Dev Tracker - Discussion

this thread has been more fun than V20 will be

The block button is near useless when people quote respond the person(s) you've blocked.

I wish I had this kind of motivation to hunt down drama from 15 years ago, and revive it in to some sort of secret treasure hunt.
I feel completely worthless now.

There's actually a short list of things that you can do to avoid being involved with any kind of ancient drama farming:

1. Don't steal people's code and sell it for money and lie about it and then accuse them of some weird ***in a 20 year old MMO forum and then later call them Nathan???

do you prefer Nate or Nathanial

I know what you mean. I hate when someone uses the same offsets as me.

The Devs stole code? Dang. Thread title sure doesn't lie- y'all trackin' them Devs like Narcos.

I've got to hand it to this kid, my initial post that refuted most of his bs claims has now been replaced with "This post is pending moderation.". Keep in mind that the reply that he made to it, that literally called out someone's individual name, (and it wasn't even my name), is still sitting there. As is the imgur link to a random chat screenshot that includes this poor individual's name.

I don't think Daak is this super-genius who can put on different personas. I've noticed the people you accuse to be him all behave VERY differently...

Hey Wiccann, is this the post that you wanted removed from the internet?

So I took a peek at your Discord and maybe you do know who I am, but honestly I just can't figure out why you'd make up the random nonsense claims about me unless I'm somehow being counter-trolled, in which case well done.

In any scenario, I want to make sure that I've gotten the chain of events correct here so that I can accurately provide my team of psychiatrists with the proper information for them to create a treatment plan that can cure my ailments:

1. I've never spoken to anyone involved before this point. I write Cupper, a completely open source tool that is based upon functionality that you had previously made available to people but were no longer maintaining (MvSpeed, JaZero, OG Clipper stuff). I write it from scratch, with one other person who you don't know.

2. I add a bunch of new features that no other related application had, consistently share the source code with each update, and even get help from you in your own IRC channel since I'm new to this type of application and can't easily figure out the SigScan functionality. I never speak to you again after that point as far as I'm aware.

3. You take the open source code that I wrote, keep most of the file structure intact (Player_AutoDetect.cs -> public partial class Player ??) completely replace any authoring comments that I had made and instead replace them with your own. Keep all of my newly added features intact (UseExclusions, ZoneDelay, DetectionDelay, ExcludedPlayers, ExcludedZones, etc.,) close the source code, and then sell the application on your own website for *profit*.

4. You tell people in your Discord that Cupper was a "branch of Clipper". You know that this isn't true because the source code was written entirely from scratch and you reused it when you created the new version of Clipper that EliteMMO is now distributing. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here and assume that you meant branch in terms of feature functionality even though no one who uses git would ever use that verb in that sense.

5. I see a dumb argument between boring people accusing each other of trolling, so I decide to write one of the most blatantly satirical troll posts that you could possibly write by scraping the corners of the internet moron trash bin in the hope that it would shut them up (I was successful in that last goal at least).

6. I decide that even though it's obviously a troll post to anyone with a modicum of sense, I'll still add a huge disclaimer at the bottom so that people won't accidentally take it seriously and reply with 10,000 word essays. In my disclaimer I state, verbatim, "what Thorny is doing is using buzzwords and partially correct information to troll people who don't have the knowledge to fully comprehend their posts," while that's EXACTLY what the post itself was doing, using a few partially correct statements while adding in absolute nonsense and buzzwords to troll people who don't have the existing knowledge to discern the accuracy of the post content. Masunasu even pointed this big red flag out to people a few replies later to absolutely no one's benefit.

I don't even know what to say at this point. I can only assume that all of you have swum so far into the deep end of the autism spectrum pool that you're now drowning in it and can no longer separate fact from fiction. I still think that the original post and one or two of the replies were genuinely funny, but the rest of it has been boring and repetitive and honestly a waste of everyone's time so it's probably time to put it to bed.

I also never would have minded that you re-branded the Cupper stuff for your own benefit if you hadn't come in here spewing absolute nonsense after the fact.

I've got plenty of evidence in the fashion of BG Forum posts, Wayback Machine Internet Archive posts (from your own forums), existing source code from when Kenshi took a snapshot of your rebranding in 2013, and JSON content of the configuration files from your own current release version of Clipper to back up everything that I've said here by the way.

Did he really steal it, though, if he wrote most of the tools to begin with and then contributed on (supposedly) your version?

Yes. There's not really a great example that I can give but let's say that you wrote all of the initial code for Internet Explorer, and then I came along a year later and wrote Firefox, both with your help and citing you as the initial inspiration, and then you came back and took all of the Firefox code that you inspired, but that I wrote, and you started selling Microsoft SuperExplorer for $9.99.

There are a bunch of reasons that this parallel doesn't work, including the fact that my code was never that great and that Wiccann never really had that many customers, but then what's the point in lying about it or misrepresenting yourself when you could have just written Microsoft Edge a year later? It makes no sense, but that's what happened :(

Also, keep in mind that I never brought any of this up. I just made a dumb trollish post about how the network routers prevent dupes and this guy swooped in to call me Nathan.

