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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Using Unlicensed Assets From Doom 3?
segafreak writes "ShackNews reports that S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Shadow of Chernobyl may contain unlicensed assets from other commercial games such as Doom 3 and Half Life 2. Though this has yet to be confirmed by any of the developers involved, if true this would be somewhat worrying. 'Responding to inquiries made by Shacknews, id Software CEO Todd Hollshead stated: I've seen a post on a web forum that claims DOOM3 assets are used in another game, but we've been working hard on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as well as our own internal project and have not had the time to fully investigate or otherwise verify that the claim is true. Only from what I've seen on the Web, it's concerning. However, it may turn out to be nothing.'"
OMG, that could be true. I'm pretty sure S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has brown walls too!
I read the internet for the articles.
While the Mapcore post that first made the alert was made on April 1st, I have remained skeptical mostly because of the very generic nature of the naming systems. How easily could two different companies come up with nearly identical images called "grate7" or "fanblade." I dabble in texture making a little and, for me atleast, all water normal maps turn out nearly the same, so I don't think I see the HL2 connection. We do know the developers are fans of HL2, though, as they refer to it directly in the game. I am significantly less skeptical about the Doom3 connection, however, once I noticed a certain file entitled "hellgate1"
Demented But Determined.
I know I haven't been able to sleep since I heard this story! S.T.A.L.K.E.R., might have (may have, even), used some highly generic normal-mapping textures that the user doesn't really see, from other games!!! God damn that is worrying!
Think of enourmous damage that has been done to the Half Life and Doom franchise by such a thing! I was looking forward to the next Doom game, but it is all ruined for me now.
The next thing you know, people will be sampling a half second loop from other people's songs, adding other musical elements over it, and turning it into a new piece of music! And children will be encouraged to cut pictures out from magazines, and glue them on another piece of paper to create a new piece of artwork... IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS EVEN!!
Won't someone think of the childre... er, the big multinational corporations!!!
Commercial businesses provide a ton of licensable and even public domain content for developers to use. It's like stock photography but for things that game developers need like textures, bump maps, sound effects, etc.
:D
It's also possible being that HL2 and Doom3 are highly moddable games that an individual on the STALKER team borrowed assets because they needed quick place holders but then they forgot to replace them - or it's also possible the assets they borrowed are in the public domain.
Still, I've seen this getting a lot of coverage on the web and some people even insulting the developers saying things like "only russians steal". It's quite ridiculous considering the artists clearly spent thousands of hours designing unique assets for this title. It's like harping on three or four words used in a novel that also appear somewhere else.
Even if this was flat out stealing assets from one game to use in another, it appears to me not unlike stealing a high-hat from one song to complete your song. It's such a small piece of the artists work that it seems silly to consider it a stolen asset used to get rich quick - so sue the crap out of them. What is more likely is the asset was just "the right one" and the artist used what worked best in that situation.
Still, if the files in question are actually (c) to a specific company, I still think it's unlikely they'd take much legal recourse over it. It'd be hard to prove it has caused major damages or that it's been the sole reason STALKER is making money.
oh and for reference, I understand what it's like to have your violated. my music is all over russian mp3 websites being sold and I don't see a penny. But hey it's getting out there!
The du/dv and normal maps for Half-Life 2's water definitely aren't shaders - they're inputs for shaders, but don't themselves contain a single line of program code. As with Doom 3's light textures, they're definitely artwork - while the player indeed won't 'see' them as they appear in the games' datafiles, they're quite distinctive and do contribute to the original games' artistic directions.
It would be quite strange to licence such textures from third-parties. They're not photographically sourced, so no big photo libraries would carry them - and in the case of the light textures, anyone halfway competent with Photoshop could make some decent facsimiles from scratch fairly quickly. It makes sense to buy sound libraries (to save shooting guns, breaking objects and releasing monsters in a clean and tidy office) and photo references (need to find some rusty old machines, tumble-down buildings etc.) - but not 128x128 pixel blobs of light.
I suspect the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. graphics programmers were independently implementing some fairly similar engine features to Doom 3 and Source, and to test their work 'borrowed' the shader input textures from the games they were emulating. Then, through forgetfulness, miscommunication or deceit, the original placeholders got left in the game.
I can't see it as being an attempt to save time or money during development - the screenshots I've seen contain some vastly more difficult and impressive map, character and prop texturing, so their artists are definitely more than capable of knocking together some quick light textures. Maybe a programmer did the original borrowing, and nobody on the art team realised where these new textures were actually from?
Moral of the story, though - don't use other people's stuff as placeholders. You might forget!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the mod that makes Doom 3 fun!