Jangaron - new browser-based lightcycle game

[Jangaroo]

Hi everybody,

I'm currently implementing yet another Tron lightcycle game and would be interested if any of you, especially the Armagetron developers, ever had any legal problems or inquieries from Disney or whoever owns copyrights or trademarks in Tron, Lightcycle, the game idea etc. I really would like to put my game online, but I would not like to be sued...

Thanks for any shared experience!

Greetings,

Jangaroo

[Z-Man]

The notorious Disney Lawyers are surprisingly quiet when it comes to freeware games. My personal opinion is that if you don't name your game actually just "Tron", they can't touch you; and if you're not making money with it, they won't attack because they there is nothing to gain apart from bad publicity. So give it a silly name and you're absolutely on the safe side.

The gameplay predates the movie, so you're safe with that. And if you replicate the visuals of the movie, you're not actually violating any copyright laws unless you really copy something verbatim from the movie.

Of course, instead of starting a new game, you could help us here

[Tank Program]

The closest thing we've had was Fedora not liking the name for their package. Hence why you can play Armacycles Advanced on Fedora.

[Lucifer]

Mind you, we're not lawyers.

Fedora said it was a trademark issue, that the name Tron is trademarked, which is separate from copyright and has to be enforced or it gets diluted. Consider when Xerox was a trademarked word, now it's a verb. Google has gone the same way, I suppose, but not quite to the daily usage extreme that xerox went (people still say 'xerox' when they mean "photocopy").

Anyway, I would recommend avoiding a name that includes the word Tron in it, and if someone showed up with a better name than Armagetron, I'd probably support a name change here ("armacycles" doesn't cut it for me, not for a permanent change anyway. Good enough to suit Fedora and keep people pointed in the right direction).

Z-man's right, the gameplay does predate the movie. Also consider jurisdictions. I believe z-man is wrong about the look and feel thing, mostly because Microsoft notoriously lost in court to Apple over the look and feel issue, but that could also be a jurisdiction thing (he's in Germany, and I"m in the US, and German copyright laws are different enough). Also, we're not lawyers. I think I said that already.

You really want to get some notoriety or popularity if you can. I believe that we are somewhat immune to Disney's actions mostly because even if we lose in court, we'd be able to a) raise the money to fight (therefore not bankrupting us) and b) send enough bad publicity to Disney to prevent Tron from being the lucrative business opportunity it is now. Not completely immune, we'd probably still suffer, but we have the goodwill of a lot of people, and generally a supportive open source community that has power in the Tron market in particular. So it's more a case of MAD as far as Tron is concerned if Disney comes after us.

But traditionally Disney has completely ignored clones, and in the case of glTron, one of the actors from the movie links to it on his own website (although that's not exactly an endorsement and could probably work against andre more than it would work for him). Disney does a lot of things we hate, but for the most part I don't think they ever intentionally shoot themselves in the foot, and the freeware Tron gaming experience is a long tradition nowadays, long enough that some of the old farts around here like z-man remember playing freeware tron games when they were kids.

[Jangaroo]

z-man, Tank, Lucifer,

thank you, all you non-lawyers, for the quick and detailed replies!
Man, this is an active forum!
The answers are what I hoped/expected: theoretically, there is the danger that some Disney lawyer could send you a notice, but as it never seems to have happened to any free Tron game in the past 20 years...
Thank you also for the advice to use a "silly" name: I already have one, "Jangaron" (see below).
One last question about the topic: You mentioned graphics / artwork, but what about sounds? I think it was on your "contributors" page where I saw that some sounds are "from the movie". No complaints by Disney there, either?

z-man, regarding your question

Of course, instead of starting a new game, you could help us here

there are actually two aspects that keep me from joining:

• The game is gonna be a browser game, and that is something quite different.
• I'm not a C++ programmer.

