The Still New What Did You Last Do Thread

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Nash
 
 
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Nash »

All this asset-stealing business kind of makes me want to praise those non-moddable/cooked-asset engines (Unreal, Unity etc)... I mean sure someone can still get to them if they tried hard or want it badly, but at least it's not as easy as using SLADE or 7Zip or whatever and just getting direct access to the graphics...
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Rachael
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Rachael »

Nash I don't mean to be offensive saying this, but I think you worry way too much about asset protection, and I think that's an awful road to go down because it has lead to fuckery where games are actually unplayable due to the draconic and overzealous practices of game developers trying to "protect" their assets (and ultimately failing, anyhow). And opening 7-zip or Slade to just rip them right out - it's astonishingly common for a file format decoder to create a program that does the same for pretty much any game's proprietary format.

It would not take much effort to rip from said engines, and I think the main reason it hasn't been done so much is because it would be a lot more obvious with more recent games than it would be with past ones.
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Vostyok »

This was something I remember being brought up in an old gaming discussion. Where asset holding was actually holding back development.

Now, I know that having your work ripped off and used in someone else's work might sting. But think about it this way:

I'm a (hypothetical) new developer. I'm making a new game with a small team, but the graphics side is taking time. I want an outdoor area, but to do that, I need some trees. I can't draw trees, I can do code, but my art skills are, in this example, terrible. Say another studio has made some decent tree models/sprites/pixel art. A simple recolor for theme, and wham. I've made in a few minutes what the original studio completed in several hours, maybe weeks.

You see this with all sorts of content. But it would be nice, at least, if my hypothetical game studio added a credit for this (ie. asset "Hypothetical Trees, made by Example Software"). Adds another.... ohhhh TEN SECONDS to my busy developer life.
Sharing assets with sites such as Sketchfab and others saves time and allows smaller outfits who might not have a competant artist to compete with established studios who do have manpower and time in a day to waste. I'm not a voice actor or a musician for instance. Good thing we have friends here :D
If we shared more, we'd create more.

Although yeah, Steam has a massive problem with people whipping up god awful games in two minutes using uncredited assets for a few bucks. Go figure...
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Rachael
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Rachael »

I agree there, Vostyok - but there's a slippery slope there, as well.

The problem is, the more a single asset gets used the less meaning and uniqueness it has. This is exemplified with the sound library that was used for Doom - Doom made the sounds in that library famous but that does not stop the fact that other games use the sounds in that library (particularly the door sounds and the monster's projectile start sounds) in many other ways.

In fact, it's not wholly different with how virtually every single game from 1995 to 2005 looked like Quake (except Unreal and several others). You can't copyright an aesthetic - but it's a perfect example of how one thing - even if it's only an idea - can easily become way too overused. (Let's not even talk about the Wilhelm scream)

In the end I think it's better if every game does try to make as many original assets as possible. I don't see it as a basic requirement to be a game and I don't like how people tend to be overzealous about that, too. But it's just a whole thing with the asset ecosystem that when you want to try something "new" it really should look new.
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by InsanityBringer »

I'll confess I've been vaguely tempted to try to make an asset obfuscator for ZD projects. It wouldn't add any real technical protections, but my idea was to just utterly mangle everything within the archive and automatically update DECORATE/ZScript lumps, UDMF maps, etc. It'd give every asset a complete random name, for sprites giving them a random name and shuffling the frames (automatically remapping the states in decorate/zscript). Assuming you were using a ZIP for your archive, a nicely organized one with paths, it would strip all the paths where it could safely do so, so all sprites would be dumped right into sprites with no organization whatsoever (maybe to make things harder on slade it would even fuck up the internal ordering, though you could sort it to work around that) It probably wouldn't offer a huge amount of protection, but it would make using assets a greater ordeal.

the worst idea I had was chopping up every graphic into 16x16 tiles or something, randomizing their names, and compositing them with an automatically generated texture lump, but the engine might not be too happy with that.
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Rachael »

The problem there is, Slade3 can read the TEXTURES lump and re-composite said textures to their in-game appearances very easily. ;)
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Marrub »

I think the large amount of google-image-searchable sprites on this site is more of a problem regarding asset flipping than 'unprotected' mod assets. :P
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Rachael »

Marrub wrote:I think the large amount of google-image-searchable sprites on this site is more of a problem regarding asset flipping than 'unprotected' mod assets. :P
Agreed.

