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Game Assets For Open Source Games?
Ron Harwood writes "As a developer of an open source game - and having zero artistic talent - I find one of the biggest challenges is finding graphics (and potentially sounds) that can be distributed freely. Are there any good repositories of game assets (tiles, sprites, 3D meshes, sounds, music, etc.) out there?"
I've recently 'opened' the creative guts of my animated series (including concepts, technologies, artwork etc), and am in the process of releasing content bit by bit, and it so if you're interested, you can use and modify the stuff already up there at Dustrunners.com or request new assets in the games stream on the site.
It's just getting rolling, but I'm sure there's something there that could help you...
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Previous discussion on free graphics
While they aren't free, GarageGames offers content packs. I'd prefer something ala carte, but the screenshots are enticing.
The folks on the Game Maker forum are generally open with spriting assistance. You've usually gotta have something code-wise to entice them into helping out, but that'll probably be the case in a lot of situations when you need media handouts.
Quake Retexturing Project
http://www.quake.cz/winclan/qe1/
Phillip
Don't give me "I can't draw" like you're proud of it or something.
The last new programming language or algorythm you worked on took studying, right?
visit Learn To Draw and surprise yourself!
you might not end up with the mona lisa, but you'll finish up with something better than the nothing you have right now.
When your game looks reasonable, there will be a better chance of attracting an "artist" to help you.
The community around Polycount tends to be strictly opposed to plagiarism, and it seems to a good idea to ask authors' permission before doing anything to their model (as well as being courteous - they like to know that their models are appreciated :-)
Some models on Polycount don't actually have a permissions statement, meaning that if you want to be picky, it may not even be legal for Polycount to distribute them. Some have non-commercial clauses in the readme, or other encumberances.
Some Q3 models use, or are based on, Quake 3 stock animations - I'm not sure about the copyright status of these, and whether they're a large enough proportion that the model counts as a derived work.
As for "Free" rather than "free", I haven't seen a model on Polycount yet that's freely modifiable, or meets the FSF or OSI guidelines for free software/open source software - so if you want open-source code combined with unmodifiable graphics, that's fine, but if you want your artwork to be licensed in the same way as your code, Polycount is unlikely to help you unless you specifically ask the authors for more permission.
Moreover, there's a GarageGames thread about a site which will host assets of "dead" projects, with a very permissive license.
The thread is here. I'm not sure if it's in a public forum or not.
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