Using Other Game Models

HAHAHAHA where is totalbiscuits game?? he critics games wheres his game?

well.. in that society, we would pay the artists properly for their works... you assume the current society and capitalism

 

I'd like to see a show of hands by the people here who have never watched a DVD that was not made for your region, have never circumvented the region protection of a YouTube video to watch one that's not legally viewable for your country, have never played an imported video game on a modded system. Have never broken any of those IP laws that are smothering us all more and more every day.

Anyone?

Those things are against the law, and you are breaking IP laws with your unethical, morally reprehensible, criminal ways. You are a thief. There are tons more examples besides those ones I listed, of course.

Seriously. Who really cares if someone uses elements from another game to learn from, in their own home, if they never release that game? Should we really be trying to govern what people do in the privacy of their own homes? Artistic endeavors that literally hurt no one?

I bet every single person in this thread, including myself, breaks laws all the time, without batting an eyelash. I actually pulled out of a parking lot the other day without using my turn signal! OMG. Laws are there to protect us, not to constrain us. Why so serious? Don't release games with someone else's work in them. Simple. Beyond that, who cares what you do when you're inspired and learning?

 

Well...

- He does not hang around gaming forums acting like he knows about game development (your post history).
- He does not post stuff that disregard copyright laws (your F*** you all, i just wanna have fun)
- He does not criticize games without giving details on why and how they suck

 

@GoesTo11 has it right. In art, the "unprotected" content isn't the model itself, rather the "structure" if you get what I mean. You could learn the fact that they used 10 rings around the elbow joints to get super smooth animation, such and such polys in the head but yet really long ones in the arms, or whatever similar things, like how UV mapping was done.

About parody, to get away with it, it really has to be parody. Like Space Balls, like Weird Al, REAL parody meant to be parody, and be blatantly obvious to be parody. But, you can't use any content from the original, rather you have to create your own. The IP, as in characters are fair game in parody(as you kind of have to use them or it isn't parody anymore) but you have to create your own versions as far as art and sound goes.

@Ony in that last post also has a valid point. Who among us has never done anything technically illegal? Who can seriously put oneself on such a high moral ground? Sorry, but I can't, and I don't think any of you can either. I think a moral code is more important. While some things are technically illegal, they don't hurt anybody, or make them lose money. Piracy is borderline, as people argue about whether it hurts the creator or not. But using a model in a personal game that is never released, not even for free...I don't see how that hurts somebody. But you must accept the facts...it IS illegal. Half of Youtube is also illegal, but we watch anyway.

 

my moral code says owning, and fiercely barring other people from knowledge is a sin

"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

 

Well there are a lot of valid points there, however we are on a game development forum, or to be more specific official forum of an very popular game engine which is browsed by all type developers from various age groups, hundreds or thousand times a week and threads searched with forum search or Google.

The original post was about taking someone else's models, share the game on various platforms (even if was just a dream) and maybe even earn with it. In that regards any kind of positive talk or approving model "stealing" or borrowing is a bit inappropriate if and when the replies could be used as reference by others.

 

lol i didnt really think of that LOL... im just spouting my personal beliefs BS LOL

my beliefs on the related subject are much wider than game dev.. (like pharma and stuff)
its just that i reside in game dev

 

Stealing other peoples work to pass off as your own or to try to make money on is the opposite of knowledge. There is nothing wrong with studying a model from another game to see how it is made, etc.

 

The Elder Scrolls series is fantastic if you want to get into modding. Skyrim, Oblivion, and even Morrowind all have active communities surrounding them. There is even a group attempting to recreate the Morrowind engine from scratch.

www.openmw.org

 

Hmm that's neat!
Didn't know modding was still a big thing these days, I thought that era died out 7 years ago lol.

 

You have a very poor knowledge of how technology progresses and works. In almost all cases, research and development is driven by perceived gain. Removing all barriers to knowledge sharing will not solve all the worlds problems. Sure, there are technologies out there that would become dramatically cheaper in the short term. But the long term result would be negative.

