Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes

The 9th Sage said:
Wow. I know they are supposed to be an archive, but I know that if anyone had ever requested we take anything down from here it'd be down in a heart beat. That's pretty nasty to keep it up like that.
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They got tired of people repeatedly requesting that their stuff be removed, due to so many people disliking the RHDN staff, so they put in a new "policy" that if you submit your own stuff, you can't request that it be removed. That doesn't apply to me, however, as I was rather incarcerated at the time my stuff was added to RHDN, so it clearly wasn't submitted by me. In fact, in one of their descriptions, they flat out admit that I said not to distribute a particular beta patch and then they go on to do so anyway.

So, I wouldn't take Nightcrawler's word for absolutely anything, especially something such as the Crimson Echoes debacle of which he played no part. (In fact, if you go to RHDN, you'll see that they've locked all threads related to Crimson Echoes and forbid anyone from discussing it in any form.)
 
InVerse said:
They got tired of people repeatedly requesting that their stuff be removed, due to so many people disliking the RHDN staff, so they put in a new "policy" that if you submit your own stuff, you can't request that it be removed. That doesn't apply to me, however, as I was rather incarcerated at the time my stuff was added to RHDN, so it clearly wasn't submitted by me. In fact, in one of their descriptions, they flat out admit that I said not to distribute a particular beta patch and then they go on to do so anyway.

So, I wouldn't take Nightcrawler's word for absolutely anything, especially something such as the Crimson Echoes debacle of which he played no part. (In fact, if you go to RHDN, you'll see that they've locked all threads related to Crimson Echoes and forbid anyone from discussing it in any form.)
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Hard rules. But I think RHDN will continue until there's a better alternative.
It's always the same. If you say that so many others complain about RHDN, then start something better.

Regarding Chrimson Echoes @ RHDN: We shouldn't speculate too much. As long as there is no change on the official site, I go on and believe that the letter is real. And even if it is a fake, it doesn't bring us a final patch.
But the behaviour of RHDN is a little bit suspicious. Why should a romhacking site lock all topics of a romhacking project? It's weird. And I don't like it.
 
I believe they locked it because it was beginning to make people angry (posts with death threats at Square Enix, ect).
 
snesmaster40 said:
I believe they locked it because it was beginning to make people angry (posts with death threats at Square Enix, ect).
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Actually, if you go through old threads, you'll see that they have a history of locking any threads that don't agree with their own personal view on a particular subject. There are probably more than 100 threads that are locked, with the final post being one staff member or the other spouting off about why the original poster (or someone else in the thread) is wrong, and then locking the thread so that nobody can rebut the staff claims.

Of course, this is completely off topic. Regarding Crimson Echoes, I don't think anyone calling Square-Enix is going to be able to determine anything. If SE *didn't* send a C&D, they might still claim to have done so as a simple way of shutting down a copyright infringing project. I mean, think about it, if you ran a ROM site and got a C&D allegedly from Nintendo telling you to take it down, and then you called them to find out if they really did send one, they'd be pretty stupid to say no, because that would either encourage you to continue running the site or else would require them to then go out and send a real C&D in order to shut the site down.

On the other hand, if SE really did send out a C&D, they might lie to any uninvolved third parties that contact them in regards to the legitimacy of the C&D so as to prevent any ill will. It seems odd to me, however, that they would issue a C&D in regards to Crimson Echoes but not Prophet's Guile which was another hack (not as extensive, from what I've read) by the same people.

What a lot of people tend to forget is how exactly copyright law works. Even though Crimson Echoes wouldn't be sold for profit, even though you could potentially make a case that it could boost sales to Chrono Trigger DS (for the sake of argument), Square Enix is still legally obligated to protect their copyright. If they allow Crimson Echoes to go forward, they really have no legal basis for shutting down the next similar project, and after a few such projects, someone might decide to sell a Chrono Trigger hack for profit and, if SE attempted to sue them for doing so, a judge could very well look at all of the hacks that SE allowed to disseminate and rule that they had failed to protect their copyright and no longer possessed it.
 
InVerse said:
On the other hand, if SE really did send out a C&D, they might lie to any uninvolved third parties that contact them in regards to the legitimacy of the C&D so as to prevent any ill will. It seems odd to me, however, that they would issue a C&D in regards to Crimson Echoes but not Prophet's Guile which was another hack (not as extensive, from what I've read) by the same people.
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If I understand what they said on the Chrono Compendium (the home of these hacks) apparently Square told them to take down all that stuff (including Prophet's Guile and the Chrono retranslation). You'll notice that the entire hacking section is gone. Only trace of it left is the soundtrack. You'll find the link to the hack's page doesn't work. The album is worth a download if you like Chrono Trigger's music, btw (it has a lot of neat sounding variations of classic tunes). It's too bad about Prophet's Guile too, it was pretty good. It's not a whole game hack, but it's still probably about 8 - 10 hours of gameplay I'd say.

*edit*
Except that the soundtrack has the patch still within the zip. At least they were supposed to take it down (other things like the translation and the Collesium patch are definitely gone though). Perhaps I should notify them.
 
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InVerse said:
Actually, if you go through old threads, you'll see that they have a history of locking any threads that don't agree with their own personal view on a particular subject. There are probably more than 100 threads that are locked, with the final post being one staff member or the other spouting off about why the original poster (or someone else in the thread) is wrong, and then locking the thread so that nobody can rebut the staff claims.
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I know it's off-topic, but I've always been curious why Romhacking.net had so much drama. The closure of the CE threads was an example of this ridiculous locking going on, but I'm pretty sure they already don't like the Compendium over there because of the Chrono Trigger Retranslation. I wonder why they're down right now, too...

Well, I'm glad my old Zophar account is still working. These forums look great.
 
