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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
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
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."
You're correct, I'm being a bit contradictory here. The originality of the game for me stems from the A.I., which is very unpredictable. It's refreshing to transverse areas of the game and run into a fire-fight between different factions that you can either take part in, or avoid. You will see creatures grabbing corpses and dragging them away. Random patrols. An outpost might be captured by the enemy, but then the next time you visit, it's been re-taken by your allies. The game has a fluid nature to it which I can appreciate. I also think the game premise, some of the sub-plots, the idea of the anomalies, the gun realism, the sounds, and other aspects of the game were well done as well. The nostalgia feel that makes me remember Fallout is mostly a result of how WONDERFUL a job they did on the environment, in terms of constructing bombed out and ruined cities, outposts made out of rusting cars, junk piles, radioactive pools, etc. I haven't seen a game get its environment so SPOT ON in a long time. I don't think Half Life 2 did as good a job on environment as STALKER did. That's saying a lot. Granted, Half Life 2 is a very linear game compared to STALKER, and it's not really possible to make a city in a linear level feel like a real city. STALKER has open levels, which adds a lot to the immersion. Just my opinion. STALKER isn't the best game ever by a long shot... but I'm going to keep an eye on this game developer and see what else they come up with down the line. I'm hoping maybe we'll see a European incarnation of Bioware or Black Isle or Looking Glass.
A game without crates would be dreamy! Time to crate for STALKER? 2 minutes. Pretty good!
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.
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!
Kenneth Scott made the light images himself and he knows it. Not licensed. :)