Hi All,

17 U.S.C. § 103(a) states that "The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully."

This was famously dealt with in the case Anderson v. Stallone, 11 U.S.P.Q.2d 1161 (C.D. Cal. 1989) in which a writer wrote an unsolicited and unauthorized script for Rocky IV and then tried to sue for copyright infringement claiming they stole his ideas. The court ruled that Anderson's script, being an unauthorized derivative of the first three Rocky movies, could not be afforded copyright protection.

The copyright of SWG can be broken down into two parts :

1. The copyright of the code base
2. The copyright of Star Wars and all related lore
   

SWG Copyright

The copyright of the code base belongs to the successor of SOE which is Daybreak Game Company. There is nothing legal about using the source code that was leaked so anything based on that leaked source code is in violation of their copyright.

That being said, I do not think that Daybreak would be interested in pursuing legal action because the Star Wars Galaxies code is a dead end and not used in any of their current games. There would be little benefit to them in pursuing legal action and they are a small company with limited money and they are, in my opinion, not going to waste lots of money on lawyers.

As such, you cannot copyright any modifications to this code base. None, zero zilch. Any modifications are 100% unauthorized derivatives.

The other issue is the copyright and trademarks of Star Wars itself. This is broad and expansive and Disney has a bottomless chest of m\oney to fund lawyers with.

Star Wars Copyright

Anything dealing with Star Wars is copyrighted. The names and appearances of the characters are copyrighted. The planets are copyrighted. Bespin is copyrighted.

If you are making an emulator to play the game and you are just emulating the game as it was on release, that is not, in and of itself a violation of Disney's copyrights (although using Star Wars style branding or imagery outside of screenshots of the game for fair use purposes is).

Once you start adding content, you are now making unauthorized derivative works and you cannot copyright any of this content.

A good example is Bespin. SWG Legends added Bespin a few years ago. While I'm sure the Legends team invested a lot of time and effort into creating Bespin for SWG, Bespin is the copyright of Disney. It first appeared in the movie "The Empire Strikes Back". Therefore, the SWG Legends developers cannot claim legal ownership or copyright over it.

I am making no commentary on the ethics of copying their work or breaking their encryption, I am merely pointing out that there is no way for them to claim copyright.

This goes for any mods that involve Star Wars at all. You should assume that anything you make for SWG is not copyrightable by you and act accordingly.

Finally, and, this is very important: Please do not attempt to threaten or assert any copyright claims over SWG content.

1. Any DMCA notice is made under penalty of perjury. If you make a DMCA claim on something that you do not hold a legal copyright to, you could be subject to criminal charges.
2. Disney routinely monitors court filings for anything that mentions their trademarks and copyrights. If you file a lawsuit involving SWG, you WILL attract their attention and it will not end well for anyone here as it would most likely involve them shutting down all emulators.

Do you have a favorite lightsaber color in Star Wars Galaxies? Let's hear it!

~Kiria, Co-founder of SWGalacticArchives

This sub is being moderated by this person who has shown they have no place here with their petty grudges and delusional outlook. This sub is not a place for swg players while this guy is representative of it.

Hi a friendly request for the community especially you folks that have ran servers A friend of mine built a p/CU server for just him and I to game on and we were wondering if anyone was willing to share any of the assets for extra planets or NGE content (vehicles, weapons, houses) i appreciate you taking the time to read this.
Thanks in advance

Let’s start at the beginning. Where did r/swg come from? Who the fuck even am I?

Hi. I’m Wim. I played on Bloodfin, made a lot of friends there that I still game with from time to time. One of them is Levarris. SWG was my MMO. It gave me that extra something to get back to while I was away training or deployed as an engineer in the army. It was my refuge after a day of tough classes, going through divorce, or dealing with ptsd. Like many of you, It was my escape for years.

I came to Reddit kinda early, as a refugee from digg.com. I think my first post on this subreddit of just 1 member was about the Tie Defender release on the live servers. I was pumped! Ultimately my excitement for swg then is what led to this community today. There have been a lot of little updates since the beginning but the rules have stayed consistent. In 2017 one of those updates was adding Levarris as moderator to help moderate.

How did Levarris get involved? We were gaming over ventrilo and I had a few of my friends and guild members check out some changes I made to the subreddit. He got involved pretty actively over a few years and I extended the invitation to him and a couple other friends to help out while keeping the rules and basic philosophy of the subreddit. Of my friends, he’s easily the most knowledgeable when it comes to swg. Sean and Yaggy were interested but didn’t really want to. I get it. Lev stepped up. We’ve had little friction over the years and where there’s been any it’d tend to resolve pretty easily, mostly while playing civ.

