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Can TDM missions be commercialized?


MirceaKitsune

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Discussions like this are why I don't personally favour "non-commercial" open source licences. They cause too much confusion. What if I post my "non-commercial" asset on a Wordpress blog that happens to show ads to some users? Is this "commercial" use or not? Some lawyers would say that it is, because someone somewhere is making money off it.

 

However as somebody else pointed out, some of the TDM assets from third parties have existing non-commercial licences applied, so our hands are tied in this regard.

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Not everything needs to be monetized. All TDM missions should remain free. We host them on our servers and list them in our ingame downloaded. Theoretically, we would be well within our rights to refuse to host missions that someone was directly making money from...if we wanted to be complete jerks we could just patch those missions out with a blacklist so they wouldn't even load. ;)

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Not everything needs to be monetized. All TDM missions should remain free. We host them on our servers and list them in our ingame downloaded. Theoretically, we would be well within our rights to refuse to host missions that someone was directly making money from...if we wanted to be complete jerks we could just patch those missions out with a blacklist so they wouldn't even load. ;)

 

So much for "could some jerk just decide to sell missions on his own". If the coders don't want him to, he won't...

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One thing I might want to clarify: If the community would have agreed with this, my idea was only charging Patreon for releasing the mission. The mission itself would not be behind a paywall, it would still be openly available and could make it to TDM's mission repository like all others. Other people, of course, might want to host and sell them separately... as in require you to pay to download the pk4.

 

But although my opinion on this being a bad thing is slightly different, I certainly share the same focus as everyone else: Money is not important, being able to make quality missions that everyone enjoys is. I'd want my missions to be of best quality regardless, and will put just as much work into them. I mainly imagined the addition of Patreon to the mix as a way for people with money issues (myself included) to also get an additional aid from working on something they enjoy, as happens with art or literature. Problem is some would abuse even this idea, as happens with everything that money is involved in.

 

Oh... and no, I don't know who AngelWolf is. If you do find and mention my accounts from some websites though, let me know so I can put my guard armor on and hide in an unlit spot ;)

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I don't think anyone would object if you accept donations to cover your day to day expenses (not everyone is rich, after all), provided that there is no direct link between the donations and the missions.

 

"Hey guys, I'd like to make all of this cool stuff but I'm having difficulty paying my electricity bill (or I need a new graphics card or whatever), if you'd like to help there is a completely optional donations page" gives a very different message from "Please pay me to release this mission, here is my Patreon". The former is just an invitation for people to help out an individual with financial issues, whereas the latter definitely sounds like working for hire.

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I don't think anyone would object if you accept donations to cover your day to day expenses (not everyone is rich, after all), provided that there is no direct link between the donations and the missions.

 

"Hey guys, I'd like to make all of this cool stuff but I'm having difficulty paying my electricity bill (or I need a new graphics card or whatever), if you'd like to help there is a completely optional donations page" gives a very different message from "Please pay me to release this mission, here is my Patreon". The former is just an invitation for people to help out an individual with financial issues, whereas the latter definitely sounds like working for hire.

 

True. With the way I use Patreon, the idea would have been more like: "Hey guys, I'm going to work on this cool stuff no matter what and will release it publicly to everyone... but I'm having difficulty paying my bills, so if you want please pledge to my Patreon, and I will charge for the mission as my project for month X". There is a direct link in this case however, so yeah.

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Now that I think of it, there is *probably* one scenario where the whole TDM team wouldn't object to a mission author selling their missions.

 

Eidos \ Square Enix decides to sell a mission pack with Thief 1 \ 2 levels made in TDM.

 

We'd stop getting annoying requests for it, and Square Enix would have fewer reasons to criticize or astro-turf us...

...and TTLG would lose their minds (there would sure be fun threads to read). :D

 

The downside would be mission authors might take assets from that mission pack and start to spill Square Enix IP into their missions.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Square Enix's awareness of TDM probably rates very, very, very low. The Doom 3 engine is more than ten years old, Thief is a niche franchise they burned their hands with, and anyway, no AAA game studio is interested in recreating a 1998-style game. They had their idea of Thief, and it was the game where you could not jump.

