Well I'm not a 3d modeller so I can't really speak for them, but honestly I don't think any of them sign up to have their work released wholesale into the public domain. It's different for us coders, we'd love nothing more than for our employers to give the code away so everyone can use it. They see modelling as a more personal thing I think. To them it is offensive to even have their models edited after they've finished them. Even when modellers work in teams there's a fairly specific division of labour such that if the UV guy goes and changes the work of the modelling guy there's gunna be hell to pay. Different attitudes, different community and employers who say "blah, I own the copyright I can do anything I want" quickly discover that no-one wants to work for them.
Wow, I can imagine how many people would just be pissing me off every minute of gameplay. When I play MUDs I turn off all the channels, go find a nice quiet area of the world and fight some mobs. When I'm forced to go into the city to sell my loot, train with my guild master, or deposit gold in my bank account, I almost always cast an invisibility spell on myself. That way the newbies wont be asking me where to find stuff or if I'll take them hunting. Why bother playing a multiplayer game then? Cause on occasion I want to sell something to someone with a brain or I want to participate in a user-created mission (I lost my kit in the swamp, can you find it for me, I have gold!) or god forbid, roleplay!
Re:Their called assets...
on
Wish Cancelled
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· Score: 1
I'm sorry, as funny as this is their step 2 was clearly more than ?. Specially it was: change players $x a month to connect to the server just like every other MMORPG that actually intends to make money. There's no reason to suggest that this model is going anywhere. Even with the free-to-connect MMORPGs that are becoming available there's still more than enough of a market to support development of subscription based MMORPGs. How can that be? Because when the server goes down players want someone there to restart it, diagnose the problem and ensure that it doesn't happen again. i.e., they want service and they're willing to pay for it.
Re:Why do the assets always go to waste?
on
Wish Cancelled
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· Score: 1
I agree, texture packs and sound effects are certainly reusable. I don't know about music though, I'd put that in the same category as 3d models. But hey, if it's worthless and we're mostly sure that it is, then why not release it right? If you can't make any money from it by keeping it secret then you might as well give it away. Unfortunately I think there's something else at work here. If I was a 3d modeller for a games company that cancelled the project I'd be pretty pissed off. If that company then went and gave my models away so god-knows-who could use them in god-knows-what I'd be extra specially pissed off. In fact, I'd probably do everything in my power to ensure that every 3d modeller out there hears the tale of my woe and make sure the dicks running this company never make another game again. But hey, that's just me.
Re:Why do the assets always go to waste?
on
Wish Cancelled
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· Score: 1
Isn't it obvious? Go to Turbosquid, click on 'free 3d models', click on one of the many free chairs available, now look at the polycount. Wow, 800 polys for a plain straight backed chair. Yep, that's gunna be great for my FPS or MMORPG. You will have similar problems with fitting these models together to get an overall feel for your game. Artwork is the life of a game, if you're not producing it from scratch with a specific intention in mind you're going to get bad performance and poor consistancy and the players will notice it.
You mean other than the 30 minute conversation I had with him in-person in regards to this matter? How do you feel that applying his words in regards to articles and books to graphics for a game is not misrepresentation? Get a grip.
Well it's obvious that very few people understand the context in which RMS is talking when he says that it isn't necessary that graphics and other art are free.
I don't think you can take Stallman's opinion on Engine + Art == Telling a story type games and apply that to every kind of game there is out there. Actually understanding where his opinion comes from is more important than shouting "Stallman says it is ok" as justification for your actions. When Stallman talks about proprietary art being ok, he's refering to the consume-and-forget style of gameplay that currently dominates the gaming industry. The specific example he gives is the Quake II engine + artwork to tell a story. He specifically states that there is no need to demand that the user of this work be free to change the story and distribute the changed engine + artwork to others. He doesn't, and wouldn't ever, say that it's ok to restrict the verbatium distribution of the artwork. That is, it's not ok for you to make a game and tell your users that they can't share that game with their neighbour.
actually it's worse than that. Planeshift are now demanding copyright assignment for code as well as art. This is why I am no longer contributing to the project.
