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My TDM mod and Patreon


MirceaKitsune

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Where is this wonderful land where donations for working on a mod can replace the income of some bullshit job?

 

http://patreon.com :)

 

With the added correction that working on just one mod is usually not enough: Most creators that earn anything significant work on multiple creations... or they have an account dedicated to just one game, but that game is of AAA quality. I think I maintain two mods / games now, with more on the way once I get around to working on every WIP sitting on my drive... I also do 3D animation and rendering though, otherwise people might care less.

 

TLDR; It's possible, but not all that easy either.

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there's always the change that several people on here may report you to patreon for claiming money for something you didn't write. or trying to get money for something written by someone else even if its only for a short time.

 

it would be better if you used the doom 3 code as the base for your mod and not the dark mod code as the base for your mod, or use unity, cryengine, or unreal engine, as the base of your mod.

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there's always the change that several people on here may report you to patreon for claiming money for something you didn't write. or trying to get money for something written by someone else even if its only for a short time.

 

it would be better if you used the doom 3 code as the base for your mod and not the dark mod code as the base for your mod, or use unity, cryengine, or unreal engine, as the base of your mod.

 

As I explained, I only work with other freely licensed assets and using Creative Commons / GPL is obviously allowed on Patreon... there would be nothing to report. However I believe this issue is settled by now, since as I said I'll only post public announcements later on like I do on all my blogs. The TDM code is otherwise a great base, and it would be a bad practical decision to use another engine or new code just because of this limitation.

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What about not distributing TDM, just your mod and making TDM's existence known on your Patreon page and wherever else you talk about it, along with details about it and its COMPLETELY FREE nature, then state clearly that your patron is for simply for your mod work and what it contains. If someone from that patreon pages says to himself, "free? Lets check that out." and comes to TDM.com and says, meh, no thanks, not for me, and doesn't use it, then TDM and all its coding potential technically has zero value to them. They can use TDM alone if they choose, but presumably wouldn't unless its using his/her mod. Its still running off a mountain of insane labor by TDM devs (possibly including a years worth of most of my free time animating), but i know wouldn't mind so long as it was handled right. Just only distribute the mod as a separate patch-like addon? Wouldn't that work and please everybody? That way, your supporting this guy and his generation of the mod, only. They can always hop in and use TDM's existing functionality at any time and stop paying the patreon if they so choose.

 

I deleted this before, having jumped the gun, but ill leave it up because for anyone interested, this is why i feel like erring on the side of generosity, in our world.

 

I see camps full of homeless people on the streets in Seattle and homeless all over the place. Meanwhile, renters are jacking up their prices taking advantage of a surplus of population looking for a staple need of shelter, made possible by our continuously rising population. My own 27 year old landlord pulled up to my apartment in a super high end brand new ultra shinny black Mercedes to oversee the removal of our two massive trees, the only natural things that made our tiny apt look nice, that they wanted to save money on cleanup with, next to the front garden that spanned the apt that they left to turn into a desert, having been formerly a beautiful garden that shockingly rivaled any professional garden location i've ever seen. They raised our rents from 895 to 1200 in one shot. I had to move out, well, i didn't have to, i could just continue working a blue collar job and just hand it all over to them at the end of every month ( would that be a cousin to a slave?), and they just live off my money, all of it, contributing little of actual value in return, a close cousin to a slave, but i didn't want to. That is all our economy is to some people, a video game. Or do you think she and people like her actually contributed something to your country at age 27, just out of college? to take $80,000 worth of other people's hard earned money while having contributed jack and shit to society. They do this by simply inserting a barrier between you and your staple need of a home...

On a second front, so called "businesses" all across the planet take advantage of the same surplus of labor and blindly following the laws of supply and demand, paying people a competitive wage in leu of what 100 other applicants are willing to work for, or a 1000. Some of who must feed their children tonight. Not paid what your % contribution to the sale of whatever good or service is being generated, in fact, in my experience, sometimes much much higher than the owners, every day, all year long. Not only can they pay less, but all the power is in their hands in these cases of surplus, so they can treat you worse, crack the whip harder, offer less benefits, be less attentive to your hourly needs, etc.

