why no more players

[radas]

hi

i m radas old players of bnt !!

before there are few years , in blacknova traders , very very more players play bnt , now no more players , where is all players!

[thekabal]

hi

i m radas old players of bnt !!

before there are few years , in blacknova traders , very very more players play bnt , now no more players , where is all players!

Hello, glad to see you still around!

Several things, in my opinion.

First is the growth (explosion?) of online games that are free to play. Games like LoL are absolutely amazing, free, and very graphically rich. The gameplay is also excellent.

Second is the growth of intensive filtering at most work places. For better or worse, in the past, BNT was most active during the work day in the US, and that wasn't a coincidence. Now that most work places have solid web filters, people can't get away with that, so we see less of those players.

Third is the unfortunate state of the game itself. The development team dwindled until it was at one point just TMD keeping the website up and the game improving. I came back for a while, and continue to work on it in my spare time. But the team as it was is gone. Worse, almost every minor step we (as a team) tried to move the code to a better state was met with vocal, repeated resistance. Adding in multiple ships nearly broke the dev team apart. Adjusting even very, very slightly the upgrade value to rein in inflation was practically a riot on these forums. When trying to improve the game is met with loud opposition, why work hard on it?

Finally, I'd say that time caught up with us. The dev team couldn't improve the game fast enough to keep players entertained, couldn't get good artists to help us with solid graphics, and the code has fallen behind the times making it hard to get new developers.

Its a shame, because BNT was a great game back in the day. I'd love to think it could be again, but I'm starting to see that it will never be quite as awesome as it used to be.

[Tucher]

I believe thekabal is correct in all of his assumptions. I saw the exact same thing happen to the game Legend OF The Green Dragon.
I is amazing how hard it can be to organize forward project with multiple devs.

[Uriah Heep]

Hi radas and others! I check every month this forum and hope find some news, but ...

10 or more years ago i have username lilleke, but last played years Uriah Heep aka UH

[Alberto]

Imo the game got stale maybe mulitple themes would have helped: Star Trek, Star Wars , BattleStar Galactica etc... Basically same code just different pics for the ships, planets and ports. Also detailed news should of helped stating when one player attacks another just to egg someone on and create alittle drama but again probably it would not have been enough.

[xgermz]

Multiple themes was tried and worked very well on another un-named project, however it brought about a massive problem with the GPL, you cant share copyrighted material. Hence Battlestar, starwars, star trek themes, etc etc, you can code them but you cant share the code without opening a minefield. On one hand youd be forced to share due to the BNT GPL, but images are properties of others and sharing them is against copyright laws. They sometime turn a blind eye, if your doing it for personal use, but if someone slapped the pictures behind a paywall, then the lawyers would come knocking.

But i digress, i have ideas to make the game a lot more interesting, its the direction im heading with the Fork im working on. Keeping players active will draw other players.

Detailed news? explain more?

[Alberto]

(Detailed news )

Currently the news in BNT only displays:
when a player has reach 5 planets , 10planets , 50 palanets ect....
and when player has reached 100mil colonists, 500mil colonists, 1bil colonists ect ....

however in another fork I loved to play it had much more detailed news. It would show
whenever a player attacked another ship and stated the pvp ship battle result
whenever a player attacked another player's planet and stated the result either successful, not successful or even if stalemate.
also that game had xenobes so whenever a player killed one that was announced aswell.

Also people could rename their ship anytime they pleased instead of being stuck with 1 name like in bnt so people would name their ship for example, "dat's wat u get 4 attacking me" when they attack someone's planet they have a beef with. As a result the news would announce the the player and his ship name when he attacks another and people got a kick out of that.

here are links as examples:
http://www.mybnt.net/starkick/news.php? ... 2014-12-22
http://www.mybnt.net/starkick/news.php

[thekabal]

Multiple themes was tried and worked very well on another un-named project, however it brought about a massive problem with the GPL, you cant share copyrighted material. Hence Battlestar, starwars, star trek themes, etc etc, you can code them but you cant share the code without opening a minefield. On one hand youd be forced to share due to the BNT GPL, but images are properties of others and sharing them is against copyright laws. They sometime turn a blind eye, if your doing it for personal use, but if someone slapped the pictures behind a paywall, then the lawyers would come knocking.