When we recruited for more mods we did the same thing a year ago and lolTyler stepped up and effortlessly integrated. He’s the lead mod over at r/swgemu and he’s put in some good work there as well as here.

What’s the philosophy of the subreddit? We’re here to facilitate open discussion of Star Wars Galaxies in any iteration. We have a couple rules that keep things from getting too redundant for regular members, prevent spam, or intentionally misleading content (namely staff impersonation and ai generated content). The final rule is Reddit’s Rules so the rules of the platform. There’s admittedly some overlap now as the platform rules have been updated over the years and the overlap provides emphasis for recent issues.

What about discussion regarding source servers and the source code leak?
I opposed source leak discussion at first, some communities still do, but it became such a big part of the swg community that I relaxed and then removed that rule almost a decade ago. We had community votes, it was a whole thing.

So what happens now?
Well from what I see everything is operating as it should be. Levarris did a drama, not his first doubt it’ll be his last. He can do that, he’s not held to any standard by me different than my other mods. If lolTyler wants to do a drama he’s more than welcome to. One of these days I might do a drama just for funsies. Members are allowed to as well, go get crazy. Do some drama, come talk about it!

Did he break the law? What are SWG Legends rights?
Well first I’m not a lawyer but I can give my layman’s assessment. The source code is operated on https://www.swgsource.org/ and https://swg-source.github.io. It functions as and its repositories are operated as open-source. This is, however, a legally gray area as consumer rights laws are currently battling property rights of sunset live-service games. You can read more about this here for an overview. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8e8e7g0r82o
And the kinda crap the other side is trying to do. https://www.polygon.com/sony-digital-games-lawsuit-california/

SWG Legends operates as a non-profit, fan-run emulator within this complex legal gray area because it relies on leaked corporate source code and world-builder tools from the defunct live game. Unlike projects that reverse-engineer code from scratch, Legends uses misappropriated software to run its servers. Legally, the fractured intellectual property rights belong to Disney (Star Wars branding), Electronic Arts (MMO interactive rights), and Daybreak Games/Enad Global 7 AB (the underlying code). Copyright owners have so far tolerated the server.

The project is built entirely on unlicensed property, the SWG Legends team holds zero legally enforceable rights to any custom content, planets, or code alterations they create. This causes a severe operational vulnerability:

Under copyright law, their custom expansions are considered unauthorized derivative works. Copyright protections never attach to them.

If a rival server, or in this case a user, decrypts, copies, or hosts the Legends team's custom assets, the Legends developers have no legal recourse. They cannot file copyright lawsuits, issue DMCA takedown notices, or claim financial damages.

Without legal shielding, their only protections against content theft and code replication are technical encryption, player bans, and community trust.

We’re currently at the community trust chapter of protection. 📍 You are here.

So it’s just as legally gray as the very existence of SWG Legends? That’s right. It may not be the popular move but it’s playing by the same game of lawlessness. Welcome to the source project Wild West, buckle up, grab your popcorn, and a DL44.

Update: This post has received reports that I'm threatening to shoot people with blasters in the comments. Allow me to better explain.

I wonder if it’s time to revisit the public IP restriction for players, especially with more ISPs moving to CGNAT.

I’m on Starlink, which already uses CGNAT, and in this case the player is also using a VPN on top of that. Because of the way the game currently handles or checks public IP addresses, they’re unable to play even though their internet connection itself is working normally.

This is becoming a bigger issue because a lot of residential providers no longer give customers a true public IPv4 address. In my area, providers like AT&T and Windstream also make it difficult or impossible to get a public IP without moving to a business account, and Starlink uses CGNAT by default.

As CGNAT becomes more common, I think this is going to affect more players over time, not just people on Starlink. VPN usage also makes the situation more complicated, since the IP the game sees may not match what it expects.

Would it be worth removing or changing the public IP requirement/check so players behind CGNAT, Starlink, mobile internet, or VPNs aren’t automatically prevented from connecting?

It seems like the current behavior may have made sense when most residential connections had their own public IPv4 address, but that’s becoming less common now. Supporting CGNAT and VPN-based connections would make the private server more accessible to players using modern ISP setups.

Badges Earned on Bria
Live Server Report Date: July 2004

"Badges may be earned in the game by visiting locations, completing theme parks, mastering professions and other sorts of in-game activities. While testing the Jedi system, we were able to do a database query of the Bria server while it was copied onto TC2 and find out just how many badges players have earned. The list is broken down by the type of badge and how many of each badge has been acquired by players."