ZeaLitY said:
I wonder why they're down right now, too...
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Because of the vulnerability in HyperVM that resulted in over 100,000 sites being completely wiped out. (A vulnerability so bad that the creator of the software actually committed suicide as a result of all the damage.)

According to a thread on NC's personal forum, the site should be online again this weekend, albeit only current as of April 5th which was the last time anybody bothered to back it up. (But apparently, Neil is in the process of combing through Google's cache of the site, keeping track of updates that were made after April 5th so that they can be readded manually.
 
InVerse said:
Because of the vulnerability in HyperVM that resulted in over 100,000 sites being completely wiped out. (A vulnerability so bad that the creator of the software actually committed suicide as a result of all the damage.)
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I can't imagine the vulnerability helped (perhaps it was the straw that broke the camel's back) but it sounds like he was troubled well before the vulnerability was exploited. (As an aside, is it just me being stuffy, or does it sound kind of oddly crude to slangily refer to an accomplished software company owner merely as some "techie" in the headline of an article delivering the news of his death?)
 
ZeaLitY said:
I know it's off-topic, but I've always been curious why Romhacking.net had so much drama. The closure of the CE threads was an example of this ridiculous locking going on, but I'm pretty sure they already don't like the Compendium over there because of the Chrono Trigger Retranslation. I wonder why they're down right now, too...

Well, I'm glad my old Zophar account is still working. These forums look great.
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o_O! Nice to have you Zeality. This is kind of a weird surprise. I was just watching some more of the gameplay videos and thinking about the hack, and *poof*. :p
 
The 9th Sage said:
o_O! Nice to have you Zeality.
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Indeed. As you can see, we're bummed about the way things turned out.
Which I imagine can't compare to how frustrated you and all the people who worked on it must feel. :(

Even though fate (well, a legal department, anyway) intervened and didn't allow it to come to full fruition as a completed hack, thank you and the rest of CC/KL for the effort.
 
We're just happy to have the videos rolling. Seeing the feedback has given us enough of a sense of accomplishment that we don't feel mortally embittered or anything...

I've been curious though; what's the state of the ROM hacking community? I remember people at RHDN saying everything was in some sort of slow decline, but I'm not really involved enough in the community to know what's going on. To contribute to the discussion, I had the idea for doing high profile projects like these (CE, the FF6 hack, a new Sonic, or translating very popular and still-untranslated works or something) to attract attention. Something like, temporarily drawing on the talent of many people time to time for popular efforts. Working on a full-size hack like CE, I really wondered sometimes how much faster development would have been if, instead of a handful of people familiar with the CT ROM chipping in information time to time and one person coding, we could have tapped into the full power of the community, making use of several experts or ASM specialists, and so on. An awful lot of CE's greatest achievements came only very recently in the history of the Chrono Trigger community, like inserting custom SPCs converted from MMLs, documenting assembly enough to make complicated graphic hacks possible, decoding some unknown event commands or pinning down DrawGeometry...

I guess it's a pipe dream to have a community united enough to do something like that...
 
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I say it's all bull. I don't know if the C&D letter is fake or not, however I know that C&D letters aren't threats of real legal action, on these sort of things. It does indeed fall under fair use, it's a rom hack. I just means someone either didn't like what they were doing, or it was a cruel joke caused by that 3D Chrono Remake getting shut down. That one was illegal since it was an attempt to rebuild Chrono Trigger 1 to 1.

Square-Enix would never waste time actually pursuing it as a real case. I mean, I dout CT would be an exclusive target of this while every single big hack of Final Fantasy 1-6 gets ignored entirely. It's just to stir up crap and nothing more. It was just a free fan made patch to turn CT into a pseudo sequel, nothing more, nothing less. Plenty of FF hack do the same, like Dragoon X Omega. It's a whole new game running on the FF1 engine.

This is like when Cutepet got scared by a C&D letter, or the Penny Arcade Strawberry Shortcake fiasco. It is just strong arm tactics to scare you into stop doing things they don't like.
 
Unfortunately, S-E has the legal resources to put plenty of bite behind the bark, Akane. For a company of that size, taking someone to court is not a difficult matter. The courts would likely find in favor of S-E, as this doesn't fall wholly within categories like educational use, parody, or reviewing.

Even in the case of Penny Arcade (where the webcomic team wisely complied with the C&D) they weren't in the clear as far as parody goes because they weren't parodying the Strawberry Shortcake character herself so much as using Strawberry Shortcake to parody American McGee-- a distinction that matters for such cases, if my understanding is correct.

Just because other projects have been released without repurcussions doesn't mean that CE could expect that, once an actual C&D was sent. I'm not sure if InVerse is correct about companies having to defend any copyright violation that comes to their attention (my recollection, at least, is that copyrights are given for a certain amount of time, period, while trademarks have to be defended against dilution/infrinngement or the owners will lose exclusive claim to them), however, the CE team had every reason to fear that S-E would follow through on their threat. An actual cease and desist letter from a company with good legal representation is not to be taken lightly: Large companies tend to take intellectual property seriously, and once they have embarked on a course of legal action, it's easily imaginable that they would be loath to reverse course, for fear of encouraging others to flout their legal demands.

Even releasing the playthrough videos is somewhat risky, but hopefully no harm will come of it.
 
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AkaneJones said:
It is just strong arm tactics to scare you into stop doing things they don't like.
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Oh, no doubt it is a strong arm tactic. That said, they sent a C+D, and they have more money than all of us put together that they could use to pursue this if they wanted to. As Agent12 more or less said, as much as it stinks, is it worth possibly screwing your life the hell up to fight it?
 
The main annoying thing is that they seem to target Chrono Trigger related hacks while all the Final Fantasy hacks are left alone.
 
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