Is Anyone Talking To Ben?

[[Bay12]Jake]

If not, someone really should be. For one thing, I think it would be really helpful if we could get his side of the story into the public domain; the community deserves some closure on this issue and it would significantly detoxify the discussion about the new game. I don't honestly expect he'll come out of it looking any better than Jagex, but at this point I think it'd be better just to know than have a dozen ugly rumours flying back and forth.

Secondly, I think it would be extremely useful for the future of this community if we knew how much of the actual code, if any, Jagex actually bought off him; going by the major changes they're making I suspect they just bought up the trademarks and started development from scratch. The Voxlap engine is already open-source, so that's not an issue; maybe at some future date we can work on OpenAoS?

[StackOverflow]

Ben is currently under some non-disclosure agreements. A lot of speculation has been going on and hopefully it'll all be cleared up as time progresses.

[Null]

From the language used on the Jagex Group website it looks like the buying of the AoS project came in the form of a merger of Jagex with Ben's independent studio along with a few others. That means that the holdings of all companies in the merger would be one in the same. If the website is legally accurate in wording (which might not be the case) then Ben's holdings with respect to AoS have all been converted over to Jagex, that includes any and all Copyrighting and Licensing held by Soca Studios, past and present. Also, Jagex has been working on AoS for at least a few patches now if I'm not mistaken (and if that information isn't completely fabricated) so they must at least have right to copy the voxlap codebase, presumably.

[[Bay12]Jake]

Fair enough. I don't suppose it greatly matters; it just means a bit more work for any hypothetical remake if we can't acquire some of the original source code.

[StackOverflow]

He isn't going to share any of the source code. That would be him in a horrible position.

[Prune]

Interesting question, is anybody indeed talking to Ben or anyone from Soca Studios? What I find shocking about the whole situaton is the way Ben and his people at SOCA STUDIOS dissappeared, from being one of the kindest game creators, always making sure the forum community was content and democratic, always talking to everyone abd being ubber kind and listening... and then this a 180 to a complete corporate blackout. But a lot of the information you guys have presented here clears up the mystery, for example

StackOverflow said that "Ben is currently under some non-disclosure agreements. A lot of speculation has been going on and hopefully it'll all be cleared up as time progresses."

Null added "From the language used on the Jagex Group website it looks like the buying of the AoS project came in the form of a merger of Jagex with Ben's independent studio along with a few others. That means that the holdings of all companies in the merger would be one in the same. If the website is legally accurate in wording (which might not be the case) then Ben's holdings with respect to AoS have all been converted over to Jagex, that includes any and all Copyrighting and Licensing held by Soca Studios, past and present..."


On another note... on the other forum runned by Jagex I got a notification (which I earned it sort of) for answering a post by some dude who said...

SomeDude: "Most People Are saying they hate jaggex but they are helping ace of spades get out of the beta and into the real world in gaming"

ME: "WE WERE ALREADY IN THE "the real world in gaming" you monkey, we had our own forum, our own servers, our own mods and a lot of map crafting, weapon crafting. in REAL games i havener never seen those things. you are a monkey and you cant see how capitalism forces Ben Aksoy and his original team into selling out the game to the higgest bidder (the ones that pay them the most for their programing / art work). FUCK YOU JAGEX, yet JAGEX is only a symtom of our worldly affairs. ce la vie.

P.S. for the dude that as asking for the links to download the .75 version, guess what? they were deleted cause the game will be sold for $10-$15 in STEAM as a commodity in out great capitalist society so the programmers can have food on their table.

So yeah, I sort of know where we are all coming from.

[Chameleon]

What if someone accidentally stole the source code from Bens computer, eh? Just change the looks and name, so Jagex will have to shut up. I propose: Thunder Of Guns!

[HoboHob]

Or if some kind soul replicated the game in SDL... Oh wait, it has already happened.