The night before SOE Block Party 2008 Mark Hamill took a break from San Diego Comic-Con to visit SOE staff and some very lucky Galaxies players at the Hard Rock Café!

~Kiria, Co-founder of SWGalacticArchives

I can and will freely admit that what they say in this post is accurate. Not sure why the Legends staff felt the need to mention player data, personal information, etcetera as client data files are just what they are, assets and data for the client only like in game objects, art, sounds, not a single thing that would compromise a single player's privacy. I can only imagine they would include such a blurb to add more dramatic flair to something that they're just simply fumingly mad about and unable to do a thing about.

Allow me though a moment to explain why, regardless I would imagine that this post will get downvoted tremendously as the majority of the community simply don't care how they are able to play the NGE, they only care that they can play the NGE. Nevertheless I will provide a detailed reasoning why for those unaware of the fullness of fact.

We first need to go back to roughly fourteen years ago now, at this time in 2012 there was only one effort to bring back the NGE, it was a small emulation team known as ProjectSWG (They still exist today but are a CU emulation effort these days). It was my first delve into the world of SWG Development, I learned a lot in those early days about the inner workings of this game etc. We had a good relationship with SWGEmu based on mutual respect for the efforts each team was doing. They were good times by my recollection.

It was our chief aim to re-create the NGE in the way SWGEmu had done so for Pre-CU, through reverse engineering of packet data to create a stable server core that could "emulate" an SOE server. A painstaking process built on tireless and very tedious work and a great deal of trial and error.

Somewhere in the late fall of 2012 or early winter of 2013, the Community Manager (Glorified forum moderator) Fingies Ceano, whom the Legends community knows nowadays as "Reign", began to cultivate a relationship with a certain ex SOE developer, I will leave that dev nameless for his own sake and respect for him. Through an effort between Fingies / Reign, and I will be honest, this reads like a trashy spy novel, and not a good one. One of those cheap ones you find at a neighborhood garage sale for a buck that's never been read because the writing was so bad. Fingies and a female from the ProjectSWG team.. (I can't actually remember her name as of writing this any longer) essentially employed a honeypot strategy on this ex SOE developer to acquire a copy of the NGE developer tools that he had kept on a personal drive or something after leaving SOE as an employee.

When they finally got their hands on this data they realized what they had, though they couldn't initially get it to work. They chose to keep this a guarded secret from the rest of the development team at ProjectSWG. As a developer at PSWG back then, I can speak for the dev team of that day that that source code, we would have used as purely reference material, a digital textbook if you will to learn from to continue to build and stabilize our own server core that some of us had worked extremely long hours to deliver to that community who at the time had no other hope of seeing the NGE again.

I can also say wholeheartedly that we would never have done the alternative and used a stash of stolen goods to launch and host a live server from. To us that that would be just too morally gray to have done. Our colleagues at SWGEmu would have agreed with that stance.

In short Fingies / Reign undermined the development efforts of ProjectSWG, because he chose the quick and easy path. The dark side if you will.

Fast forward to today. Yeah the NGE Source is very much cat out of the bag, there's no putting that back in there this is true, and for some miraculous reason the use of SOE's stolen proprietary code has neither incurred the legal wrath of Daybreak Games or Disney, yet. (The verdict is never final on that until something actually happens legally one way or another)

There are many NGE development projects based on the SOE Source Code, but one of these projects does something so hypocritical with their work that it's almost laughable.

SWG Legends, built their server and work on the backs of the Sony Online Entertainment developers who came before them and they stole from to create the "Omega Server". They didn't spend tireless hours reverse engineering, writing code and figuring out how to build their own. They found it, like a vacant building they chose to squat in, all they had to do was figure out where the light switches were in a manner of speaking.

For a project team that is entirely built upon Stolen goods to be so angry and hurt over client data files they encrypted to try to prevent others from stealing is both laughable and extremely hypocritical. Which brings us to exactly why I did it. Hypocrisy at it's finest, shown a mirror to examine themselves with. You can't steal someone's house, change the locks and expect to be safe and sound when someone comes with the means to pick or destroy the lock altogether. It was never your house, it never belonged to you.

I do imagine that nothing of note happens other than I seriously ruffled the feathers of certain people in the Legends staff, which was my sole objective. I am confident the community will continue to play there or wherever they choose to, play wherever you want to.

In the meantime I will leave these here publicly for any and all who wants them.

https://drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1u4vCkNt4P5QUG1O9n4VCAXbTKZJUS2hu&export=download

Sorry Fingies, you don't get to protect and hoard from the greater community things built on stolen goods.