What is a business if the owner didn't use his own money to start it, got a loan based on the presumption of the workers doing the work, didn't hammer a single nail to build it, doesn't do any work after a few years, months, days, or possibly ever and takes a majority share of the money the workers made at the end of every day. Anti-[insert your countries name here]? Parasite? They might open up a new business and temporarily create some new jobs, a good thing? Does the new business that opened up because of an expansion, in these instances at least create some new jobs? If a new pizza resturant opens up, the money that goes to them will no longer go to prior food companies it went to before. Worth it? That level of inequal pay across our planet? How many resturants that you used to love are closed now?

Our society works to sap money from those at the "bottom" yet if you look outside, almost everything you see is the result of a low or middle income worker. In fact if you don't like it, you can probably blame the higher paids.

Moral of the story: There is a lack of ways to make money, especially good money, and lots of people are under undue pressure to pay the bills. Someone looking to get paid for building something and providing exchanging it for something of equal value for the purpose of paying for staple needs is not immoral. Especially when the thing just wouldn't exist without compensation.

Holy long winded post Batman.

 

Edited by Noisycricket
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MirceaKitsune: Archive this thread. It contains proof that the developers know about the implications of the GPL and also might come in handy if anyone really is moronic enough to do the mentioned false reports.

I do not expect anyone here to really be moronic enough for that. But: Better safe than sorry.

 

Edit: I really am impressed, how fast the Internet Archive has become. Last time the save-this-page-now feature took ages to complete. It only takes seconds for each page now.

Edited by Abusimplea
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What about not distributing TDM, just your mod and making TDM's existence known on your Patreon page and wherever else you talk about it, along with details about it and its COMPLETELY FREE nature, then state clearly that your patron is for simply for your mod work and what it contains. If someone from that patreon pages says to himself, "free? Lets check that out." and comes to TDM.com and says, meh, no thanks, not for me, and doesn't use it, then TDM and all its coding potential technically has zero value to them. They can use TDM alone if they choose, but presumably wouldn't unless its using his/her mod. Its still running off a mountain of insane labor by TDM devs (possibly including a years worth of most of my free time animating), but i know wouldn't mind so long as it was handled right. Just only distribute the mod as a separate patch-like addon? Wouldn't that work and please everybody? That way, your supporting this guy and his generation of the mod, only. They can always hop in and use TDM's existing functionality at any time and stop paying the patreon if they so choose.

 

That is literally, precisely, what I am doing: My mod is only distributed as an addon! Precisely like say, the addon AdBlock Plus is distributed for the browser Firefox: You get Firefox separately then install the addon on it, the addon itself does not come with Firefox. Again I might change this years from now (regarding just the game code) once the mod is self dependent, but I don't even know if it will ever get there.

 

This reminds me: I wanted to leave a few analogies for those who are so opposed to the idea, as I was simply curious how they feel about some similar examples.

  1. Suppose someone has made a proprietary web browser, like say Internet Explorer by Microsoft: The browser itself is non-commercial, however it's used by millions of people and friendly to modding. Someone decides to make an addon for this browser, which is their own work entirely but of course runs in the browser... the person takes donations for it. Is this person committing a crime or being disrespectful toward Microsoft?
  2. Take any commercial FPS game, for instance Unreal Tournament 3: It is copyrighted to Epic Games and as proprietary as it gets. Someone decides to make a mod for it, implementing custom characters / maps / game types as is very common... they receive donations for their work. Has this person breached the terms of Epic Games or disrespected the company?
  3. To venture into the realm of firmware as well, for instance with computer motherboards: Gigabyte offers a mobo with their own proprietary bios. Someone is taking donations to create customized free bioses which people can flash in their place, and makes one for this mobo as well. Has the person committed a moral or legal wrongdoing toward Gigabyte?

MirceaKitsune: Archive this thread. It contains proof that the developers know about the implications of the GPL and also might come in handy if anyone really is moronic enough to do the mentioned false reports.

I do not expect anyone here to really be moronic enough for that. But: Better safe than sorry.

 

Edit: I really am impressed, how fast the Internet Archive has become. Last time the save-this-page-now feature took ages to complete. It only takes seconds for each page now.

 

The LICENSE.txt file distributed with the TDM engine already makes this aspect clear, and is available in several Github forks and other repositories. To quote the two relevant parts:

 

All maps, textures, models, def files, audio assets, and all other non-software components of The Dark Mod are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, as specified at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/legalcode and described at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

 

All software components of The Dark Mod, either original or based on the Doom 3 GPL Source Code as released in November 2011, are licensed and can be distributed under the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Edited by MirceaKitsune
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That is literally, precisely, what I am doing: My mod is only distributed as an addon! Precisely like say, the addon AdBlock Plus is distributed for the browser Firefox: You get Firefox separately then install the addon on it, the addon itself does not come with Firefox. Again I might change this years from now (regarding just the game code) once the mod is self dependent, but I don't even know if it will ever get there.

