Rennsport (Game) use physic construction from rFactor2

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I wasn't suggesting it was an amazing coincidence, I was just wondering where the line gets drawn when borrowing ideas from a competitor's published design. "Reusing" the data structure saves quite a lot of thinking but I'm not aware of it being defined as IP. It's some years since I was involved in patenting software though.
 
That they have the same File Entry Format that rFactor 2 has, doesn't mean that they have the Code.
File Format and Game Code are 2 different Things.
 
Jeroen Goudeseune said:
Fileformats are protected too.
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Are you sure?
And even if, the Code is the important Part.
Maybe they just use the rF2 File Formatting, but have their own Code to handle it.
I just wanted to make clear, that using the rF2 File Format, doesn't necessarily mean that they also have the rF2 Code.
 
redapg said:
That they have the same File Entry Format that rFactor 2 has, doesn't mean that they have the Code.
File Format and Game Code are 2 different Things.
Click to expand...
There is a game engine files that does all the calculaions to make cars work in game - something we couldn't see - and if you took only those physics files that means you need to go all over them and build a game core based on those files which basically forces you to repeat rFactor 2 under the hood of your new game. No one does that, seriously, especially in such big projects with complicated simulation system.
 
Another path might be that both parties did get in touch with each other to help the other out.
Maybe Rennsport was another company in early dev stage that got a license, who knows. Something we might never know.
 
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redapg said:
Are you sure?
And even if, the Code is the important Part.
Maybe they just use the rF2 File Formatting, but have their own Code to handle it.
I just wanted to make clear, that using the rF2 File Format, doesn't necessarily mean that they also have the rF2 Code.
Click to expand...

Im absolutely sure. PDF, DOC are free, but still owned by Adobe and Microsoft.
Database files are licensed too.
Another example is this: https://docs.fileformat.com/database/gdb/
 
I know none of the specifics, so I won't speculate...other than the statement I made asking if S397 licensed(sold) the code.
However, when legal issues crop up, each nation often has wildly varying laws on the same subject. Concretely stating that some legal law has been violated may not always be true. Where & When & how & by who....
 
davehenrie said:
I know none of the specifics, so I won't speculate...other than the statement I made asking if S397 licensed(sold) the code.
However, when legal issues crop up, each nation often has wildly varying laws on the same subject. Concretely stating that some legal law has been violated may not always be true. Where & When & how & by who....
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Well, as Tim Wheatley wrote on his article about this subject:
"At the time I discovered this, back in June, 2023, I asked Stephen Hood of Motorsport Games whether any ISI or Studio 397 code were licensed to any other party. He said no."
 
Jeroen Goudeseune said:
Im absolutely sure. PDF, DOC are free, but still owned by Adobe and Microsoft.
Database files are licensed too.
Another example is this: https://docs.fileformat.com/database/gdb/
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean. Portable Document Format is the equivalent of the rF2 model format, both are published (PDF as ISO 32000, rF2's model less formally). A PDF file is the equivalent of a car model. Nothing has stopped many different implementations of a PDF reader which is the equivalent of a physics engine.

Or a fired dev enjoyed the moment to put his own lines that he made back in the day for RF2 to sell these to the competition as well. I imagine then that he was not payed for those lines so he is actually selling his own code.
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That is extremely unlikely, the code you write belongs to the people paying your wages. Unless this person had written something independently which he licensed to S397.
 
Jeroen Goudeseune said:
Fileformats are protected too.
Click to expand...
No they aren't. It's been proven in court many times that it's perfectly legal to reverse engineer code and implement support for proprietary file formats (it's called box box reverse engineering). It's also perfectly legal to reverse engineer a particular bit of functionality in a piece of software, and re-implement it yourself in your own software. It's only crosses the line into "stealing" legally when you're directly copy/pasting lines of code from a source file into your own software.

Is it possible that Rennsport reverse engineered the physics engine/file formats from RF2? Sure. I have no idea if that's actually the case. But if they did, there's no law against it as long its it's their OWN implementation of it.
 
Anthony Lineberry said:
No they aren't. It's been proven in court many times that it's perfectly legal to reverse engineer code and implement support for proprietary file formats (it's called box box reverse engineering). It's also perfectly legal to reverse engineer a particular bit of functionality in a piece of software, and re-implement it yourself in your own software. It's only crosses the line into "stealing" legally when you're directly copy/pasting lines of code from a source file into your own software.
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Again, different countries have different laws. Is S397 still based in Denmark? Where are the Rennsport Devs headquartered?
 
That's not what happened, so this isn't the debate, but you may want to be careful as you waive a lot rights when you accept an EULA. And it's nothing to do with whether you copy lines over directly or not. You can be prosecuted for what you INTENDED TO DO if proven, not even what you did.
 
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