So the really new thing about my 3D Tron Lightcycle Race variant is that it is written entirely in JavaScript and thus runs in any browser (well, Firefox, IE7, Safari 3) without any plugin.
The name "Jangaron" results from the JavaScript tool I used to create the game, which is called "Jangaroo" (thus my user name here) and is going to be open source soon. You can also see "Jangaron" as a proof of concept for "Jangaroo".
Of course, the graphical features are quite limited when using DHTML (no textures, no cycle models, see screen shot), but it is really fast (frame rates of 20+ on my laptop) and scalable (vector graphics). Some people might say this is not possible in DHTML, but they can see for themselves when I have it online.
As of now, there is a split-screen two-player mode, which can easily be changed to any number of players, bounded only by the computer's performance. I do not have any AI players yet, nor do I have a multiplayer protocol or server. I will soon post a preview URL here, so you can give it a try yourselves, if you like.

Cheers,

Jangaroo

[Z-Man]

That looks like some awesome work. All the other browser based lightcycle games are a) shockwave flash and won't run on Linux and b) crap.

One last question about the topic: You mentioned graphics / artwork, but what about sounds? I think it was on your "contributors" page where I saw that some sounds are "from the movie". No complaints by Disney there, either?

Right, no complaints there. It's our most direct copyright violation (in fact, the only real one), and we don't include those sounds in the default install for that reason. Here, too, sampling has been mostly tolerated in the past. That public domain tron game I played as a kid where I can't remember the name, Megatron possibly, on the Amiga, also had movie samples.

[Jangaroo]

That looks like some awesome work. All the other browser based lightcycle games are a) shockwave flash and won't run on Linux and b) crap.

...and the ones of kind a) that I found were only a 2D view of the game!
I guess I have built the first performant JavaScript 3D view game!

So here we go: http://www.wuenschenswert.net/jangaron/
You can turn left and right and increase / decrease your speed.
The keys are:
Upper player (orange, "Tron"): Arrow keys.
Lower player (blue, "Flynn"): turn: A-D, speed: W-S
Space: pause game (nice for screen shots).

The game can be run offline, if all the files are in the browser cache (untested). I could simplify this by putting all JavaScript code into one big file.

Have fun!

[Z-Man]

Wow, this is amazing. This could get really good if you polish up the gameplay a bit, I'm sure you'll want to apply a lower limit to the speed, and right now, if I'm lucky enough, I can block the enemy's spawn point so he has no chance to live longer than .1 seconds. I suppose a single player mode is planned, too?

Oh, and it doesn't work in Konqueror. Can't say why, though, maybe it does not support the way you load the javascript code, or it does not handle your graphics. It's hard to tell, I'm no expert, and there are no error messages at all, just two blank screen halves (that bit works). It works fine in Firefox on Linux, though.

[Tank Program]

That is awesome. What are the odds of playing full screen against an AI?

[Concord]

nice!

[Jangaroo]

Oops, just noticed that it currently does not run in Internet Explorer. So please stay with Firefox or Safari. IE users stay tuned, carnt be anything too difficult.

[madmax]

Oops, just noticed that it currently does not run in Internet Explorer. So please stay with Firefox or Safari. IE users stay tuned, carnt be anything too difficult.

Doesn't appear to work on Opera neither, works fine on Safari though.

Nice job!

[Luke-Jr]

I'm more interested in Konqueror support than IE

Error: http://www.wuenschenswert.net/jangaron/joo/joo.js: SyntaxError: Parse error at line 3
Error: http://www.wuenschenswert.net/jangaron/: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: joo

Any chance on getting it to do Armagetron-compatible network play?

[Rain]

awesome

[Jangaroo]

I'm more interested in Konqueror support than IE

Error: http://www.wuenschenswert.net/jangaron/joo/joo.js: SyntaxError: Parse error at line 3
Error: http://www.wuenschenswert.net/jangaron/: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: joo

Strange... I would have thought that at least the syntax of JavaScript would be standardized. Let's see if I can figure that one out. Can you tell me your Konquerer version?

Any chance on getting it to do Armagetron-compatible network play?

I would love to! So far, I searched the developer forum, but couldn't find anything about the Armagetron network protocol. Can anyone give me a pointer where to start?