External art assets licensing

[chakkman]

4 hours ago, peter_spy said:

Nice. FWIW, I saw Black Parade crediting textures.com in their credits.avi. 

I saw and heard a lot of stuff in The Black Parade which definitely isn't OK for them to use... sounds and textures from Thief 3 and a lot of other games. Seems like they are not very particular with that stuff.

As you mentioned, probably best to just ask them.

[peter_spy]

49 minutes ago, chakkman said:

I saw and heard a lot of stuff in The Black Parade which definitely isn't OK for them to use... sounds and textures from Thief 3 and a lot of other games.

Yeah, TTLG never had a great culture when it comes to copyrighted content, but BP is where things got somewhat ridiculous:

[chakkman]

On the positive side, a fan mission for Thief Gold is probably so underground that no one will ever notice.

[peter_spy]

Not this time though, the campaign is getting some PC press coverage, some major outlets like Rock Paper Shotgun included: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-black-parade-is-a-thief-mod-from-a-team-including-a-dev-at-arkane-and-an-original-thief-designer

The TDM / cgtextures.com situation made me think though; maybe, instead of worrying what future license might include, there could be a steady effort to replace photo-sourced textures with hand-made / proc-gen ones? That list is huge, but the peace of mind in the end is priceless.

Edited December 24, 2023 by peter_spy

[STiFU]

On 12/24/2023 at 10:28 AM, peter_spy said:

maybe, instead of worrying what future license might include, there could be a steady effort to replace photo-sourced textures with hand-made / proc-gen ones? That list is huge, but the peace of mind in the end is priceless.

I doubt that we have the man-power to pull that off these days.

Since TDM has no actual legal entity, nothing can really happen to anyone of us other than a request to take it all down, which we would happily oblige of course and then start to fix up the critical textures. I am sure, once the need to fix them up is actually there, the man-power will naturally reactivate for TDM.

I also doubt that anyone would come after TDM at this point, as it is a beloved community project that had tons of news coverage in the past and the creators of textures.com know about and approve of us. 

I was also trying to find our internal discussions about these licensing issues, but couldn't find them anymore. Maybe @nbohr1more knows any further sources?

[OrbWeaver]

On 12/23/2023 at 11:11 PM, peter_spy said:

Yeah, TTLG never had a great culture when it comes to copyrighted content, but BP is where things got somewhat ridiculous:

That's actually quite hilarious — using your credits to openly list all the unlicensed content you stole from other games. 

I wonder if the modelling section of the credits says "Thanks to ThePirateBay for providing the cracked copy of 3DS Max we used for all our custom models".

[Zerg Rush]

No need of piracy

https://sketchfab.com/features/free-3d-models 

https://3d.si.edu/collections

https://www.freepik.com/3d-models

https://www.blenderkit.com/asset-gallery?query=+is_free%3Atrue&page=2

https://www.turbosquid.com/Search/3D-Models/free/asset

https://opengameart.org/content/free-3d-assets

https://foxdevart.itch.io/victorian-study-3d-asset-pack

Creating easily owns with AI Tools

https://charmed.ai

etc.

[peter_spy]

It's not even that there are free asset sites or AI apps^. Models still need work as they have to be adapted to the game polycount limits, and textures need to be adjusted to work with game art style and shading system. Sometimes doing something from scratch will be faster. And with AI tools, it misses the point even more so.

And the point is, making textures, models, and sounds is great fun. It's an opportunity to grow as a creative person, and an occasion to connect and network with other people, even if it's hard to communicate sometimes. And TTLG in particular has plenty of creative people to choose from. By choosing AI, or grabbing stuff from other games, you miss that opportunity, and everything that goes with it. If everyone starts doing it, the community artists will disappear.

[Zerg Rush]

I have assumed that, although there are models made, it is not a simple copy - paste, independent if it is from these repositories or stolen from other games. Regarding AI, it can be a good tool for certain assets, bad only if it is used as a shortcut to create a game and not just as another design tool. The AI tool listed, although it can be create other things, can be used very well to quickly create textures, for example, saving time in the game developement. AI also can be used to create classical paintings, much used in TDM, without any copyright problems, things like this, and maybe even better adapt to the plot as the same paintings used since several Years now, apart of the one I made for the Black Mage.

It is clear that stealing designs from other creators is very ugly and certainly a bad path, which is why I have said that piracy is not necessary, with the free and open-use resources available. You surely have other sources of these, apart from the list What I put.

Edited December 27, 2023 by Zerg Rush

[chakkman]

On 12/27/2023 at 9:28 AM, OrbWeaver said:

That's actually quite hilarious — using your credits to openly list all the unlicensed content you stole from other games. 

It's surprising that some of the guys involved do that, although they actually work in the games industry.

Anyway, they have to know. Let's hope that they don't get into legal trouble. Would be a shame for the mod.