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Come the time of peril, did the ground gape, and did the dead rest unquiet 'gainst us. Our bands of iron and hammers of stone prevailed not, and some did doubt the Builder's plan. But the seals held strong, and the few did triumph, and the doubters were lain into the foundations of the new sanctum. -- Collected letters of the Smith-in-Exile, Civitas Approved

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If you do find and mention my accounts from some websites though, let me know so I can put my guard armor on and hide in an unlit spot ;)

No kidding. use different usernames for that stuff. Now I have to go out and buy brain bleach.

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The funniest thing with idTech 4 is how much everyone underestimates this engine, especially for something FOSS. From a technical point of view, it has almost anything I could want from a modern engine... less for voxels and raytraced lighting. Even for something a decade old, it has top quality graphics when given the right assets, mainly thanks to the dynamic light system. It's why I shake my head at suggestions to port TDM to Cryengine, since I don't see a point when we use something this good.

 

No kidding. use different usernames for that stuff. Now I have to go out and buy brain bleach.

 

lol. And no thanks, I'm content with maintaining a single identity on this internet... everyone's free to like me or hate me for what I post elsewhere.

Edited by MirceaKitsune
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everyone's free to like me or hate me for what I post elsewhere.

I don't mean you as a person. You do you, but you covered a pitfall trap with leaves and advised me to go Google it. It's like inviting your friends over and greeting them with your pants down. Of course they're going to say something. They're not going to start making generalisations about you, but they're going to have to ask why you would answer the door with your pants down, no matter how strongly you insist it's not representative of you as a whole.

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The funniest thing with idTech 4 is how much everyone underestimates this engine, especially for something FOSS. From a technical point of view, it has almost anything I could want from a modern engine... less for voxels and raytraced lighting. Even for something a decade old, it has top quality graphics when given the right assets, mainly thanks to the dynamic light system. It's why I shake my head at suggestions to port TDM to Cryengine, since I don't see a point when we use something this good.

 

 

Yeah Id Tech 4 has a lot of great foundations for use in a modernized variant. It's prescient in that the use of a material system is the cornerstone of modern PBR

rendering pipelines. (Treb made a branch with PBR too: https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/tree/PBR )

 

Id Tech 4's neglect mostly comes down to the lack of popularity for the games that used it.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Square Enix's awareness of TDM probably rates very, very, very low.

 

 

Even when I was discussing our partnership with them, most clearly didn't understand what TDM was. Some of them didn't even understand what Thief was.

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I don't mean you as a person. You do you, but you covered a pitfall trap with leaves and advised me to go Google it. It's like inviting your friends over and greeting them with your pants down. Of course they're going to say something. They're not going to start making generalisations about you, but they're going to have to ask why you would answer the door with your pants down, no matter how strongly you insist it's not representative of you as a whole.

 

Erm... I didn't invite anyone to do anything. I made a joke about my username, and you decided to google it (morbid curiosity). Anyway this is really going off-topic.

 

Yeah Id Tech 4 has a lot of great foundations for use in a modernized variant. It's prescient in that the use of a material system is the cornerstone of modern PDR

rendering pipelines. (Treb made a branch with PBR too: https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/tree/PBR )

 

Id Tech 4's neglect mostly comes down to the lack of popularity for the games that used it.

 

Doom 3 as a game was pretty popular. An article said the issue with idTech 4 was being less easy to use as a creation tool than Unreal Engine, or something like that. In any case, I find it a bit inexcusable that so many people are missing one of the best open-source game engines while it's right under their noses.

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Erm... I didn't invite anyone to do anything. I made a joke about my username, and you decided to google it (morbid curiosity). Anyway this is really going off-topic.

Well you were plugging your Patreon so I went and checked it out! I'll say no more, other than suggesting you use different accounts for game developing than you do for that.

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Doom 3 as a game was pretty popular. An article said the issue with idTech 4 was being less easy to use as a creation tool than Unreal Engine, or something like that. In any case, I find it a bit inexcusable that so many people are missing one of the best open-source game engines while it's right under their noses.

The one thing it doesn't do awfully well is big open environments. It's a purely portalled engine and doesn't have any optimizations for open landscapes that you can't split into visleafs. I read somewhere that it was originally marketed too widely, i.e. not mentioning the limitations, which might have cost it some fans. We've added some optimizations like LOD for entities, but we still build using visleafs. So it's great for our purposes but not for all game types.

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The one thing it doesn't do awfully well is big open environments. It's a purely portalled engine and doesn't have any optimizations for open landscapes that you can't split into visleafs. I read somewhere that it was originally marketed too widely, i.e. not mentioning the limitations, which might have cost it some fans.