 

Well that finally makes sense, thank you!

I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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I did think I explained it several times, but perhaps I wasn't careful and didn't choose my wording well in the other posts.

Yes, you explained it in the first post of this thread. The wording was fine. But probably emotions on receivers' end where strong and had to cool down first. That can take its while and then you repost almost the same stuff and suddenly the problem disappears. Communication between humans sometimes work that way. I doubt that you could have sped this up significantly by using better wording.
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As the developers, we have said over and over again, for more than ten years now, that we don't want money involved with TDM. We say it when people want to give us money and we say it when people want to make money from it. We say it in particular when it's connected to the generation of new content. There are no new ways to say it. You're free to ignore the request of the people who put untold hours into the mod for free, but don't expect people to be happy about it.

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As the developers, we have said over and over again, for more than ten years now, that we don't want money involved with TDM. We say it when people want to give us money and we say it when people want to make money from it. We say it in particular when it's connected to the generation of new content. There are no new ways to say it. You're free to ignore the request of the people who put untold hours into the mod for free, but don't expect people to be happy about it.

He's basically doing the same thing as TDM, when TDM was a mod for Doom 3, you needed to get Doom 3 on your own, then download the mod.

The difference is we did it for free, he's asking for donations for his work on his mod.

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I always assumed I'd taste like boot leather.

 

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If so, i dont want to rewrite these files under the gpl license.

For me it/was a tough job to change/create them.

My respects to the developers who made them.

 

For my repository, I will most likely be making my own from scratch. I'll be taking a look at how you made yours just to get a glimpse of how I should redefine the HUD in essence.

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If you want to follow the gpl rules, look at hud code from tdm and rewrite the whole file without any copying lines. Do this Also all other gui files like the menus, inventory, etc.

Then you will see and feel how long it takes to rewrite everything from scratch you need, on your own.

Im afraid you may lose the fun of working on this ptoject, the project stops and we have no scifi fm.

 

Imho getting donation money for two people to surfive per month from patreon, its will not be sufficient and its unstable.

Edited by freyk

Info: My portfolio and darkmod graphical installer
Amnesty for Bikerdude!

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If you want to follow the gpl rules, look at hud code from tdm and rewrite the whole file without any copying lines. Do this Also all other gui files like the menus, inventory, etc.

Then you will see and feel how long it takes to rewrite everything from scratch you need, on your own.

Im afraid you may lose the fun of working on this ptoject, the project stops and we have no scifi fm.

 

Imho getting donation money for two people to surfive per month from patreon, its will not be sufficient and its unstable.

 

The defs and guis will be possible to fully rewrite over time, but that's why I'm maintaining the original gamecode (also to not miss updates in core TDM). The mod will definitely have some boring or frustrating moments, but I want to ultimately make it happen whatever the case.

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If you want to follow the gpl rules, look at hud code from tdm and rewrite the whole file without any copying lines.

There are two cases to look at:

 

1. NC-licensed GUI files that do not have to be changed and can be assumed to be present on user TDM installations. This files do not have to be included in the mod anyway. So their license simply does not matter, as they are not included in the new mod.

 

2. NC-licensed GUI files that do not fit the style of the new mod. That have to be rewritten from scratch to fit the new theme anyway.

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And what do you think how square enix reacts?

they have seen tdm nc project.

To not infringe the copyrights of Square Enix just do not use their names, artwork, or assets in your work. Also do not advertise it as beeing somehow associated to something they own. Even in the USA you can't protect a complete genre (they surely would if they could).

An example of how far you are allowed to go: The two commercial Torchlight games (same genre and similiar gameplay as Diablo) are not from Blizzard.

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An example of how far you are allowed to go: The two commercial Torchlight games (same genre and similiar gameplay as Diablo) are not from Blizzard.

Different setting and the gameplay is only similar on a first look. The ruleset differs in many ways (which is good, D&D sucks ... ducks and run )

FM's: Builder Roads, Old Habits, Old Habits Rebuild

Mapping and Scripting: Apples and Peaches

Sculptris Models and Tutorials: Obsttortes Models

My wiki articles: Obstipedia

Texture Blending in DR: DR ASE Blend Exporter

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