Ok, here's another blatantly obvious use for this information. Say you've got a pipe that is dumping greasy smelly water into the drain out side your house. This water appears to be contaminated with some pretty nasty stuff and it's running into a storm water drain. You call the EPA but they are mysteriously not interested in testing the water. You get a student at a local university to come test the water and he tells you that it is a health risk and ecologically unfriendly. After contacting the EPA with this information your claim is mysteriously ignored once again. What to do? If you have access to publically available drainage information you can track back the flow of the pipe to exactly where it is that this mess is coming from. After a little digging (figuratively, not with shovels) you discover that the water is coming from an adjacent industrial estate where cloth is being treated, and the owner of the business happens to be the second cousin of your local EPA representative. Seems to be a bit of corruption in your district. After taking this evidence to the a state official your local EPA representative is fired and the clothing factory is shut down. Wow, it's almost like this information is available so the public can see the transparent working of government!
Gee I don't know, maybe you wanna dig a big ass hole in your backyard to store stuff and you wanna be sure not to hit a gas or water main. Jesus, that took me all of 5 seconds to think of a good reason. Oh, what's that? You think I should only be able to get the details for my specific property? Ok, what if it's my business to dig holes for people? Do I have to put in a request every single time I sign a contract with someone to dig a hole for em? Why should my work be delayed like that?
NewsMonster PRO contains functionality not included in the NewsMonster FREE.
Is that functionality in CVS? Do you follow the terms of your own license and provide source code for *that specific release* of your program? or when I go to your CVS will I discover that I am unable to compile the source and produce a binary which is functionally equivalent to your release?
You have to supply a written offer to supply the exact source code for *that release* of the program. If you don't, how do I know that your binary only release doesn't include some "special" functionality that my compiled version can not modify?
Umm.. by helping people in another country overthrow their government arn't you participating in what these days is called 'aiding a terrorist organisation?' The problem with every country around the world passing laws against 'terrorism' and 'aiding terrorism' is that the world 'terrorist' has no universal meaning. Most times it is defined simply as "any organisation that is opposed to the current government."
Do we really need some complex robot to achieve that? Take one solar panel. Use the energy from such to extract carbon dioxide from the air. Split the carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. String carbon atoms together to form organic molecules such as sugar, amino acids, carbohydrates, etc. Construct some more complex molecules like those that give pleasant flavours to foods. Combine ingrediants into long bars or more recognisable food stuffs. In a single box you have an artifical crop, factory and chef. Now apply the economics of mass production and competition to these devices. They'll start out less efficient and more expensive than current food sources but very quickly they will become ultra efficient as well as very widespread. People in the western world will upgrade every year to get the lastest and greatest model, leaving millions of discarded units for export to the third world. There they will cure world hunger. In the western world they will remove half the need to work, leaving us to attack the other half: shelter.
Sure. Software serves a utility which one might compare to the utility served by encyclopedias and text books. You use these works to do things. Now compare these to movies and songs, or an autobiography. These works represent a person's vision, beliefs and opinions. If these works are free to change those opinions will be misrepresented. Where it is possible to have songs which are developed by a community they are songs which represent the opinions of that community.
To bring this back to Planeshift, if the graphics are free to be modified and used by those outside our community our opinions and vision can be misrepresented. Our code on the other hand is more utility than vision. It gives us the ability to make a game. This is an ability we want others to have, we want to see their vision.
Dude, CS is not a game engine, it's a graphics engine. Get a clue. As for not knowing what Free Software is, I happen to be an associate member of the Free Software Foundation, where's your card? If you knew a damn thing you'd know that Richard Stallman himself recommends our particular way of making Free games. Why? Cause code should be free, graphics, sounds, songs, autobiographies, should not. If you don't understand why this is I'd love to sit down and explain all this to you at some point. As for paying money, how does that make it alright? People who work at Microsoft get paid a pretty penny too, what exactly are you trying to say?