I *could* stop Google from indexing this site, but that has a lot of nasty side effects as well, and plus having the images searchable is actually quite useful for people who actually have legitimate reasons to want to search said images.
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Marrub »

Yeah, I've used GIS quite a many times to find stuff on this site when I'd been having trouble with assets.
It's an unsolvable problem, unfortunately, but also it's a problem that a certain international law helps with. :D
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Vostyok »

Rachael wrote:...

The problem is, the more a single asset gets used the less meaning and uniqueness it has. This is exemplified with the sound library that was used for Doom - Doom made the sounds in that library famous but that does not stop the fact that other games use the sounds in that library (particularly the door sounds and the monster's projectile start sounds) in many other ways.

....In the end I think it's better if every game does try to make as many original assets as possible. I don't see it as a basic requirement to be a game and I don't like how people tend to be overzealous about that, too. But it's just a whole thing with the asset ecosystem that when you want to try something "new" it really should look new.
Oh of course. We definitely need more original content. (although I always thought the Doom door sounds were actually already available stock sounds paid for under licence, but whatever).
We wouldn't have the sense of the new if we recognised bits and pieces from other media. I'm not trying to advocate cookie-cutter game design. A work around at the moment seems to be intentionally trying to make your game 'look' retro, with minimal pallette and definition - whether you see the latest Pixel-art games like Shovel Knight or Nidhogg as retro/pure gameplay, or simply lazy/gimmicky though... eh. A discussion for another time...

I agree with your points. Though, I would suggest seeing asset "borrowing" as flattery. Our only real recourse otherwise in this day and age, where information is available with zero effort, is to name and shame those who use without recognition. Not everyone can be a good artist, but everyone can add a quick "thanks".
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Dancso »

Here's my take on stealing assets:

If you don't have an artist or the ability to pay one, then you HAVE TO reconsider your game's aesthetics because poaching other people's content is not going to lead to a consistent theme, and will feel worse overall even if the assets look good individually. Lack of skill really isn't an excuse, you just have to settle for programmer-art.
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Gez »

The way I see it, any game using assets ripped from a mod is going to be some sort of obscure crappy game made by a single guy, and therefore really not something worth worrying about.


Now sure if it turns out to be a Flappy Bird and get billions of downloads then you can try to sue the guy for copyright infringement and hope he'll just give you a few millions to settle it, but otherwise, why let it bother you?
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Rachael »

Gez wrote:but otherwise, why let it bother you?
The way I see it, it's someone pouring their heart and passion into something, and making it good, and then someone making actual money off of it while the artist who put actual work into it doesn't get any benefit whatsoever, and even worse not even being asked permission for it.

It stings when that happens - I am not going to 100% say it should "never ever" happen but the least these people could do is be nice about it and offer to help out the people who they've taken advantage of to get where they are. The artists could have been paid for their work, and have bread on the table, rather than having done it for free and out of the kindness of their hearts for some backwater community like ours to make mods with.
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by Vostyok »

Gez wrote:The way I see it, any game using assets ripped from a mod is going to be some sort of obscure crappy game made by a single guy, and therefore really not something worth worrying about.


Now sure if it turns out to be a Flappy Bird and get billions of downloads then you can try to sue the guy for copyright infringement and hope he'll just give you a few millions to settle it, but otherwise, why let it bother you?
I think it bothers people when they put up something on a forums that gets a couple of "that looks good" responses, and then later someone uses it in a full game and people are all "wow your game looks amazing the art is so cool!! #shutupandtakemymoney"

But yeah, fair point... it usually doesn't go that way.

edit: Rachael said it better but I type too slow. lol
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Re: The New What Did You Last Do Thread

Post by NeuralStunner »

Finished Urban Brawl. Damn.
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