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The Dark Mod and crowdfunding?


bad marine ass

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I am - and have always been - very impressed by TDM. For me, TDM represents a step up in the stealth sub-genre (though Dishonored actually comes very close to it). I've been watching the progress of the mod on and off, and though I may not have been as involved with the community as much as others around here, including the core team and FM makers, I believe TDM has the potential to be so much more than just a TC/toolbox.

 

Given that the team is now pushing for a standalone release, what do people think of using crowdfunding to produce a new IP based off the Dark Mod engine? The money would be used to pay for the commercial usage of the license, as well as to produce the game itself (i.e. salary for the developers). There aren't many good stealth games on the PC that properly make use of lighting. Knowing little about Thi4f and therefore putting it aside, we only have Dishonored. Even DX:HR doesn't really qualify in this sense. Such a shame to see a scarcity of stealth games that are slow and methodical, and it's unlikely in the near future that anyone will venture a game like that.

 

I don't know about the rest of you, but I would pay really good money for a successor to The Metal Age (or Deadly Shadows, which I admit I did enjoy too), and the TDM engine is perfectly suited to this. :P

Edited by bad marine ass
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Yet Another Discussion About Money.

 

Money will not play a part in TDM.

 

TDM is free.

 

FMs that use TDM assets are free.

 

Discussing money with this team is a waste of everyone's time, as there is absolutely no way to properly assess/weight the relative contributions of countless people over a 7-year span of time, most of whom are no longer working on TDM.

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@bam, Im sure it wasn't Gman intention to come across as harsh. Its just that that mod is free and will always be. We the fans make it for the fans :-D

 

When i saw your thread i thought is was actually going to be related the hosting and server space etc. At the moment this not an issue, but could be a subject for discussion in the future etc.

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They're right money should never become a part of TDM, but it's very kind of you to think about how to reward the TDM team for all their hard work anyway. Appreciative words are always the best reward you can give the team (...well, that and contributions if you're interested heh.) ^_^

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Yep, don't give money. In this kind of project money is not king.

 

Invested contribution time is. Spend some time and reward the community and the dev team with a kickass FM. There is no better way to 'pay' for TDM.

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Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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You can pay for some profesional animator to came up with the missing assets for standalone, if you really have to spend money=)

He was sneeking silently in the night, moonlight was his enemy.

(Im not a native speaker, sorry for all miscleanous caused by my english..)

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Sure, crowdfunding isn't an opportunity because you don't have got permission from Eidos/Square Enix to get money for using some of their ideas. But a nice donation service like Flattr or PayPal might be considered? (Think of: Even the webspace have to get paid. ;)) But when I look at conversion rates of other sites with around 100,000 visitors each month, 52,222 forum users and only 24 contributors so far after 2 weeks after introducing the service it might isn't worth the effort. So their rate is at 0,024 %.

Edited by Radiant
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I think if we're going to go standalone, we may as well do it right & be completely open source standalone too. Having proprietary stuff under a restrictive license still in our standalone package just doesn't seem right.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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Since I'm on the side of those who want to make some money, let me share some ideas I've had over the past few days.

 

1. Doom 3 code is GPL. As long as you don't use it's assets, you can do what you want with it.

 

2. The Dark Mod code is also GPL. It's the assets that are creative commons non profit.

 

3. I read on the forum last night that the individual artist of an asset still has the right to sell it to a commercial project.

 

So unless I'm reading something wrong, I don't think there's anything to stop someone from taking just the code, making their own assets, and selling it as a commercial game.

 

In which case I would probably ask the original artists who made the dark mod assets if they wanted to sell me their designs outside of Creative Commons in return for a share of the profit.

 

I would also reward/hire programmers to tackle the bugtracker items and feature requests based on difficulty.

 

The Dark Mod would stay as it is, but with a lot more exposure and support from a high quality commercial game built running on ever evolving open source code. The Dark Mod could be the training ground where such a game finds it's talent pool of the people who actually want to do this as a full time job. For everyone else, nothing would change except for the knowledge that there's a game out there that proudly bears a logo proclaiming that it was made with the Dark Mod engine, and the fact that the new versions seem to be coming out much faster.

Edited by AngelWolf

Taurus philosophy:

Give me a hammer and tell me I have 6 hours to break up a 2 inch thick layer of ice. As soon as you walk away I'm going to use some hot water and salt so I can take a nap for the remaining 5 and a half hours. Taureans hate wasting energy and if there's a more efficient way to do something they will find it.

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So you take the TDM code but only pay for the art assets? My guess is that the guys who worked on the code will not be pleased.

