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Very cool! Have you looked into the legal issues, for example ToS and copyright? I wonder if Blizzard would be within their rights to force a takedown of th

by dsjoerg 12y ago

Very cool! Have you looked into the legal issues, for example ToS and copyright? I wonder if Blizzard would be within their rights to force a takedown of the code whenever they want.

TillE 12y ago
Card names and text would be covered by copyright, but that's really unlikely to escalate beyond a DMCA takedown at worst, and Blizzard is more likely to just ignore it, as they do with the handful of Hearthstone wikis (which also include copyrighted art). Game mechanics are almost never copyrightable, so you could come up with aliases for the cards and be 100% in the clear.
scrollaway 12y ago
I have, to an extent. I've been working with Blizzard games for almost ten years (I worked on reverse engineering in WoW before), and Blizzard tends to be very cautious with this sort of projects. In this case, it would be relatively easy to implement a server on top of Fireplace which would communicate with a slightly modified Hearthstone client. This would be a huge no-no for Blizzard and they would try their best to shut it down, so I'm not doing that. You'll also note that the game files I am reusing in fireplace are actually in a separate repo (hearthstone-data submodule) so that I can take it down separately, should Blizzard request it. Edit: Part of me also hopes that Team 5, the team behind Hearthstone, is a bit different. They have been incredibly close to the community, much closer than Blizzard has with other games, and I'm hoping that if issues arise, we can work them out peacefully.
- jzelinskie 12y ago
  >In this case, it would be relatively easy to implement a server on top of Fireplace which would communicate with a slightly modified Hearthstone client. This would be a huge no-no for Blizzard and they would try their best to shut it down, so I'm not doing that. Besides doing something like this, how else would you go about testing this kind of thing?
  - scrollaway 12y ago
    Black box testing, much like the Wine project does. You can see my battery of tests here: https://github.com/jleclanche/fireplace/blob/master/tests/test_main.py https://github.com/jleclanche/fireplace/blob/master/tests/te... Also, the game has excellent debug logs which I could always generate in Fireplace and compare the two or some such. And if all else fails, I can always peek at the Hearthstone protocol.

by dsjoerg 12y ago

Very cool! Have you looked into the legal issues, for example ToS and copyright? I wonder if Blizzard would be within their rights to force a takedown of the code whenever they want.

TillE 12y ago

Card names and text would be covered by copyright, but that's really unlikely to escalate beyond a DMCA takedown at worst, and Blizzard is more likely to just ignore it, as they do with the handful of Hearthstone wikis (which also include copyrighted art). Game mechanics are almost never copyrightable, so you could come up with aliases for the cards and be 100% in the clear.

scrollaway 12y ago

I have, to an extent. I've been working with Blizzard games for almost ten years (I worked on reverse engineering in WoW before), and Blizzard tends to be very cautious with this sort of projects. In this case, it would be relatively easy to implement a server on top of Fireplace which would communicate with a slightly modified Hearthstone client. This would be a huge no-no for Blizzard and they would try their best to shut it down, so I'm not doing that. You'll also note that the game files I am reusing in fireplace are actually in a separate repo (hearthstone-data submodule) so that I can take it down separately, should Blizzard request it. Edit: Part of me also hopes that Team 5, the team behind Hearthstone, is a bit different. They have been incredibly close to the community, much closer than Blizzard has with other games, and I'm hoping that if issues arise, we can work them out peacefully.

jzelinskie 12y ago
>In this case, it would be relatively easy to implement a server on top of Fireplace which would communicate with a slightly modified Hearthstone client. This would be a huge no-no for Blizzard and they would try their best to shut it down, so I'm not doing that. Besides doing something like this, how else would you go about testing this kind of thing?
- scrollaway 12y ago
  Black box testing, much like the Wine project does. You can see my battery of tests here: https://github.com/jleclanche/fireplace/blob/master/tests/test_main.py https://github.com/jleclanche/fireplace/blob/master/tests/te... Also, the game has excellent debug logs which I could always generate in Fireplace and compare the two or some such. And if all else fails, I can always peek at the Hearthstone protocol.