Why Triakis?

[OneAVGNFan]

I want to know why would Triakis use a illegal reverse-inertia decelerator to win the 2206 FX300 championship? Give out your opinions.

[MrSmadSmartAlex]

The Triakis ship was overpowered in Pure, due to a bug or oversight in the programming. The illegal technology story was written (by our administrator, I believe) after the game as a clever way to explain this, and also why Triakis is just another ship in Pulse.
Unless you meant "What motivation would Triakis have to use this technology?", in which case: winning!

[kaori]

Read that

[AG-wolf]

That makes me wonder now... there are more program-level statistics for each ship than the main ship info lets on... "thrust, speed, shield, handling"

One of my biggest complaints with Pure was how ships would slow down so f*cking much whenever you let off the gas or whenever you went into a turn. None of the earlier games did this (aside from fusion), and it always felt like it interrupted the flow of the game... the ships seemed to have lost the sense of momentum they once had. I wonder if we can get someone into the code and maybe find all of these values. I wouldn't chaneg them for the sake of getting unfair times or anything, just to make the game "feel" more like the original games.

[Lance]

Changing internal gamecode is generally illegal, no matter what its purpose.

Dammit.

[JABBERJAW]

Eric, there was that thing in pulse if you remember, won't say more about it except that it was fun to play with, but some abused it for sure online. Wouldn't want it put out there if you find something similar

[Xavier]

One of my biggest complaints with Pure was how ships would slow down so f*cking much whenever you let off the gas or whenever you went into a turn. None of the earlier games did this (aside from fusion), and it always felt like it interrupted the flow of the game.

I never knew this!

Pure was the first WO game that I played extensively and got reasonably good at.

When playing other games, I probably don't ease off the accelerator as much as I should, because it penalized you so much in the game where I learned to pilot a Wipeout ship.

Maybe I should go back and try WO1 and 2 and decelerate more often...

[Frances_Penfold]

I think it is important that, for competitive play, OFW and original retail software/hardware be used by everybody involved

But I am surprised that no mods have not been produced for WO games in general-- alterations to the physics, tracks, and vehicles as have been created in some other game franchises. Potentially this could be pretty interesting for longtime fans.

Changing internal gamecode is generally illegal, no matter what its purpose.

Isn't this a legal grey area for video games, assuming that one owns an original copy of the game? The legal problem with CFW is the piracy it enables, not the alteration of a purchased game to be loaded to a memory stick-- and it's not like Sony/Nintendo succeeded in shutting down manufacturers of GameSharks or other third party hardware/software modifiers.

I am pissed off that CFW and video game hackery in general have ruined competitive play on handheld platforms, and no doubt cannibalized software sales. But at the same time, from a consumer perspective, it is a bit crazy that a purchased piece of entertainment software cannot be used in whatever fashion is desired by a consumer. My impression was that most legally conscious but consumer-minded organizations have tried to argue the middle ground here, that piracy is illegal but alteration of purchased electronic content is not.

But hey, I am no lawyer or software programmer or whatever

[Lance]

I'm talking about the internal code of the game, not external code like OFW/CFW. As far as I know there is no grey area in this matter; it's just flat out illegal because the code is a copyrighted object, and it doesn't matter whether you own a copy of it or not. You own the game "as is" when you've got a copy and can use it "as is", but that gives no legal right to alter it or to use that altered copy for any purpose at all. Sometimes a company doesn't legally pursue incidents of alteration if the value of doing so doesn't justify the expense. As you know, the content holders have for several years tried and partially succeeded to change the law so that they can even restrict use of the "as is" hardcopy as well.

BUT, like you, I am not a copyright attorney, so this is not certain truth, but my interpretation, which has no legal standing in court.

[AG-wolf]

Maybe I should go back and try WO1 and 2 and decelerate more often...

it's not that you'll decelerate when you let off the gas in the early games, rather their "engines" maintain a kind of momentum to their power output. Think about driving a car; redline the accelerator when it's in neutral and then drop your foot off the pedal- the engine doesn't go from 8k to 1500 in a split second, it gradually drops... and when you're in gear and moving, the weight of the car in motion maintains its forward velocity even when you let off the gas... you slow a little bit, but it's only very gradually. In the first games, not only do the ships' weight play a factor in their forward momentum, but if you pay attention to the speed gauge, you'll see a second graph slider which represents your thrust... in WO1 and XL, it's a transparent red color beneath the rainbow speed graph (I forget what it looks like in 3)... play around with how it relates to the ship-

From a dead stop, hold the gas button... you'll see the red thrust bar fill completely. Let go of the button the instant it reaches the right of the scale and watch how slow it recedes. Do that a few times. Now, do it and hold the gas until the SPEED bar is about 1/4 or 1/3 full... when you let go, your ship's speed still increases until the red thrust bar recedes back past the speed bar.

If you watch how the speed and thrust bars work in Pure, Pulse, and HD, the thrust bar drops to zero in the blink of an eye, so if you take your thumb off the gas for any length of time, it cuts out nearly completely... And the games' programming handles this as if you were flying straight into a head-wind... it's totally un-natural and unintuitive.

When I'm racing in XL or WO3, for example, I'll let off the gas for a split second when initiating a turn, and then romp on it as I come out... The instant you let off the gas, you gain slightly better turning ability, but you keep most of your speed and momentum. I don't do this with every single turn, nor do I always use air-brakes at every turn... but there's a very complex dynamic to the whole scenario that the first 4 games held beautifully.

As far as I know there is no grey area in this matter; it's just flat out illegal because the code is a copyrighted object, and it doesn't matter whether you own a copy of it or not. You own the game "as is" when you've got a copy and can use it "as is", but that gives no legal right to alter it or to use that altered copy for any purpose at all.

It still retains a grey area in the sense that unless something is occurring on a massive scale or if someone is exploiting copyrighted code and making a profit off of it, a company will usually not pursue it. Look at these people who have hacked custom tracks into the SNES version of F-Zero... built custom levels and graphics for multiple different Sonic games. Examples of and instructions detailing all of this are widely available online but no legal action has ever come of it... Look at websites like xbox-scene and xbins; they chronicle events in console and code hacking, like straight-up circumventing copy-protection and stuff, and even those sites are happily up and running.

The discussion of stuff like this is not illegal, and as long as you're not specifically circulating/sharing the modified code (well even the original for that matter), nothing will realistically happen.
"Jim in Iowa made Feisar faster than Piranha?? HIS ASS IS GOING DOWN"

I dunno... six of one, half a dozen of the other I suppose.

[Lance]

"It still retains a grey area in the sense that unless something is occurring on a massive scale or if someone is exploiting copyrighted code and making a profit off of it, a company will usually not pursue it."

I believe that I had addressed that point already when I said "Sometimes a company doesn't legally pursue incidents of alteration if the value of doing so doesn't justify the expense."