Quote:
Originally Posted by aussenseiter
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And Sojourn was heavily plagiarized from DIKU.
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No it wasn't. DIKU is not a game, it's a codebase. It's like a game engine. You use it as a framework on which to build a MUD. Calling Sojourn a copy of DIKU is like accusing Borderlands of plagiarizing the Unreal Engine. It doesn't even make technical sense.
Every MUD is built on a codebase, just as any video game is built on an engine. There's a number of different MUD codebases, the most popular at the time being DIKU, ROM, Circle, and some others. The DIKU codebase does come with some stock features, but Sojourn/Toril was highly customized and bore no meaningful resemblance to the stock attributes of the DIKU codebase.
Technically, the DIKU codebase does sort of come with a playable game. If you install the stock engine, it has a very primitive framework for classes, spells, skills, and basic areas. Any MUD worth its salt would customize these heavily. There has never been any such thing as a popular MUD that resembled the stock version of its codebase. No such game would ever have become popular in the first place. The stock version of DIKU is about as interesting as Everquest's original offline tutorial, the one where you meet Soandso.
Sojourn was built on the DIKU codebase but plagiarized literally nothing whatsoever from that codebase's stock features. Even if it had, the DIKU license prohibits monetization of any game built upon the engine, so there's no basis for plagiarism. The old EQ vs DIKU controversy stems from the fact that EQ had used a select few text strings (specifically the text shown when you use socials like /grin) from DIKU, which prohibits using any of its properties for commercial ventures. Since so little was used, there was no real case to be made.
Think of it like EQEmu's stock installation. You can set that up and it comes with a playable game, but you can then change everything. Sojourn kept virtually nothing from the original stock installation. No classes, skills, spells, areas, items or anything like that. Every possible aspect of that game was wholly unique, it was just built on the mechanical foundation of the DIKU codebase.
Meanwhile, Everquest stole wholesale from Sojourn and directly copied many of that game's unique concepts. Classes, races, area concepts, quite a few items, etc. Since SojournMUD was a hobby game run by amateurs with a playerbase of a few hundred people, no action was taken. If it had been a commercial game, it would have been a slam-dunk win in a plagiarism case against EQ. Everquest really is pretty much a direct port of Sojourn onto a graphical engine, just scrubbed of names that belong to the Forgotten Realms IP.