Here are some consequences of removing IP protection for my industry (food production). Prices for food would drop in the short term, because every man and his dog could implement technologies that are currently controlled by big corporates. Corporations profits would drop. For the moment we will forget about any economic implications of this, lets just assume you have a method to keep the world stable through this transition. Due to lower profits, corporations would spend less (or no) money on R&D efforts. So no new IP would be created. In the meantime population growth continues. And soon current food production techniques do not meet demand.

Removing IP protection may produce some gains over the next ten years. But you've really shot yourself in the foot in 20 years time.

 

yeah but then every man and his dog would be producing... somewhat similar to big corporations
and every man and his dog would be RDing

also, you are assuming the current society and capitalism

but i get what youre saying... really the problem is competition, and yeah competition is good too

well yeah my statements are for the bigger subject... like, pharma R&D and stuff...

uh... like, monsanto i guess made corn that the seeds are infertile? thats seriously messed up, a crime against nature, and the people responsible should be hunted and executed by the UN or something ... and i seriously lose faith in humanity that it hasnt occurred yet ><
i believe reproduction is basically the ONLY reason to live... so anyone messing with that for Money is a total scumbag and should not exist on earth

 

Research and development is very costly. If companies cannot protect their IP in any way then they lose any reason to push forward as heavily as they currently do.

I'm in favor of tightening the limits on how long IP can be protected, but eliminating it altogether would be far worse.

 

I believe what you are talking about are patents which are a whole different beast. Someone can patent one little step and then hold the entire industry hostage by demanding an outrageous cost just to use one step out of hundreds or sue you when you don't license it. Even if you had no idea it was patent protected, you are still going to have legal woes. While patents are a type of IP, not all IP can be patented.

ps not a lawyer but did take a couple of courses on copyright law when working on my MFA degree.

 

Be the change you want to see in the world. If you ever create something worth pirating, you could always just give up rights to it so that it's no longer "owned" by you. Unfortunately that's not a good way to make a living.

No one is "hiding knowledge." We just don't like it when people steal our things.

Put yourself in the shoes of the developer. If someone pirates your hard work you'll look at it differently.

 

That's not legal precedent. A legal precedent is something that a court has ruled on. That is a copyright violation indeed, and it was removed properly. They tried to make money off someone else's work and got caught.

You'll also notice that they are going to remove the asset and republish the game. The actual work done on the game is their's regardless of whether they used someone else's model. Nobody is going to court over it, and its likely that the offending party will suffer no consequences at all. If anything, that post supports my opinion.

Lets be clear, I'm not talking about making money off of other people's work.

I'm not talking about pirating games or stealing models, content, assets or anything else. there are several posters on this thread who's assets I've purchased from the asset store and others that are on my wishlist for when i get to that point in my project.

If any artist wants to make a 3d terrain tileset and put it on the asset store (or make it for me at a reasonable price) I would buy it in a heartbeat. There is no current asset for sale or free anywhere that i have found that suits my requirement. Maybe some of you think that that means that I should quit my hobby and take up drinking instead, but I don't agree with that.

To me, its no different than a amateur video editor using a song from his favorite band to put together a movie of his kids, or even a 3d artist using copyrighted reference images to create their model. Nobody would argue that that is not fair use.

I respect all of the opinions given, except that of the person who decided that the only response to a disagreement was to insinuate that I am a pirate of unity pro and try to report me because i have a different opinion than them.

In the end, what you do in your house, on your own time, is your own business. I did not mean to imply that the OP pirate assets and sell a game with them, but honestly, a person coming to the forum and asking that question about creating a mmorpg is never ever going to finish said game. Never. That is why i feel safe saying what I said.

Thank you (almost everyone) for the discussion.

 

Trust me, R&D does not occur if there is no direct economic benefit from it. Once something is off patent, its all about who can create the stuff cheapest. Tech focused companies are constantly competing with cheaper generic companies who sell the same chemicals developed by the tech company several years previously.

Going way off topic here, but as one of the afore mentioned scumbags I should probably put up some attempt to justify my job. And apparently life too, please don't send in your hit man, I'm a nice guy, really.

