Before I begin to explain things, please bear in mind that this situation has been resolved for now. The only reason I'm posting this is that a lot of people were given some very false impressions at some point or other in the proceedings, and many of them still aren't sure of the truth.    -Sven Viking (SvenCo-op team leader)

Part 1 of 2: The Story

SvenCo-op

RealDM

Up-close comparison

It all started when someone noticed that a screenshot of the Real DeathMatch mod displayed on the PHL news page showed what was completely identical to the SvenCo-op MP3 player HUD display...

One of us checked the RealDM Team page, and found that Mark was their lead coder. Mark worked on SvenCo-op for a short while back in late 2001, before (after some warnings), he unfortunately had to be kicked from the team for using content from other mods without telling us or the content authors (e.g. sprites from Front Line Force), lying about things, leaking files, and such like. He also left cheats and backdoors in SvenCo-op that he hadn't mentioned to us -- some of which gave Mark, anyone he told, and anyone who found out about them accidentally, rcon-like power over any server running SvenCo-op. Luckily, some of the cheats were found during beta testing, and all of them were removed before public release. There was also some serious trouble about his use of the source to create hacked SC dlls, months later.

Sniper (SC team member) contacted someone from the RealDM team, and was told that Mark was using the SvenCo-op MP3 player for testing purposes, intending to code his own MP3 player later on. This sounded like a strange way to go about things (it would seem more likely that the MP3 player code would be altered rather than re-written, else why add the code in the first place?). We couldn't prove that he didn't intend to code his own player, though, and I didn't want to stir things up unless it became necessary (though knowing Mark, we rather expected the MP3 player wouldn't be the only thing appropriated). Some team members were more irritated than others, and apparently some accusations that we have no proof of were made to some RealDM team members.

Somewhere around this time, Mark ICQed some of us saying that it was not the SvenCo-op MP3 player seen in the screenshots (Note: conflicting with what we'd heard from other RealDM team members), but in actual fact an identical-looking round timer he'd added (click the image on the left).

He said that he'd deleted the SvenCo-op code "at least two years ago" (umm, back before he joined the SC team?), and that RealDMs MP3 player looked "way different" and was "way better" than SvenCo-op's. This turned out to be even further from the truth than we imagined. Keep reading to learn why.

Anyway, shortly after this, Tom (ex-SC coder who left the team a few months ago due to other obligations) E-mailed Planet Half-Life (RealDM's host) to protest, as he had written the MP3 player code himself (with some assistance from Another1). I heard of this when I got a CC from Fragmaster (who runs PHL).  Fragmaster E-mailed Flewda (RealDM team leader) saying that they should remove the MP3 player and apologise. I E-mailed both of them to try to sort things out.

Now Flewda didn't know that the MP3 player code was stolen... He presumably checked with Mark, and Mark told him that he had written most of the SC MP3 player code. So under the impression that the SC team was lying in order to attack his mod for no reason at all, he understandably wrote a fairly angry news post along those sorts of lines (see left). In the news post, he said that to make us happy, they would re-write the MP3 player from scratch, though this would delay the release of their mod (Note: Story changes from 'used for testing purposes only, will be recoded'). He also stated twice that the majority of the SC MP3 player had been written by Mark.

Now we had a problem. Not only was this false, and a real insult to Tom, but it made it sound as if we were randomly attacking other mods for no real reason. I E-mailed Flewda with evidence (see Part 2 for this and more), and asked for the news post to be altered.

The news post was altered to say "Mark has told me that he wrote the majority of the code for SC mp3 player, and Tom helped him with it. However, Sven Viking has said otherwise...". However, the line: "I don't even consider the mp3 player "Stealing" because Mark wrote the majority of it" remained intact... meaning basically that though we "said otherwise", we were lying through our teeth.

This really wasn't an improvement, and we demanded that a proper correction be made. A much nicer news post had admittedly been posted above, saying that "mistakes were made"... but not by whom. Anybody who read the lower post would still get the impression that the SC team was an evil Godzilla-like organisation, crushing other mods underfoot :)... and also a bunch of liars. I explained that the RealDM team were welcome to use the MP3 player if they wanted, as long as credit was given to Tom and Another1 (Tom was happy with this offer). For one reason or another, this was refused.

An addition to the news was made (see left), but mostly to say "it's Mark's word versus SC's word", and the like. It was said that "Right now, no one can officially prove WHO wrote the code". This was not quite correct, and really didn't clear things up, leaving a lot of people thinking some pretty weird stuff. And so it became necessary to write this article...

Next Page: The Evidence >>