It is very important to keep separate discussions of copyright, and discussions of trademark. Keep in mind I am very specifically speaking about US law, other countries are wildly different!

Code, which is copyrighted, is entirely separate and different from images, which are handled under trademark law.

In copyright, under the GPLv2, what BNT was originally licensed under, if you *distribute* the code to the game, you have to share all your modifications (kinda, sorta, mostly). The details get a little tricky, depending on the way the code interacts with modifications, but the safe/easy interpretation is "If I use code under the GPLv2, then I probably need to share ALL of the code that makes up the game".

However, we switched to the GPLv3. In GPLv3, the "web services loophole" was closed. Meaning, now instead of having to distribute the code, if you RUN the code, like on a website, then you have to share. We very specifically wanted that behavior, because plenty of forks and spin-offs were made, that no one shared their improvements with us. Considering over a decade of coding, testing, development, and more went into BNT, that is pretty rude!

Note that NONE of that mentions images. Images are different. Entirely. Images are governed by Trademark laws. The GPL doesn't in any way react or involve itself in trademarks. So no, running the game doesn't trigger a requirement to share unique images.

However, trademark law is much, much stronger than copyright law in many ways. As you said, the lawyers for various groups (Lucas, now Disney, owner of Star Wars, for example) are very quick to sue people that use Star Wars trademarked images for games.

That is why we cannot have theme packs of popular stuff like Battlestar Galactica or Star Wars. Note, it IS possible for users to have them, but the distribution of them (and hosting of them on a website) could allow massive lawsuits.

Further, any website running BNT is much more likely to run Ads, to help pay for the costs. ANY form of earning revenue (not profit!) will make the lawsuit more likely, more painful, and much more expensive. So that is a big no.

The GPL isn't the issue at all. It has nothing to do with the images. The images are prevented by US trademark law, and yes, it stinks in some ways for us.

There is a whole different discussion to be had about what COULD be done with licensing for the images in the game, but .. that is a major discussion on its own. For some hints, check out PHPBB's history with licensed images in theme packs. It gets very complicated very fast.

[thekabal]

(Detailed news )

Currently the news in BNT only displays:
when a player has reach 5 planets , 10planets , 50 palanets ect....
and when player has reached 100mil colonists, 500mil colonists, 1bil colonists ect ....

however in another fork I loved to play it had much more detailed news. It would show
whenever a player attacked another ship and stated the pvp ship battle result
whenever a player attacked another player's planet and stated the result either successful, not successful or even if stalemate.
also that game had xenobes so whenever a player killed one that was announced aswell.

I worked on this for BNT, and I can summarize by saying it is easy to do the way they did it, and very hard to do the right way. Specifically, for it to work in other languages, it took quite a bit of rework to add all the items they had. I would have LOVED to add the patch for that if they had shared, but sadly, they didn't as far as I know. Even if they did, it would be licensed under the GPLv2, so we can't add it verbatim to the current code (GPLv3) without them relicensing also.

Also people could rename their ship anytime they pleased instead of being stuck with 1 name like in bnt so people would name their ship for example, "dat's wat u get 4 attacking me" when they attack someone's planet they have a beef with

I never liked that idea. A ship name in game shouldn't change often. It is very confusing for players, and really makes an admins job much harder. For example, "Hey, a ship called 'I told you, sucker' attacked me yesterday, and he must have used an exploit!". So we look for that ship name, and .. right, its been changed. So then you have to add that information to the admin log, and add a way to find that, and .. yeah, not ideal. Admin's already have a hard job.

Plus, until recently, the code we used for ship names was.. less than ideal, security wise. We fixed that, big time, a while ago. But Starkick was from long before that.

[Alberto]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/starkic ... /starkick/
Or
http://sourceforge.net/projects/starkick/?source=navbar


For what its worth I found the game files for starkick, it's out dated but at least they are sharing their code and maybe some of their features can be incorporated into bnt or at least see how they put their code together regarding the AI and news