Funny that you should mention Nel, the "prototype" game for it is not even remotely close to a real MMORPG. The commercial game doesn't offer the source code to the client under a GPL license at all (they relicense their code under a proprietary license.. that means they have NO third party contributors or they require you to give them the copyright for the CODE). From my perspective (as a coder) Nel is the worse open source project. What perspective are you looking at it from?
No. Wings 3D, although terribly cool, cannot do even 1/10th of what you can do with Blender. 3d studio MAX has probably the worst UI in the world, although it is intuitive on the service, it's really hard to get anything sensible done with it in less than 300 operations. That's why they have training courses for it. Blender on the other hand doesn't even try to be sensible. It's like the Amiga mentality: don't bother standardizing on anything cause everyone who uses an amiga is a zealot so they'll accept anything.
The UI is non-intuitive, but once people use it they swear that it is better than every other 3d program available. Either Blender has the best UI in the world or it's just a tendancy of human beings to rationalise their decisions after they have invested in them significantly. Either way, Blender's complex non-intuitive UI has done a lot to build the Blender community. I believe the same is true of GIMP but to a slightly lesser extent. Why change anything?
Heh, no more likely they would start servers where players can kill each other without doing a challenge first, and other basic violations of the rpc rules. Then people who had played these unofficial servers would come to the official server and be annoyed that they couldn't reek havoc there too. Oh wait, that actually happened, I'm thinking of UO or just about any MUD that ever existed.. hmm.. Seriously, if you don't like it start your own art project.
Wow, what a genius, better go rush off and tell the record companies that it is impossible for singers to assign their copyright to them cause they've been under the mistaken impression that this was possible for decades now. It's really really simple, if you don't want to contribute to Planeshift, dont. If you'd rather contribute your work under a creative commons license, cool, go start your own MMORPG project (you can even use the Planeshift engine!) and do that. You can even claim victory when there are 500 people running servers just like MUDs, and the Planeshift team will be sitting there saying "I told you so" cause that's exactly what they're trying to avoid.
There is something you can do other than just whinging, create your own fork with all free art! Oh wait, you'd actually have to do some work to pull that off. Hmmm.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I'm not a 3d modeller so I can't really speak for them, but honestly I don't think any of them sign up to have their work released wholesale into the public domain. It's different for us coders, we'd love nothing more than for our employers to give the code away so everyone can use it. They see modelling as a more personal thing I think. To them it is offensive to even have their models edited after they've finished them. Even when modellers work in teams there's a fairly specific division of labour such that if the UV guy goes and changes the work of the modelling guy there's gunna be hell to pay. Different attitudes, different community and employers who say "blah, I own the copyright I can do anything I want" quickly discover that no-one wants to work for them.
Wow, I can imagine how many people would just be pissing me off every minute of gameplay. When I play MUDs I turn off all the channels, go find a nice quiet area of the world and fight some mobs. When I'm forced to go into the city to sell my loot, train with my guild master, or deposit gold in my bank account, I almost always cast an invisibility spell on myself. That way the newbies wont be asking me where to find stuff or if I'll take them hunting. Why bother playing a multiplayer game then? Cause on occasion I want to sell something to someone with a brain or I want to participate in a user-created mission (I lost my kit in the swamp, can you find it for me, I have gold!) or god forbid, roleplay!
I'm sorry, as funny as this is their step 2 was clearly more than ?. Specially it was: change players $x a month to connect to the server just like every other MMORPG that actually intends to make money. There's no reason to suggest that this model is going anywhere. Even with the free-to-connect MMORPGs that are becoming available there's still more than enough of a market to support development of subscription based MMORPGs. How can that be? Because when the server goes down players want someone there to restart it, diagnose the problem and ensure that it doesn't happen again. i.e., they want service and they're willing to pay for it.