Terminator genes serve two purposes. One is to prevent the spread of generically modified traits through the environment. They are actually legally required for this purpose in some jurisdictions. The other is protection of expensive IP. If you think avoiding digital piracy is hard, try preventing piracy of a self replicating genetic trait. Developing traits cost millions (billions?) of dollars. That's far to much money for anyone to spend on something without some guarantee of a return on the investment.

At the risk of having this thread closed down, that's all I'll say on terminator genes.

 

Are you really supporting the development of a game engine using the assets pulled from another game....I'm effin astounded by the irony. This is absolutely no different than what I'm talking about doing except my game will never be available on the internet. Wow.

 

Wouldn't that right there give someone reason enough to consider food gene splicing and that business in general dangerous and harmful to humans, and something we probably shouldn't be F***ing around with all in the name of profit?

I get that the food industry is your business, but I'm amazed that you could sit here and justify something that could potentially wipe out human kind because hey, need to protect the billions in IP rights and screw around with gene splicing our god damned food supply so corporations can make more money, while at the same time condemning someone from using a model from someone else to learn how to make a freaking video game.

Perspective. Wow. Just wow.

 

Thread split time?

The issue with GM food is that without it we're going to struggle to feed ourselves in the mid-term. We need exponentially growing food sources to match our exponentially growing populations. It sucks that money is coming into the equation, but with the cost of research to solve the problem in the ballparks of millions and billions... well, that has to come from somewhere unless we have a Star Trek style global social reform to wipe out consideration of money. (And even in the optimistic and idealistic world of Star Trek that reform did not come cheaply!)

 

Heck, now that I think of it, even in Star Trek (and plenty of other speculative fiction) the food problem is solved by nothing short of literal alchemy, a machine that constructs food from raw elements and thus sidesteps the requirement for growing, and all of the land-hogging and destructive processes that go with it (and presumably the same tech on the other end enables near 100% efficient recycling to keep the system going).

 

There is not always a good correlation between what is required by law and what is scientifically sound. Especially in modern democracies. There's another debate on politics there. Just thought I'd point out that terminator genes are not just to protect IP. That said protecting IP is their primary purpose.

My stance on IP is pretty consistent. Decompiling a computer game to extract a model to use in your own project is illegal. (As pointed out decompiling a project to see how it works is not necessarily illegal, interesting distinction I wasn't aware of). Reproducing a patented gene trait is illegal. If I'm protecting the interests of a multi billion dollar game company, or some starving PhD student in a lab with a petri dish, is irrelevant.

As too wiping out human kind? That's a risk we are going to have to take. Human population is growing. Arable land area is pretty static. Genetic manipulation is one tool we can use to continue providing food. Alternatively we can starve to death (this is natures way of achieving population control). Most people are happy to give up money for food.

 

Dragging this back on topic... IP protection is clearly important in so far as in a world that revolves around economic rewards problems won't get solved without it. However, Ony is also spot on in that, for someone who's learning, if being inspired by the work of others helps them take their first steps then it really isn't hurting anyone. Furthermore, there's a lot to be gained by having more smart, self-motivated people learning skills that can help the world later on. Sure, the direct activity of making games isn't doing much to improve the world, but those same skills are useful in other areas too (my skills are in game dev, but it's not "games" I've spent most of my career making).

 

I'm sorry, you are just wrong about this. Every emulator written from the beginning of time has used external assets in development. Everyone of them needed to have roms be reverse engineered, decompiled, unpacked and used in development. The legality of emulators is not in question. I could point to a ton of examples of projects that are blatant clones of other games, that even support the original game's assets. You cannot distribute the original assets without permission, but their use in development is not illegal. Any product that is for sale can be bought by a competitor and reverse engineered to create a competitive product. You cannot violate patents, or distribute the original, but you can disassemble the product to see how it works and derive your own implementation. This is well established legal fact, not my opinion.

Your company may have a patent on gene terminators or whatever, but if that seed is for sale then any other company can buy it, reverse engineer it and come up with their own implementation that does not infringe on the original patent. The gene is not protected against reverse engineering, it is protected by patents on implementation.