So that's how Microsoft Edge was born

Well you see when a mommy browser and a daddy browser...

Microsoft edge... more like when a brother and sister browser love eachother.....

In the Microsoft cinematic universe, the existence of mommy browsers, and daddy browsers, and baby browsers implies there must be a...

I hate to get back into this thread, because I suspect you're still trolling, but consider a few points.

-A class meant to detect other players will likely have player in the name.
-Adding features from comparable software is incredibly common. You used all the features from clipper in cupper in the first place.
-Atom0s was, and is, arguably the single most knowledgable ffxi developer. I don't think he needed to steal your code to iterate the entity array looking for names and whether they were drawn. He may have used the idea, but he had numerous projects utilizing that data long before cupper existed.
-You're listing like 6 feature names, but really they all just feed into one feature(player detection). Keeping feature naming consistant is easier on users.

If he already knew how to do what you added, which is certainly the case, how can you fairly say he stole anything? Any sane person would check the same way, by iterating valid player indices in the entity array for a measure of if they are (active, visible, in range, w.e) and testing name against exclusions. Writing similar code is not an indicator of theft, or even of him looking at your project's source. His clipper uses an entirely different UI based on entirely different code.

So, what are you actually saying he stole? The naming scheme of your features?

Step bro browser porn.

I don't even need to reply to this do I?

But I will.

This is literally why software patents exist. If I come up with some new open source software feature first, you do not get the right to sell it yourself just because you could have come up with it on your own. If you agree that software patents are mostly nonsense then you must also agree that people shouldn’t be selling what was previously open source software for profit.

Yes you came up with all of these features first, but I could have come up with them first if I wanted to, and it certainly wasn't hard to figure out how to do it, and I copied your naming schemas exactly including the file and class structure because why not? I could've come up with that as well if I wanted to! And I sold it for money instead of giving it away for free like you did because if I could have done everything else on my own then clearly I deserve the profit as well!!!

Edit: You're both kind of dumb and I think that the only reason that either of you feel relevant is because you're peddling your wares and skills and RMT services around on a 20 year old game that has zero competition for them. Imagine either of you trying to do anything similar in the FFXIV environment? I don't think that it would be quite the same experience for you ;)

-Nathan

Software patents must be non-obvious. From what I'm reading here, the algorithms implemented in Cupper seem straightforward and textbook, although I haven't read the source myself. That's not to say they were bad or inferior in some way. Straightforward and textbook is usually what you want, but if you're going the IP route, I think you'd have an easier time convincing someone that the features were a novel concept.

Good point. Most of the examples that I gave were from a similar grouping of features related to auto detect because those are the identically named features that are still easily visible in the auto generated configuration file of the currently for sale version of Clipper.

For example the ZoneExclusionList allowed the user to provide their own list of zone ids where the app would skip the auto detect logic entirely if the player was currently in that zone. It was useful back then for doing NNI etc with your trusted LS and not having to maintain a player specific exclusion list. This never existed in any previous release of a similar type of application to my knowledge (or to anyone else’s knowledge according to the replies in the BG forum threads).

It’s not something that would have been hard to add or to come up with on your own, it’s just that no one had done it previously, and the fact that it’s still there in the code with the exact same name and functioning in the exact same manner is a pretty blatant indicator that my code was reused (on top of the nearly identical partial class file structure.)

Edit: Re-reading this ***is boring even for me and it’s doubtful that anyone is actually paying money for this ***anymore when tako has been free and around forever so I’ll withdraw my complaint and you can just go on selling whatever you want. I’m out.

The thing is, I didn't claim to be an authority on anything besides FFXI. I know I wouldn't be anywhere near the top in FFXIV. I'm not a top tier reverse engineer, or a great developer. I'm stating things about FFXI as fact, because I understand the game well enough to be sure that I am correct. So, I totally agree with you here(at least regarding myself).

However, if you don't recognize atom0s has some world-tier reverse engineering skill, then you clearly haven't spent much time talking with him. His talent is recognizable far outside the sphere of FFXI.

Then perhaps you should have patented it. The most sympathetic read on your situation is that you shouldn't have been dabbling in greymarket development.

Then go post it in a thread.

I will note, this isn't the first time I have seen accusations of stealing code thrown around willy nilly over the many many years.

But I have *never* seen any of such claims actually come to fruition. Its a lot of "I have proof! Really! Trust me! No, won't post it though..."

Also I am pretty sure most of said website requires you to login to see basically anything, and website content that requires a login to see cannot be wayback machine'd.

Source: I had my own old forums back in the day and was sad to see only the content exposed to non-logged in users got saved, which was like... 1% of the website.


Can confirm, when a person writes a discord bot that auto-extracts chunks of FFXI dlls into assembly from commands on the fly, you know they are pretty next level.

I think "Dev Tracker" refers to the FFXI devs, guys. . . not your personal projects.

Anyone know if ML are increasing?