I agree, texture packs and sound effects are certainly reusable. I don't know about music though, I'd put that in the same category as 3d models. But hey, if it's worthless and we're mostly sure that it is, then why not release it right? If you can't make any money from it by keeping it secret then you might as well give it away. Unfortunately I think there's something else at work here. If I was a 3d modeller for a games company that cancelled the project I'd be pretty pissed off. If that company then went and gave my models away so god-knows-who could use them in god-knows-what I'd be extra specially pissed off. In fact, I'd probably do everything in my power to ensure that every 3d modeller out there hears the tale of my woe and make sure the dicks running this company never make another game again. But hey, that's just me.
Isn't it obvious? Go to Turbosquid, click on 'free 3d models', click on one of the many free chairs available, now look at the polycount. Wow, 800 polys for a plain straight backed chair. Yep, that's gunna be great for my FPS or MMORPG. You will have similar problems with fitting these models together to get an overall feel for your game. Artwork is the life of a game, if you're not producing it from scratch with a specific intention in mind you're going to get bad performance and poor consistancy and the players will notice it.
You mean other than the 30 minute conversation I had with him in-person in regards to this matter? How do you feel that applying his words in regards to articles and books to graphics for a game is not misrepresentation? Get a grip.
Well it's obvious that very few people understand the context in which RMS is talking when he says that it isn't necessary that graphics and other art are free.
I don't think you can take Stallman's opinion on Engine + Art == Telling a story type games and apply that to every kind of game there is out there. Actually understanding where his opinion comes from is more important than shouting "Stallman says it is ok" as justification for your actions. When Stallman talks about proprietary art being ok, he's refering to the consume-and-forget style of gameplay that currently dominates the gaming industry. The specific example he gives is the Quake II engine + artwork to tell a story. He specifically states that there is no need to demand that the user of this work be free to change the story and distribute the changed engine + artwork to others. He doesn't, and wouldn't ever, say that it's ok to restrict the verbatium distribution of the artwork. That is, it's not ok for you to make a game and tell your users that they can't share that game with their neighbour.
actually it's worse than that. Planeshift are now demanding copyright assignment for code as well as art. This is why I am no longer contributing to the project.
Ok, here's another blatantly obvious use for this information. Say you've got a pipe that is dumping greasy smelly water into the drain out side your house. This water appears to be contaminated with some pretty nasty stuff and it's running into a storm water drain. You call the EPA but they are mysteriously not interested in testing the water. You get a student at a local university to come test the water and he tells you that it is a health risk and ecologically unfriendly. After contacting the EPA with this information your claim is mysteriously ignored once again. What to do? If you have access to publically available drainage information you can track back the flow of the pipe to exactly where it is that this mess is coming from. After a little digging (figuratively, not with shovels) you discover that the water is coming from an adjacent industrial estate where cloth is being treated, and the owner of the business happens to be the second cousin of your local EPA representative. Seems to be a bit of corruption in your district. After taking this evidence to the a state official your local EPA representative is fired and the clothing factory is shut down. Wow, it's almost like this information is available so the public can see the transparent working of government!
Gee I don't know, maybe you wanna dig a big ass hole in your backyard to store stuff and you wanna be sure not to hit a gas or water main. Jesus, that took me all of 5 seconds to think of a good reason. Oh, what's that? You think I should only be able to get the details for my specific property? Ok, what if it's my business to dig holes for people? Do I have to put in a request every single time I sign a contract with someone to dig a hole for em? Why should my work be delayed like that?
Is that functionality in CVS? Do you follow the terms of your own license and provide source code for *that specific release* of your program? or when I go to your CVS will I discover that I am unable to compile the source and produce a binary which is functionally equivalent to your release?
You have to supply a written offer to supply the exact source code for *that release* of the program. If you don't, how do I know that your binary only release doesn't include some "special" functionality that my compiled version can not modify?
Umm.. by helping people in another country overthrow their government arn't you participating in what these days is called 'aiding a terrorist organisation?' The problem with every country around the world passing laws against 'terrorism' and 'aiding terrorism' is that the world 'terrorist' has no universal meaning. Most times it is defined simply as "any organisation that is opposed to the current government."
