Talk:MineClone 2

How similar is this to Minecraft?
Hello, could someone familiar with this and Minecraft summarize the similarities? The reason being that if the similarity is too great, i.e. if the content is almost identical to Minecraft, Mineclone should probably be removed from this Wiki as it would legally be considered a derivative work of proprietary Minecraft and hence not free as in freedom. For the same reason games like OpenMW aren't allowed here. But of course, if the game is not too similar, this might not be the case. Thank you! --Drummyfish (talk) 16:00, 22 January 2022 (CET)
 * (OpenMW uses MW assets directly.) A fair point but I think applying copyright to clones is not straight forward. There's very little legal precedent&mdash;gameplay wasn't historically considered covered. I see there has been a bit of movement in that direction. (A very bad idea which will lead to all sorts of legal restrictions on interoperability&mdash;intentional of course from megacorps and probably not created with mere games in mind. Maybe the FSF has a statement on the gradual shrinking of the right to clone software. I don't think I've seen one, which is odd now that I think of it.)


 * Other games are in the same boat. Freeciv is identical to Civilization if configured to be identical and different if configured to be different. Oolite when set to strict mode is identical to Elite (except that the AI enemies are harder). Any one of these games just as much as Minecraft clones can be very different with settings changes and mods. LGW is full of Risk clones, etc. which I don't even think are materially different to their originals with any settings. I think Wyrmsun has the same gameplay as WarCraft 2 (but don't hold me to that because I don't remember well enough).


 * I would personally ignore it and remove MineClone if it does turn out to be a problem, because I don't think we here should be trying to prejudge a changing legal area by applying it to something which has not yet happened. (By which I mean the game aims to clone Minecraft but has not yet succeeded in duplicating its feature set, while examples above have done so.) Just IMO.
 * It shames me to say that having written a long reply, I can't answer your question in depth. I've played neither. Minetest forum might be a better place to ask for details of how this is legal/different/justified. What I can say is that I've checked the list of differences on the Minetest ContentDB page for you. Apart from temporary differences intended to change, there are block types not found in MC, different easter eggs, differences in loot chest content, inbuilt help, mod support, and of course Minetest's own terrain generation style and world dimensions. Still very similar, but aught to suffice? FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 17:41, 22 January 2022 (CET)
 * Thanks for this great insight. I know this is a gray area, I would just like someone who has played both games to provide a comparison so that we can at least try to make some judgement. I'm not so much talking about gameplay but rather the assets: even if they're not identical, I reckon they will be extremely similar to Minecraft's assets which could violate trade dress or even copyright. I even think that Minetest Game, the "less similar clone", would very likely be violating these and if it wasn't for its non-commercial nature, it would be very well suable. But yeah, that's the case with many games here. I'd just like to have some more info about this here, maybe even in the article itself. --Drummyfish (talk) 21:29, 22 January 2022 (CET)
 * Hi! Wuzzy here, the original developer (but no longer active, others have taken over). So, what MineClone 2 clones is the *ideas* but not the actual data. As for the gameplay, the game is indeed really similar. It's a clone, after all, that's the point. So you will find a lot of blocks, items and mobs that also exist in MC. You know, like a real clone. The philosophy is to clone MC faithfully AS LONG it is reasonably/technically possible within the bounds of Minetest. So it's not meant to be a VERY sophisticated clone like OpenTTD but still rather faithful, mostly focusing on the gameplay. Images, sounds, and other media are NOT ripped from MC and during the development so I paid close attention to use different images under libre licenses. And the code is 100% a clean-room implementation (dumping Java code into Minetest is not possible anyway lol). The core goal of MCL2 is and always was from the start to be a fully libre clone with no exceptions. I wouldn't have really seen much value in this if it weren't actual FOSS. For the graphics, a free/libre texture pack was used. Sounds were basically all from freesound.org and other Public Domain / libre sources. As for the new developers, they also take great care to not let sneak stuff of “dubious” origin in. If you have more questions about the current situation, you should look in the forum thread and ask those people. In case you find anything “suspicious” in this game despite all of this, please file a bug report, these things are generally taken very seriously. But I have long left this project because I wanted to move on with something new, so you really need to talk to the new devs. --Wuzzy (talk) 00:16, 10 August 2022 (CEST)