Doom Legacy is Illegal

Status
Not open for further replies.
i just Noticed that SRB2 is based on the Doom Legacy port of Doom
*Token from Doomworld Forums.
It has come to my attention that Doom Legacy back in 1997 and 1998 used code from Quake. Now if you are asking how is this possible since the source was released in 1999. For those of you who do not know, the Quake source was leaked by a bunch of people. Now since that the source code is illegal, anything using that source would be illegal also. Me along with a team of anonymouses have determined that the a portion of the code in Doom Legacy is a carbon copy of the Quake 1.01 source code. Most notably is the console system, which includes the console itself, console variables, console commands, and other things related to it. Comparisons have been made between Doom Legacy 1.25 and the Quake source and it has been determined that they are exact or near exact matches. Some differences are the way the functions are named, for example the console variable system in Doom Legacy uses the CV_ prefix wheras Quake uses the Cvar_ prefix. Most of the white space and comments match except for a select few. For example, in the Quake source (as seen from Hexen 2) in Cvar_RegisterVariable, the error message reads "Can't register variable %s, allready defined", however in Doom Legacy it's "Variable %s is already defined". Now you may see that those do not match, but if you look at the comment above you will see that both Quake and Doom Legacy have the same comment "first check to see if it has allready been defined". So far, most of the violations are within the console subsystem but more have been spotted outside in the Video code for example.
Quake 1.01 and Quake 1.09 have major differences and what is seen in Quake 1.09 is not seen in Quake 1.01 whereas Quake 1.01 stuff is seen in Doom Legacy but is not seen in Quake 1.09 or Hexen 2 but not as much as Quake 1.09.
Despite all of this, this makes ReMooD illegal also, sadfully, but this will be fixed.
The other part of the team (not me) figuring this out would like to remain anonymous, so if any names should appear, please erase them.
 
Last edited:
Congratulations on digging up 15 year old drama? At this point I don't think Doom Legacy is even on the same codebase, and Quake's source code was released ages ago at this point anyways.
 
I'm really not sure what difference this would make to us anyway honestly. SRB2 is already copyright infringement as it is for using Sonic in it!
 
It's more of a trademark violation than a copyright violation. Most of the stuff in SRB2 isn't ripped directly out of the Sonic games. Stealing the HUD straight is a copyright violation, for example, but the custom art isn't.
 
Just wanted to make sure that everybody here knows it .. it still uses Quake's source code ,and i mentioned above that the Source Code was leaked before it's release .. it means that anything using that source would be illegal also .
 
Last edited:
Quake 1 source is out now, under the same GPLv2 license, so it doesn't matter anymore.

And yes, we (well, at least I) have been aware of this.
 
Stealing the HUD straight is a copyright violation, for example, but the custom art isn't.
Though the question is, is the HUD really copyrightable, since it consists of solely a typeface and therefore doesn't meet the threshold of originality.

The real question is, of course, why the hell that even matters.
 
I never said it was unique enough to copyright, but I just used the HUD as a nice easy example of something that we use straight from Sonic as opposed to something we made our own art assets for.
 
I'm pretty sure with the sticky way Doom Legacy is licensed, you can't make commercial games with it, (Or was that ZDoom?) but I figured there was no point in reading that wall of text when I skipped to the replies. Not that it matters for the loads of fan games and non-commercial projects based on DOOM.
 
ZDoom would not exist if the IP owners made a fuss about it.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Who is viewing this thread (Total: 1, Members: 0, Guests: 1)

Back
Top