Do we really need some complex robot to achieve that? Take one solar panel. Use the energy from such to extract carbon dioxide from the air. Split the carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen. String carbon atoms together to form organic molecules such as sugar, amino acids, carbohydrates, etc. Construct some more complex molecules like those that give pleasant flavours to foods. Combine ingrediants into long bars or more recognisable food stuffs. In a single box you have an artifical crop, factory and chef. Now apply the economics of mass production and competition to these devices. They'll start out less efficient and more expensive than current food sources but very quickly they will become ultra efficient as well as very widespread. People in the western world will upgrade every year to get the lastest and greatest model, leaving millions of discarded units for export to the third world. There they will cure world hunger. In the western world they will remove half the need to work, leaving us to attack the other half: shelter.
To bring this back to Planeshift, if the graphics are free to be modified and used by those outside our community our opinions and vision can be misrepresented. Our code on the other hand is more utility than vision. It gives us the ability to make a game. This is an ability we want others to have, we want to see their vision.
Dude, CS is not a game engine, it's a graphics engine. Get a clue. As for not knowing what Free Software is, I happen to be an associate member of the Free Software Foundation, where's your card? If you knew a damn thing you'd know that Richard Stallman himself recommends our particular way of making Free games. Why? Cause code should be free, graphics, sounds, songs, autobiographies, should not. If you don't understand why this is I'd love to sit down and explain all this to you at some point. As for paying money, how does that make it alright? People who work at Microsoft get paid a pretty penny too, what exactly are you trying to say?
Funny that you should mention Nel, the "prototype" game for it is not even remotely close to a real MMORPG. The commercial game doesn't offer the source code to the client under a GPL license at all (they relicense their code under a proprietary license.. that means they have NO third party contributors or they require you to give them the copyright for the CODE). From my perspective (as a coder) Nel is the worse open source project. What perspective are you looking at it from?
No, my point was that Planeshift is not about PKing, so people being annoyed (and annoying others) cause they expect PKing is a bad thing.
Truespace really was intuitive for the simply actions, I actually managed to make some 3d graphics with Truespace and I can't draw for a damn.
No. Wings 3D, although terribly cool, cannot do even 1/10th of what you can do with Blender. 3d studio MAX has probably the worst UI in the world, although it is intuitive on the service, it's really hard to get anything sensible done with it in less than 300 operations. That's why they have training courses for it. Blender on the other hand doesn't even try to be sensible. It's like the Amiga mentality: don't bother standardizing on anything cause everyone who uses an amiga is a zealot so they'll accept anything.
The UI is non-intuitive, but once people use it they swear that it is better than every other 3d program available. Either Blender has the best UI in the world or it's just a tendancy of human beings to rationalise their decisions after they have invested in them significantly. Either way, Blender's complex non-intuitive UI has done a lot to build the Blender community. I believe the same is true of GIMP but to a slightly lesser extent. Why change anything?
Heh, no more likely they would start servers where players can kill each other without doing a challenge first, and other basic violations of the rpc rules. Then people who had played these unofficial servers would come to the official server and be annoyed that they couldn't reek havoc there too. Oh wait, that actually happened, I'm thinking of UO or just about any MUD that ever existed.. hmm.. Seriously, if you don't like it start your own art project.
Wow, what a genius, better go rush off and tell the record companies that it is impossible for singers to assign their copyright to them cause they've been under the mistaken impression that this was possible for decades now. It's really really simple, if you don't want to contribute to Planeshift, dont. If you'd rather contribute your work under a creative commons license, cool, go start your own MMORPG project (you can even use the Planeshift engine!) and do that. You can even claim victory when there are 500 people running servers just like MUDs, and the Planeshift team will be sitting there saying "I told you so" cause that's exactly what they're trying to avoid.
There is something you can do other than just whinging, create your own fork with all free art! Oh wait, you'd actually have to do some work to pull that off. Hmmm.