 

It would also be bad if there was two versions of the game: the free and the commercial. There can be only one. Let it go already.

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Clipper

-The mapper's best friend.

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I'm going to paraphrase something, tell me if I'm far off the mark here:

 

I want to make some money, so here's how I want to do it.

 

Take Dark Mod code, use it for personal gain, because the license says I can do it.

 

Find some of the individual artists of TDM assets willing to give or sell them cheaply.

 

I don't think there's anything to stop me from just taking the code, making some new assets, and selling the whole thing off eventually.

 

The Dark Mod would stay as it is, but with a lot more exposure and support from a "higher quality" commercial game, built running on open source code that you wrote yourselves. If you get as good as my dev team at your job while working for free on the cheapo original version, the new "Dark Game" could find it's talent pool of the people who actually want to do this as a full time job. For everyone else, nothing would change except for the knowledge that there's a game out there seems to update and improve faster than your free version, and generates money.

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The thing is we've already gone over every angle of this since 2005, so the status quo position isn't like we just didn't think of it, but the considered opinion after a looooong conversation among dozens of people.

 

So overturning that would first of all turn the team against whoever did it. It's just hard to work under those conditions since it inevitably poisons everything, having to allocate whose contribution means what. Second, while the TDM code is GPL true, it's also still copyrighted to the coders, so they'd have a claim to stop commercialization of it if they wanted (on copyright grounds, aside from the license issue), or you'd have to have a messy argument what copyrightable or not. But in any event, if a new commercial version were made, it's also going to be GPL, so nothing's stopping anyone else from putting up a free download of it in another place to make sure the public can get it for free rather than paying for it and proceeds going to some people and not others.

 

But it also may depend on what the project is. I think if we're talking about something inside the Dark Mod community, it should be free. But if there's an outside community that wants to make an entirely different game and just use our code as a base to build from (like we're Doom3-plus), and it takes them 5 years to build their own game with their own assets, and then they wanted to commercialize that... That I think would be more acceptable, and more what the GPL rights are for. Well, not our code itself since we still have copyright, but something like freely released derivative code, but selling original .pk4 maps that run on that code. That would be more ok. I mean I'd be interested to see some cool branch-projects, and that's one way to see them happen. But they're just a different issue than the issue here anyway.

 

GPL is for communities to build around code & take ownership over it, and the community decides what to do with it. In our case, we've come to a conclusion for our community not to commercialize it. But another community might come to their own conclusion for their own derivative thing, and that's their prerogative. The only thing where you might get trouble is trying to commercialize it working within our own community, like it's going over our heads in our own backyard.

What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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So you take the TDM code but only pay for the art assets? My guess is that the guys who worked on the code will not be pleased.

 

It would also be bad if there was two versions of the game: the free and the commercial. There can be only one. Let it go already.

 

Actually, why "let it go"? Wether the guys working on the GPL code are pleased or not, the license is exactly allowing that: Take the code and make a (commerical or free) product out of it. I think you guys might be forgetting that w/o the GPL release of D3 (a commercial successfull product) there would be no TDM.

 

The "programmers" might not like it, but it isn't actually theirs to say. They got gifted an engine, they used and improved it, and the end result belongs to everyone. Commercial or not.

 

(It would be equally silly to say that someone "doesn't like it that TDM uses the free D3 GPL engine to produce a mod that is then not allowed to be used for commercial products". This are simply two complete different things (assets and engine).

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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So overturning that would first of all turn the team against whoever did it. It's just hard to work under those conditions since it inevitably poisons everything, having to allocate whose contribution means what.

 

Codewise, all contributions are automatically under the GPL. There is no confusion here.

 

Second, while the TDM code is GPL true, it's also still copyrighted to the coders, so they'd have a claim to stop commercialization of it if they wanted (on copyright grounds, aside from the license issue), or you'd have to have a messy argument what copyrightable or not. But in any event, if a new commercial version were made, it's also going to be GPL, so nothing's stopping anyone else from putting up a free download of it in another place to make sure the public can get it for free rather than paying for it and proceeds going to some people and not others.

 

Er, you are contradicting yourself. Either the license is GPL, so it allows commercail use and also forces derivative works under the GPL, OR it isn't GPL and so the coders retain their rights to say "no commercial usage".

 

You will find that despite the coders retaining their copyright, their code IS under the GPL, and it allows the commercialisation. That's the entire point about the GPL license. Once the binary is distributed, all the code to it is automatically under the GPL (and hence can be used by anyone as long as they comply with the GPL).

 

The trick here is that if someone don't like it, then they shouldn't contribute to a GPL project. If they DO, then they no longer have a say in how their work is used.