Heck, even graphical design work is only protected up to about a 25% deviation from the original.

While I loath wikipedia as a source, this summarize it nicely:

Even when the product reverse engineered is that of a competitor, the goal may not be to copy them, but to perform competitor analysis.[4]Reverse engineering may also be used to create interoperable products; despite some narrowly tailored US and EU legislation, the legality of using specific reverse engineering techniques for this purpose has been hotly contested in courts worldwide for more than two decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering

 

Video games, yada yada. As anyone who reads my posts knows, I'm not living in some imaginary world where I think video games offer anything but pure entertainment to people. I think ultimately digital technology is harmful to the future of human kind, and I readily admit that I am complicit in contributing to the inevitable crash that takes us all down. I don't try to justify it, though. I do what I do because I enjoy making games and I make a damn good living with it. I fear digital technology and what it's doing to us, though, and I make no secret of that.

So IP rights, yes, of course protect what you've made. And no, of course, don't take someone else's work and claim it as your own. And my whole point in entering this thread was exasperation at the dead-horse beating that takes place sometimes in threads like this. It was pointed out within the first post or two that no, don't take other people's work. That should have been enough, frankly. And that's why I commented.

Annnndd.... going way off track here for just this one post...

One final thing about genetic manipulation of our food supplies and then I'm finished. It is the epitome of naivety to think that billions of dollars are spent in R&D by the food industry because it wants to help people. The reason those billions of dollars are spent on R&D and patents is to increase the bottom line, pure and simple.

By engineering crops with a higher yield, the result is more food with less nutrients. More food to sell, and damn the torpedoes if it's not as healthy, because hey, we can sell more!! By engineering crops that protect themselves against pests, we've created mutant strains that attract even worse pests. We have very little idea what we are doing and yet we continue to do it. This is people's food we're talking about.

Actually, we're not really talking mainly about food, we're mostly talking about corn, soy, and a couple of other "cash" crops that make a lot of money, are easy to grow, and don't really contribute to the health of the people. People need a balanced diet, and the more land we give over to things like corn that's literally in every single thing we eat now in America, the worse it's going to get. How is that healthy? Oh, it's not, but hey, companies can make money from it so let's all cheer them on while they slowly kill us with the mass-packaged garbage the food industry calls "food".

And did someone mention an increasing lack of arable land? Genetically modified crops do not give back to the soil in the way that natural crops do. In fact, they actively damage the soil, and add elements into it that accumulate over time that can help make that soil worthless. The natural cycle is disrupted, and soon, well, you guessed it, less arable land. Good stuff.

Ah yes, the "oh but we need to modify food because there's not enough!" argument. There are plenty of reasons many people around the world don't have access to food that has nothing at all to do with a lack of food. It has to do with a lack of proper infrastructure in place to deliver that food. It has to do with governments being overly greedy and exporting the food they do have to other countries while their own people starve. It has to do with dictatorships stealing the food from the people it's meant for. There are a dozen other reasons why people don't have access to healthy food and not a single, solitary one of them is remedied by corporations spending billions on IP rights so they can protect their investments and make more money.

They research food science so they can make more food with less nutritional value, because more food means more money. Nothing more than that.

And I'm done with that... sorry to go so far off track but it was related to (and still is, tangentially) IP rights. But that's the last I'll comment on it.

 

Your not far off. The primary motive is always more money. There are more ways to increase profits then straight yields, through increasing yields is generally profitable. Adding specific nutrient profiles is profitable. Adding drought resistance is profitable. Adding herbicide resistance is profitable. Adding internal pesticides is profitable. Reducing nutritional content is not profitable (you've just handed your competitors and the regulatory agencies a big stick).

As a side effect of all of this profit mongering, the worlds total food supply is increased.

I think that's what I was trying to say, it may not have come across correctly.

Despite reverse engineering not breaking copyright laws, its generally still against the EULAs. These might not hold up in court, but its still not something I would recommend doing just to get an animated model. In general there are enough free assets around that there is no need to grab models from other games.

