Purchase rights to commercicial episodes and make them GPL

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Benvolio
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Post by Benvolio »

I've never used Steam and I don't really know how it works, but i gather that it is some sort of a subscription service for PC games. If one bought Keen on it, would one receive an intact copy to one's on disk, in an original 1990/1991 form that could be modded? Or does it somehow have to be played only by logging into Steam?
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troublesomekeen
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Post by troublesomekeen »

You have to download Steam, buy a game in order to release all restrictions on your account, be logged into a constantly updating and restarting Steam client to play any games you bought through Steam, and it's all downloads. No physical copies are sold.
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Commander Keen in... Canteloupe Quest!
Benvolio
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Post by Benvolio »

Hmmmm well I wonder does that mean that people who haven't bought Keen2/3/5 previously (e.g. from 3D Realms or Apogee) won't ever be able to legally play Keen mods as long as the Steam model prevails?
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Post by Keening_Product »

It does download the game files to your disk though, doesn't it TSK? Or have they been sucked into some wrapper binary which cannot be broken apart easily?
Keening_Product was defeated before the game.

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troublesomekeen
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Post by troublesomekeen »

Keening_Product wrote:It does download the game files to your disk though, doesn't it TSK? Or have they been sucked into some wrapper binary which cannot be broken apart easily?
That's a good question. It would be kind of absurd to have no access to your games without running Steam -- like if all your games were on the Steam Cloud? I'll have a look.

Okay, I found it.
Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common and there you should see all the folders containing your games. If you have the Commander Keen pack thing, just run the batch files for whichever episode you want to play. It uses DosBox fullscreen.

So yes. You can games you bought on Steam without running Steam. The only benefit to running Steam while playing is the Overlay (screenshots, voice chat, type chat, video, group chat) and Steam Achievements, since it records your progress.
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Commander Keen in... Canteloupe Quest!
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Post by Lunick »

Any DOSBox games on Steam have no DRM included with them (Doom's first release did but id quickly went back on that decision) so after you have bought and downloaded through Steam then I guess you are free to do what you want with them. The Commander Keen pack only has Steam Cloud as a feature for it to backup your save data, there are no Steam Achievements for it. If you want to use the Steam Overlay then you need to fiddle with the DOSBox config.

You can put Steam into offline mode for up to 30 days too if you don't want to be online using it although it won't record gameplay time (or Steam Achievements for other games) in this way.

I'll also point out that Steam itself isn't a DRM but Steamworks is which can be incorporated into a game's .exe file to make it only run when Steam is running and the account is authorised to play that game.
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Post by Levellass »

troublesomekeen wrote:Okay, I found it.
Google has some wonderful short answers to questions now doesn't it? Very efficient.
What you really need, not what you think you ought to want.
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Post by SupFanat »

I made a Facebook page about it. At the moment it has only 12 likes. Hope you'll enjoy it and give more likes. :)
https://www.facebook.com/Make-all-Comma ... 3/?fref=ts
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