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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Team Not Art Thieves
Via Kotaku an Inquirer article reports that, despite earlier claims to the contrary, it looks like the folks behind the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title are not guilty of art theft. It seems both Half-Life 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. use textures from a pack produced by Marlin Studios. The similarities are there because both teams used pre-canned materials for their titles, not because of any tom-foolery on the part of GSC GameWorld.
Good thing we all jumped to conclusions.
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I bought all 38 copies of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. from the local Best Buy thinking it'd be a good investement.
Do you have any idea the hundreds of thousands of hours that would be wasted if every game made all of their own unique textures. How different do you want that crate to look from game to game? What about that door? Or how about on a smaller scale, what about the trash texture used to cover the top of a garbage dumpster, do you want to recreate that for every game just to give it another point of difference that nobody will notice?
just as unoriginal aesthetically as the other major players.
Nah, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s dark brown halls look much nicer than DOOM 3's dark brown halls.
Trolling is a art,
I'm a big fan of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
:)
The game is very original, and I see a lot of promise in this game in the way of mods, expansions, and sequels. This game is so good it made me feel like I was playing a first-person-shooter version of Fallout. In fact, I recently reinstalled Fallout, and am beating it again. If S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is good enough to remind me of such a golden age game, they must have touched on the right nerves.
Hopefully any previously mentioned projects will take less time to develop than the game itself did!
I sort of doubted the original allegations were true, and figured that some kind of licensed or public domain material must have been involved in this. Glad to hear that is in fact true.
This developer shows promise, and it would be unfortunate if its reputation were inappropriately tarnished.
Exactly. Time spent creating Unique_Wall_Texture_37 takes time from creating Unique_Mob_Texture.
I mean, I know every time I go through Half-Life 2, I spent hours looking at wall textures wondering how each would look as wallpaper for my room. I could care less about the striders, the bugs, Dog or Alyx.
When it's so noticeable that the creators get accused of stealing artwork? Yeah.
I understand the concept of using tools (Engines, Texture Sets, etc.) to create games. I also understand that it is unfeasible for studios to reinvent the wheel every time they make a title. But when a game is accused of stealing artwork because its graphics are so rehashed, I think it is indicative of a problem. Like I said, these things won't likely affect sales.
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
By "so noticeable" you mean that nobody noticed until someone HACKED the game files and found the water texture raw files?
more insightful than funny, right in one.
Stealing Theiving Appropriating Looting Kleptomanias Extortion R... ER... wait.. doh!
"Snatching defeat from the mouth of victory on a daily basis."
Or maybe anti-Stalker
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http://www.starfild.pri.ee/pildid/ajaviide/imagep
These "textures" were things like the light attenuation pattern of a flashlight. You buy this stuff from a specialist because you can't afford the time it'd take for one of your artists to even figure out how to make something like this, let alone perfect the process to where it's going to look as good as the ones you can buy. This is totally different from the world/object/character textures that your artists are trained to do.
Anyone who has seen the original 1979 movie that i imagine is heavily influencial to this, may well disagree. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/ But then again, will have to play the game first.
"all through my house i set up traps, it seems like the rats have a map, so now i feed the rats crack" - Donald D
It's worse than that. None of them wrote their own production software or even operating systems. They didn't even grind their own sand to make their chips!
How do they explain the Doom3 specific filenames?
So... they're not thieves, just as unoriginal aesthetically as the other major players.
:-s
Yes, because games sharing the textures for some of their lamps are then all junk.
Give me aesthetically innovative lamp textures, goddammit!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Do they even need to?
From the last sentence of the article: "the IMP_Light texture that it was thought could have been pilfered from Doom 3 was, in fact, just a standard Impact Light texture, rather than referring to the Doom 3 monster."
RTFA.
I was more concerned about the "Hellgate3" texture. Though I suppose it's still not a direct reference to Doom.
A game without crates would be dreamy! Time to crate for STALKER? 2 minutes. Pretty good!
'cuz it's important for each light bulb texture to be unique.
oh, and led lights need to be unique, and grass textures. and bathroom porcelain.
So, game developers are not constantly re-inventing the wheel... this is great. How many times in an FPS have you burst into an office, seen a desk, a chair, etc, then wondered how long it took developers to model it, texture it etc? Probably not many. But I have! Really, a few good chair models is all we need. This will hopefully free up development time for more important things like design, AI, plot and innovation.
Even better, these kinds of resources need to be made available to small time and independant developers. Writing a 3D game would be a lot easier if a huge number of the objects were already done.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
If by "hacked" you mean "browsed some directories," you fucking jackass.
Point torch at white-painted wall. Take photo. Adjust levels in Photoshop or nearest equivalent so that white-painted wall is now black, and pattern from torch is only thing visible.
Oh no, really difficult!
I seriously doubt the textures in question (lights, and animated water textures) are from Marlin Studios. Why? Well, they don't appear to have such things for sale, and the idea that two companies would independently end up with pixel-perfect copies of a du/dv map for rendering water refractions in DirectX 8, when this texture library company isn't even selling such a thing, seems a bit unlikely.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
But someone ought to take a good look at Marlin Studios. Apparently some of their textures were lifted straight from HL2!
I agree, why re-invent the wheel? If it ain't broke don't fix it. It's like using stock photos, music, and sounds. Besides, you can have all the fancy graphics in the world but if the game play bites, what's the point.
GCS/MU d- s: a--- C++ W+++ w+ M-- PS--- PE++ t+ R+ tv b+ DI++ G e- h! !y
everyone knows that prepacked stuff is used in games all the time. There's a whole industry based on it. Check out http://www.turbosquid.com/ sometime. I sell a lot of stock photos of ashpault on there quite a bit. I suspect most folks buying those are game designers working on car related video games...
Kenneth Scott made the light images himself and he knows it. Not licensed. :)