Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Philip Gooch Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Plagiarism... Date: Mon, 20 Jul 1998 17:07:55 +0100 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 65 Message-ID: <35B36B5B.5529B919@easynet.co.uk> References: <35B35498.6FCD@saqnet.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: 193.131.140.246 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.05 [en] (Win95; I) Nick Ferguson wrote: > Hiya all, > > I suppose most of you will have checked out the 'Plagiarism' bit in > the members homepages section of the WWW site (if not, do so now). Now, > I don't have anything to do with it - aside from the fact the tutorial > will prove v. handy for my GDUK entry :-) - but I do have one opinion > which I think is a fair one... > Why is it that whenever something like this happens, people feel the > need to shout about it from the rooftops? George - couldn't you have > mailed Paul privately and discussed the matter via e-mail between > yourselves? Certainly, it would be a bit more mature than screaming and > pointing the finger in front of everyone (which is *exactly* what you > did). And as a SCEE employee, as opposed to a regular member, you must > appreciate that is NOT acceptable behaviour :-( > Now, I don't want to contribute to some little feud by forcing George > to justify his right to indignation, but to me the situation is very > difficult. I've barely mastered the art of displaying sprites, but after > scouring numerous sprite tutorials I have to admit they all say pretty > much the same thing (in many cases, almost exactly the same thing)! Is > it really so unlikely that 2 people's routines for a fairly simple task > should be so alike? > > Personally, I don't think that any member would do anything so dumb > as to post another person's code and pretend it was their own. It isn't > exactly the most amazing, intricate bit of work on the site, is it? > George - I'm really looking forward to your tutorial and you can bet > I'll learn a lot form it. I hope, though, that when I begin implementing > your ideas in my code you won't be treating me the same way you treated > Paul... > > Nick F Can't comment as Paul's page always seems to be broken when I visit it :( (Netscape 4.04 Mac and PC - the HTML source looks a bit dodgy to me - missing end tags etc) Anyway, I think you can only claim plagiarism if someone has used exactly the same variable names and structure. Otherwise, for something like displaying a GsBG or a GsSPRITE, one person's code is going to look pretty similar to another's. George should post both his and Paul's code together and let us decide. When I finally get around putting my Web site up (you never know, I might do it tonight), any source code I post can be used freely, with or without credit. Plagiarise as much as you like. Why? well 1) Most of it will be so simple and basic a 10 year old could work it out! 2) Seriously, unless you've written a new way of doing something that hasn't been done before, how can you really claim authorship of your code? Most people will have picked up stuff from the manuals, the demo program at the back of the Startup guide, the tutorials, the Codewarrior game code, game programming books in general etc that very little of it will really be 100% all their own work anyway. Most game processes - tiling sprites, collision detection, scrolling routines etc have all been worked out long ago. We're not talking copyrightable processes here! Storm in a teacup Phil