Sure, no ones going to check on you in your basement. And no one is going to take any action against you unless you make some significant waves. But the OP was not about a beginner in a basement.

 

The OP wants to make an mmorpg with their cousins, just for fun, as their first project, using another game's models, then distribute it online for free or, "maybe a few ads". I'm pretty sure that entire concept qualifies as "beginner in a basement" level.

 

I'm shocked this isn't locked yet talking about food production and stuff lol.

 

You should be astounded by your own ignorance in assuming that such a project would be illegally using resources from Morrowind. It does not include any of Morrowind's assets or source code.

Installation of OpenMW is as simple as copying the OpenMW files into an installation of Morrowind.

 

While not disagreeing with your comments, rarely in this big ole complex world are things black and white or one sided.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug

 

Totally valid point. Worth remembering that corporations are staffed entirely by humans. And humans are driven by a wide variety of motives.

 

Oh, there are absolutely grey areas in this, and everything else. When discussing certain topics in order to make a particular point, once must many times "choose a stronger side" for the sake of the argument. I know there are pros and cons to everything, including GM crops\food. I also know about Mr. Borlaug. My point was more regarding the gigantic corporate machine's reasons for R&D and not the reasons of individual people working within and around that machine, such as Mr. Borlaug. It is the machine that has a life of its own, not the individual components which make it up. In all things there is both good and bad, of course.

This thread is an example of people only seeing the bad side to an issue, that being the use of assets from someone else's game. It's against the law! Yes, and no. And it depends. They're not taking things into context. Context changes everything.

Regardless of individual people's (such as Mr. Borglaug) ideas on what they'd like to see happen in the world, the giant corporate machines are the ones that take those well-meaning ideas and distort them for profit, and purely profit, and nothing else. The "road to hell" and all that, you know.

Honestly, again I got myself into a subject that I don't really care to make into anything more of than my first comments on it. I was talking to my wife about it all after reading the thing about terminator genes, and said, "I'm not going to post anything", after which I promptly, of course, went and posted my thoughts. I should know better by now.

There's good and bad in everything. The fact that a man won a Nobel Prize for his very noble ideas on helping human kind doesn't really have anything to do with the corporate food industry distorting and manipulating those same ideas for profit without regard to the possible consequences and risks to human kind. One does not negate the other, either way you look at it.

 

Of course there are gray areas, there are with everything. But as @BoredMormon pointed out, if Profit-Mongerer A produces a product with inferior nutritional value, it leaves the door wide open for Profit-Mongerer B to create a product with higher nutritional yield and put Profit-Mongerer A out of business. Profit-Mongerer A's greed might make him want to not care about nutrition, but it is in his rational self-interest to do so. We might not be there yet, but over time we will be. And we won't get there if we don't start. And if we don't start, people starve.

The problem comes in when laws like the so called Monsanto Protection Act are passed, shielding these companies from legal action, and all of the other rent-seeking behavior that the greedy among us engage in. But, contrary to popular belief, that is not capitalism. It is cronyism, or corporatism. We haven't had a capitalist society in quite a while as far too many big players go to congress and get away with rent-seeking and other anti-competitive behaviors that make the playing field uneven or improperly shift the balance of the risk/reward equation.

But, IP protection for games (bringing this back on topic y'all) is still important. Games can cost in the millions to develop now. If anyone can just yank those assets and make their own game, then the profit that can be made from them shrinks. Everyone could just yank AAA assets and crank out games that compete with the companies that spent millions to create those assets. A company that has to recoup sunk costs cannot compete with a company operating on the margins. The end result would be significantly less investment in sunk cost, meaning lower quality games. This is true of every industry. You need protection for what you've created because it cost you far more to create it than it does for your competitors to copy and paste it. Without the protection, the creation stops.

To see this in real world, compare Unity, UE4, or Crytek with Crystal Space, Ogre, or any other engine with no profit motive. The mythical claim that everyone chipping in will result in a superior (or even equal) product is false. There are exceptions, of course, like Linux. But they are the exception and not the rule. What works on the operating system level will not work on every level of software development, or across every industry.