P.S. Synge sends his regards.

- Levarris

The following is a record from the Star Wars Galaxies Official Website:

The Event Report: Episode 1: "The Attack of the Events"

"Greetings! This is the first of what I hope is a long series of event reports chronicling the many player events occurring across the galaxies.

Each of the events below had requested Event Team support, but for each of them, the event support was a minor addition to the overall event (lots of PVP this week).

Now onto the events!"

Flurry

"We begin with a large-scale PVP event on Flurry run by Psyco's. Psyco's found a great location for this event located between two rivers on Talus (-2878, 1376). A Player Event Perk flag was placed in the middle and each faction wasn't allowed to cross the opposing side's river. Event Perk decorations were also placed by the organizers to give it more of a battleground feel."

FarStar

"The second event of the day was run by Errathe on the FarStar European server."

Naritus

"The Empire and the Alliance fought a pitched PVP and PVE battle within the confines of New Astravia on Tatooine of the Naritus server thanks to the efforts of Ewel who set up the event with the Events Team. Both Rebel and Imperial commandos fought well, but the Rebels had the advantage of nearby cloners and (I believe) ended up winning the day."

Hey guys, decided to try SWG again after a long hiatus and came across this server SWG Nexus and its kind of cool how its both NGE and pre cu with new content.

Is the population usually that strong? Just want to make sure I have people to play with

I was on Bloodfin or Intrepid, can't remember. My Shop was on Corellia just outside of town. I would rename Data Terminals to Computers and the big yellow couch to C-Shape Couch. I would place a torch on the Corellia Bazaar with my shop coordinates for $5000 credits so no one would buy it so it stayed up for all to see. Every so often someone would buy it and then by 2 million worth of furniture from the shop 30 minutes later. It was a fun time, almost like a second job though. I try to play now but it seems with multi character servers there wouldn't be to much need to purchase furniture these days. Years later I would walk around and go into peoples house to see if my furniture was still around. Almost everywhere I went Made By: BLASTER :-) What did you make back in the day?

In April of 2006, LucasArts and Sony Online Entertainment hosted Star Wars Galaxies Community Summit 2006. Taking place in select cities, this event allowed players to meet the developers, win prizes, learn some of what was to come for SWG in the rest of 2006, and of course, voice their concerns. Since this was roughly 5 months after the NGE hit, there were many, many concerns.

By most accounts, those who did attend these events enjoyed themselves, satisfied that at least some of their feedback would be acted upon by the developers. The first stop for Star Wars Galaxies Community Summit 2006 was Atlanta, Georgia on April 7th.

-Treewise

The following is an account of the first Mandalorian chest piece crafted on a live SWG server (Eclipse):

"SOE’s SWG development team announced the addition of the Death Watch Bunker on 25 May 2005 (Publish 8) but the United Lowlands community were on the case much earlier than that. While the new dungeon was still on Test Center, community member Twist of <SYNRG> was busy exploring and mapping the empty bunker (without enemies) for later use.

There was much talk and excitement about the coming Death Watch Bunker patch on the community forums and when it finally arrived practically the whole community turned out to take it on. A large team of two groups consisting of about 35 people led by Twist’s character, Quistis, stormed the bunker and made it as far as the shuttle room (key #2) before suffering a complete and epic wipe-out.

Twist worked hard to create a balanced, trustworthy and disciplined squad of combat professions, which was what it took to be successful in the pre-CU Death Watch Bunker. Every Dutch person at starwarsgalaxies.nl who had mastered at least one combat profession, was allowed to sign up for the raids.

The DWB was raided daily by members of the UL community from early in the afternoon until late at night. After two weeks they had already looted two sets of the main components, Protective Liquid Coating and Binary Liquid, but had yet to complete the Alum Minerals quest or obtain a jetpack stabilizer (which was prevented from dropping from the Overlord of the Deathwatch by a bug, which was corrected on August 31 2004 with Publish 10).

The lack of Alum Minerals caused the project to hit a wall which would never had been surpassed in time without the help of Vorda, Quistis and Renato. They discovered it was possible to complete the quest by using a smuggler ability known as Feign Death, while another team member dragged them through the treacherous tunnels of the bunker with the Medic’s +Drag+ ability.

With this, and after many hours of planning, analysis, thinking, disappointment, cursing, frustration, Twist’s teams managed to complete their goal. They made six full strikes and six smaller strikes with their team, from June 1st until mid-July 2004. With each attempt they made it a little bit further. With the great feedback and de-briefing sessions after each strike, Twist was able to plan the final strike which led to the creation of the first Mandalorian Chest Plate (on live servers) and the third Helmet in the history of Star Wars Galaxies. They also achieved a server first for Eclipse after creating not only one, but two pieces of Mandalorian Armour in one strike. This was a monumental achievement for everyone involved and truly was a community effort.

