I've been working on "universal" replacement mods that allow you to have:
-Doom, Heretic & Strife weapons in Hexen.
-Heretic, Hexen and Strife weapons in Doom.
-Doom, Hexen & Strife weapons in Heretic.
-Doom, Heretic and Hexen weapons in Strife.
These are made to be semi-universal. E.g. Blue and green mana are replaced with Doom's ammo pickups so that these in turn can be replaced by gameplay mods. Tailor made compatibility patches can be released for mods that require them or would be unbalanced without.
Tl;dr use weapons & gameplay mods from one game in all others.
Here comes the problem. For weapons and items from one game to work in the other, you need to have a minimal resource PWAD that contains the needed sprites (in PNG format) and sounds. Am I safe to distribute these as long as they require the original IWADs to work and don't work with the shareware versions of the games? I lack the skills to do so, otherwise I would've made a script that requires you to own the games in question so their assets are pulled out at runtime on your local machine. Is this a legal grey area or will I raise red flags with this?
Like most people I've seen plenty of mods that contain copyrighted work, but I'd like to be given a green light before proceeding. Maybe a bad analogy, but like in modern society. Just because everyone's throwing their litter in the street doesn't mean I can do it too or that it's okay to do so.
Implications of distributing mods that contain IWAD assets
- StroggVorbis
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- Kinsie
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Re: Implications of distributing mods that contain IWAD asse
Nearly 26 years of past evidence, to say nothing of the existence and success of Samsara, suggests that you're probably gonna be fine.
- Graf Zahl
- Lead GZDoom+Raze Developer
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Re: Implications of distributing mods that contain IWAD asse
The community standard seems to be that you are not allowed to release a mod that allows playing the IWAD levels without the IWAD.
When sharing graphics assets between games nobody seems to really care.
When sharing graphics assets between games nobody seems to really care.
- StroggVorbis
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