 

The assets are of course something completely different.

 

GPL is for communities to build around code & take ownership over it, and the community decides what to do with it.

 

I don't know where you read that in the license, but the license doesn't actually say it. It just says a few things about distributing the original and derivative works, but it isn't up to "the community to decide what to do with it". "What to do with it" is spelled quite clearly in the license, without any buts or ifs.

 

Of course, working together under a commercial and a non-commercial branch is quite difficult, but this is the same even if both branches are non-commercial (or commerical). Mainly because it are two communities with different goals. But please don't confuse that this comes alone from the commerical side - even a commercial product goal can result in a great overlapping and "working together". Take f.i. the wine community (free, non-commercial) and CodeWeaver (a firm selling products based on wine).

 

You see them working together, benefitting both. What you don't see is the Wine guys shutting Codeweaver out, just because they (try to) make money and you don't see Codeweavers not talking to the Wine guys just because the Wine guys don't want to be involved with money. Instead, they share their work.

 

The "poison" everything here is bordering on the silly, maybe because people here like to think of the work on the engine as "theirs", while in reality it belongs to "the world" (and not a single community, no matter how hard you wish this). I'm pretty sure id did not release their code under the GPL just so that someone could "claim" whatever they added to the engine. In the contrary, that is WHY they choose the GPL and not say some other license.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Crowdfunding would allow me to outright buy the assets I need for my game. I never said anything about buying them cheaply either. Ever since I saw Capitalism: A Love Story I've always strongly believed in the idea of a workers cooperative and people getting their fair share. I've also stated that I would be helping this community in return for all the hard work that went into the code. With funding, I would pay programmers to fix bugs and add features. Yes, my game would be running on open source code. A copy of which would be available for anyone to download from my website. That doesn't mean the game content would be free. I actually see no reason to create a separate codebase, since I already like the look and feel of the Dark Mod.

 

To put it another way, think of yourselves as Wizards of the Coast. You created a system of game rules and a campaign setting full of assets. Think of me as a small independent publisher who has his own campaign setting in mind, but wants to use your rule system. I leave the continued development of those rules in your more than capable hands, and start throwing some money your way to help you refine those rules. I acknowledge that my product is running on your rules, which sends more gamers your way while they wait for my next episode. Some of the assets you currently have fit in my campaign world, so I offer to pay the artists for the right to use them.

 

Another way I see it is similar to the cooking class I went to 2 years ago. It was a 3 month program run by a non profit business that also ran a soup kitchen and housing for the homeless. They also owned and supported a small for profit cafe where some of the graduating students would work. Some of the profit generated by that cafe went back into the non profit, ultimately benefitting the community that it served. The Dark Mod is like that non profit. My idea is more like the cafe. I have a vision and a business plan to create some badly needed jobs for those who want it. Soon I will be unveiling a video tutorial series that I have been working on, covering the creation of a small mission in Dark Radiant. From graph paper map to finished product. I'm going to start lecturing about how our education system can make artists mentally ill. I'm seeing some rather serious evidence that stifled creativity is one of the main reasons people become addicts. School makes people doubt themselves, because it's main focus is not really on learning, but on memorizing tons of information that they may or may not ever need. If the subject holds no interest to the student, it is much more difficult to remember and can lead to bad grades, anxiety, and self doubt. I want to change this by encouraging people to start watching tutorials about the things that interest them. I'll be reaching out to those in recovery, like my fiancé, and showing them that they don't need a college degree to create something new and get payed for it. The Dark Mod is a great learning platform BECAUSE it's free and soon to become standalone. I want to hire those people who show promise and desire and put them to work in a virtual video game studio, making commercial games from the comfort of their own homes. Games that share the stealthy gameplay as the Dark Mod, but have a different campaign setting. Part of the profits from the sale of those games would go back to The Dark Mod to help pay for the servers, website, and rewarding the programmers. Everybody wins.

Taurus philosophy:

Give me a hammer and tell me I have 6 hours to break up a 2 inch thick layer of ice. As soon as you walk away I'm going to use some hot water and salt so I can take a nap for the remaining 5 and a half hours. Taureans hate wasting energy and if there's a more efficient way to do something they will find it.

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The thing is we've already gone over every angle of this since 2005, so the status quo position isn't like we just didn't think of it, but the considered opinion after a looooong conversation among dozens of people. So overturning that would first of all turn the team against whoever did it.

 

Yep.

 

It's amusing how this idea almost always comes from the outside, and the people firmly saying they want nothing to do with money are the people doing the majority of the work on the mod (with one notable exception).

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