Maybe that was where megatextures came in. From what I've read while perusing old threads, there's prototypical megatexture code in the Doom 3 version of the engine, but it's not the completed version used in ET:QW.

Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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Very early version of megatextures but fully working :) there was at some point a test map you could download at moddb but it was for an earlier patchlevel of idtech4 so it did not run on the latest patch.

The main problem with the included version is that the megatextures have very bad compression so the maps will be freaking huge hehe. Still it looked quite nice :).

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A more on-topic question, which I forgot to bring up last time but was curious about: There is an artist and writer here... I'd rather not mention the name just in case, only that they make some of the best quality and most loved TDM missions. The story in their last campaign is based on a book which is sold on the market. The game contains a code in the outro video, which you can give to the author to get a discount for the book when you buy it online. What are your thoughts on that?

 

Thankfully no one seems to mind. And I'm glad, since it would upset me considerably to see the author getting a drop of hate over this. To me at least, it seems more than fair... especially considering how much work and detail they put into their missions! This is of course a different scenario... though at the end of the day I see the idea of Patreon donations just as "evil" here (meaning not a lot).

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A more on-topic question, which I forgot to bring up last time but was curious about: There is an artist and writer here... I'd rather not mention the name just in case, only that they make some of the best quality and most loved TDM missions. The story in their last campaign is based on a book which is sold on the market. The game contains a code in the outro video, which you can give to the author to get a discount for the book when you buy it online. What are your thoughts on that?

 

Thankfully no one seems to mind. And I'm glad, since it would upset me considerably to see the author getting a drop of hate over this. To me at least, it seems more than fair... especially considering how much work and detail they put into their missions! This is of course a different scenario... though at the end of the day I see the idea of Patreon donations just as "evil" here (meaning not a lot).

 

Why are you even bringing up stuff like this? The book existed before the author joined TDM.

 

You can breathe a sigh of relief. No "drops of hate" were spilled. All is well in the world. The sun will rise. The sun will set. No evil lurks in the shadows.

 

Stop trying to stir things up.

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I should probably leave this thread to quietly die away, but I may as well make a quick point for the record.

 

I think the one place any kind of commercialization could be thought about is if a separate team came along and wanted to use our engine for the base of a new game, and they put in all the work, making or finding their own commercializable assets, modding the engine to be a completely new game, etc. If some team puts in 100s or 1000s of hours making a new game, and they check all the boxes to make sure it's kosher for selling, and given that the license to the underlying id4 allows it, then I think they earn the right to do it IMO. It should be something we can have pride in, that a dev team would want to use our engine as a base, as opposed to others.

 

The important part is they'd be their own community separate from ours, and they're up front about being commercial from the start. If something's happening in our own community, though, whether FMs or mods, etc, then we already have our own community norms against selling. It's been our ethos from the start, and I'm happy if we keep to it.

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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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Why are you even bringing up stuff like this? The book existed before the author joined TDM.

 

You can breathe a sigh of relief. No "drops of hate" were spilled. All is well in the world. The sun will rise. The sun will set. No evil lurks in the shadows.

 

Stop trying to stir things up.

 

I'm not trying to stir things up... why would anyone think that just because I asked a legitimate question? If the subject is so sensitive it can't even be discussed in the open, that's fine by me... it's probably best to let this die like demagogue said at this point. I'm not however happy with being accused of things I'm not trying to do! If I express myself poorly or the like, please let me know about it... but don't imply I'm up to no good which is not the case. Thanks.

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If the subject is so sensitive it can't even be discussed in the open, that's fine by me...

 

Well, there ya go again, assuming something that's unsubstantiated.

 

Be positive. Now that you have DR working--thanks to the fine folks here on this forum--please make a map that we can all enjoy. It's a better way to spend all of our time.

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Well, there ya go again, assuming something that's unsubstantiated.

 

Be positive. Now that you have DR working--thanks to the fine folks here on this forum--please make a map that we can all enjoy. It's a better way to spend all of our time.

 

Your answer gave me the impression what I said got you offended, or seemed as me trying to stir up trouble intentionally... glad if that wasn't the case and I misunderstood. And yep... I'm glad I have DR running now, thanks to OrbWeaver but also everyone working on debugging that crazy glitch with me :) I'll most certainly be making missions I hope to be of quality, and they'll always be openly available.

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