The bunker is supposed to eject everyone in the group upon the completion of a successful crafting run, however in those early days this was temperamental at best. After crafting the Mandalorian Chest Piece, Ludossk became stranded alone with no combat skills while the rest of his group was ejected back to the surface. There was a risk that he would be killed, resulting in a 5% condition decay on the uninsured armour piece. With a bit of luck and a set of 90% armour, Ludossk made it out safely and the group went on to complete a second run which resulted in the creation of the helmet."

This account comes directly from https://lianorm.wordpress.com/history/

-Treewise

I created a custom mission in my private SWG server (hosted in a Proxmox Debian VM running on a Beelink SER5 mini PC). Creating the prototype mission (kill 5 womp rats for a $500 reward) was the easy part: just a few LUA server-side files placed in my J:\SWG\swg-proxmox\workspace\Core3\MMOCoreORB\bin\scripts\custom_scripts folder and then FTPed to the VM (and restart the game instance via the \bin\run script).

The mission itself works: I grab the mission from an NPC outside the Mos Eisley spaceport, kill 5 womp rats and receive the $500 reward from the NPC (with a waypoint pointing back to the NPC until it's completed).

What I haven't figured out are the steps to make the mission display in the Quest Journal. Claude Sonnet 5 says the client-side TRE files (which you get from installing SWG) need to be unpacked and modified to make this work but it doesn't know the exact steps and tools. I've dug around but as yet have not found the answer.

Any ideas or resources? Thanks.

Hi all,

Having a blast being back and playing again, and the memories have come rushing back.

I'm trying to figure out what Era I started playing in as I was very young at the time of my first time before NGE. My main memories involved getting dropped off at Dany Mining Outpost on Euro-Chim and it being packed to the core of hunting groups.

I don't remember too much more except that lady in Mos Eisley being somewhat a tutorial guide and giving me the mission for my XP-34 landspeeder.

Was it CU or pre cu? My brain seems to think it must have been late 04/early 05?

A player named Raelin created this digitally when Galaxies was live. Would you have bought a action figure of your character? Or maybe a plushie of your favorite pet? The options could have been endless!

~Kiria, Co-founder of SWGalacticArchives

Hi all

Thanks for the commentary yesterday, I have started on Resto and look forward to my next journey.

I'm not as active on Discord but was wondering if there was any interest for new or current players to join up for some RP and leveling.

In the past I have use my own adventure in game to build my story and would love for others to join if anyone was interested. In the past I have ran a Project Uncle Owen style adventure which is basically the group is self sufficient and levels together/builds a community together without too much outside help (whilst remaining in character)

I'm an EU player and would only play a few hours each evening so it would be a slow burn. Feel free to reach out if interested!

Pardon if I am repeating a question or unable to find the answer, I have spent a considerable amount of times on Legends but would love to try a more earlier style of the game and just have two questions

1) How true is it to CU back in the day (noting I know there are the additions of NGE end game etc)

2) What is the population like? I enjoyed Legends but felt like I was around afk tags half the time and I enjoy playing with a decent community.

Thanks!

Is there any sort of effort being made on a unified launcher (or does one already exist)? Like if I wanted to play on multiple different servers, I could do that all from the same launcher?

Was feeling a little nostalgic tonight and was curious how many people are still around that remember that name. Or the people that were part of what came next and gave us the opportunities we have today?

If a certain someone is still around, I can remember the day we got it up and we showed IG-88 who was boss while freaking out we got it working on the outskirts of Eisley lol.

Miss ya my friend!

Hi folks,

I’m looking for some advice getting SWGR or Legends running on the Steam Deck. I’m running it in desktop mode with a monitor/mouse/keyboard. Basically my primary desktop PC.

I’ve tried several setup variations using past posts on Reddit and the official SWGR article - https://swgr.org/wiki/steam_deck/

In all cases the launcher runs fine but the game fails to load with the attached shader error. LLMs suggest it’s due to direct x missing, so I’ve tried using protontricks as mentioned in the docs, but the default archive.org download path fails and a sideloaded version doesn’t match the hash check even though it’s the same size, version, and from Microsoft’s download page.

Does anyone have recent experience running SWG on the Steam Deck? I’d appreciate any suggestions.

Hey all, I've just started playing on SWGR. I want to go down the pistol route. What works well with Pistoleer?