[In-Progress] Unofficial SEIV Expansion Pack

[Atrocities]

You cannot sell it. The legal ramifications of such a thing would only cause hardship and anger.

[Captain Kwok]

You would ask SFI/MM if you could give it away with an $XX donation to PBW. The expansion itself would have to contain no copyrighted material outside of SE stuff and the permission of all contributers to distribute their work. In that case I don't see any problems.

[Gandalf Parker]

Atrocities said:
You cannot sell it. The legal ramifications of such a thing would only cause hardship and anger.

You mean you should not sell it? I dont think there is a legal "cannot" involved. Many people in many games sell CDs of add-ons for games. After all, its their own work. Its no different than selling a CD of avatars, or icons, clip-art, sound effects, tiles, etc. There should be no problem selling a CD of help files, or nations, or replacement text files, or whatever for this game.

The advertising part of it might get shakey. You can announce it here and give a link but creating a page that sells the CD and mentions "Space Empires IV" or Malfador could complained about.

And it doesnt matter what the market is since it doesnt cost anything to put it online for sale. If I remember correctly the materials cost of providing it on CafePress is some like $6 so if you set it at $6 then you make nothing (CP handles the burning and shipping). If you charge $7 then you get a dollar each time.

But I guess with Shrapnel offering free download off of their servers then its no biggie for most of the mods. But a major mod-compilation that takes someone quite abit of effort would make sense to offer off of CP (also mugs and mousepads with keypress charts, tshirts with ship sets and funny sayings, posters of great space battles, bumper stickers, etc etc)

[Urendi Maleldil]

Anyway, there are several parts to the expansion:

• New Tech Areas (& Racial Traits)
• Expanded Tech Areas
• New Components, Facilities, Hulls
• New Races (& AI, possibly using some of the new techs)
• New Quadrants, Systems and Planets
• Flavor Text (Empire Types, etc.)
• Additional Graphics (load screen, UI enhancement, etc)
• New Events, Intel projects
• New Formations, Strategies

Most of these can be taken from existing mods (with the creator's permission of course), but it will take editing to make everything work together and keep the stock flavor. I know of several items from the Masters Mod and the Ages mod that might work as part of the expansion pack.

For graphics, we might be able to use a version of the Image Mod with the non-original and copyrighted images removed.

Post here or send me a private message if you want to help out with one of the above areas. Once we get the ball rolling I can assign you a particular task.

Also post links to any of your mods mods or race styles that might be able to help fill those areas.

[douglas]

Colony Tech 2.0 I'm pretty sure can be worked around by means of analyzing ships. The racial trait scheme cannot.

[Gandalf Parker]

Personally I wouldnt mind if it worked analyzing ships.

[Urendi Maleldil]

I think that trading colony techs in a multiplayer game right off the bat between allies gives them an unfair advantage over the other players.

But I also think that requiring a player to select a racial trait to get any sort of colony tech is bad for both new players and absent-minded veterans. One of the worst things is to start a game only to find out you can't colonize anything. And if that's a multiplayer game, then everybody has to wait while they start the game over again.

Even if it doesn't fix the third problem of trading through tech analysis, the Colony Tech Mod 2 fixes those two problems. In that way I think it's better than stock.