Once upon the time, I remember feeling utterly unpleasant toward playing racing games where cars did not break. I thought that GTA games, for example, were far more realistic because making mistakes and crashing into something is going to break the car and therefor you have to drive more carefully. Yes I was a strange kid. But I did enjoy games such as Flat Out where the objective is to crash your car as much as possible. I think I liked games that simulate reality, rather then those that are just made for fun. You could imagine how excited I was when I saw videos of this new racing game that came out at about 2013 called BeamNG Drive. A game where cars don't just swap body shapes with pre-modeled deformations. But a game that simulates the destruction fully. Using soft body physics. I didn't play it. At first my computer was way too slow and there was no GNU / Linux support. Then the game became paid. Then I changed from being a mere
The article is written with the same speculative insights as an angry manchild before breakfast, but they do correctly spot that Thomas Fischer was a contributor to Rigs of Rods, and decided to go in another direction from what he had learned there.
To call it copying is quite harsh, since he did change the engine and did write large parts of it.
It would be like calling LibreOffice “stealing” Microsoft Office, when one just served as the inspiration for the other
There isn’t anything particularly wrong with copying though. And copying isn’t stealing.