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Author Topic: I wish to offer you some textures  (Read 26434 times)
Gig
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« on: April 28, 2010, 11:01:56 AM »

Hello everybody.
I like OpenArena and I would like to contribute. But I'm not a mapper and I'm not a coder. So I can only point out bugs...

But I remembered some textures I did some years ago for a map for the second release (still not released, with the project blocked for years, continued and then blocked again - but maybe this year will be the good one! Maybe our mapper/project leader will return working on it!) of the FlagRaiders mod for Q3A. So, yesterday I took some of them and changed the background from a woody wall taken from Q3A (so copyright of idSoftware) with one taken from OpenArena's texture pk3 (which should be under GPLv2, right?). I also did some other changes to adapt them...
Can I upload them, releasing under GPLv2, in the hope that someone of you will use some of them in a map for OA (or another game, if you want so)? It would be a honour for me.
Should I also say who is the author of the background image used? Image is e7panelwood.jpg.

I have to point out that some of them are "strange" (because of their original purpose was for an unconventional map, where the hero passes various traps and finally returns back home, the player's home), but maybe you could add them into a "secret area" or similar...
Some of them include photorealistic items (a clock, an old guitar...) taken with a camera... may this be a copyright problem? Maybe I could upload them and you could tell me if some of them is a problem...
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« Reply #1 on: April 28, 2010, 01:53:21 PM »

This is nice Smiley

1) I think Q3A textures have a lower resolution than OA standards. This may not be a big deal, you can always release them in a pack, submit it to opengameart and mappers will eventually use it.
2) I don't even know how we tell who is the author on a GPL project. It could be copyright is assigned to the whole OA team, and your (nick)name appears in the readme, or some note is present within the assets. If you leave some link to OA website in your readme this should be enough.
3) If you have some textures or photos with full copyright on it, you may release them under public domain on burningwell.org.
4) If flagraiders are friends of yours, you may convince them to make their code compatible with OA, and release it under GPL Wink Some eventual problem: contributors may have kept their copyright for their files so the task may not be simple.
5) There has been a few maps with rooms like kitchens around here, photorealism wouldn't suit the game's art direction but they can still be used by mappers. There is no copyright problem related to these photos, though you may have to pay attention to a few things like: trademarks, people's face... etc.  I'm not well informed on that issue, maybe some photograph website could enlighten you but I doubt there is much more to know.
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Gig
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« Reply #2 on: April 28, 2010, 02:31:54 PM »

Well, I've heard that OA 0.9.0 (scheduled for 201X?) will have a replace for every texture in Q3A, right? Then it should became possible to play FlagRaiders maps without missing textures (although there will be some "oddities" when FR's customized textures with q3 original textures in background, will be next to the new OA's textures... anyway, they aren't too many).

In the meanwhile, I've heard about a "q3 texture pack for OA" or something similar (where could I get it?), and maybe that could be a fix, waiting for OA 0.9.0.

For FlagRaiders, if (and I repeat "if") we will be able to publish the second release, maybe we could think to an OA specific version. But think that this project was started something like in 2003, a first beta (FR v0.9, which had only maps, no interface changes) was released and more maps were in production... then the mapper/project leader's computer had a major failure and the project stopped. It was resumed some years later, in 2006, but after a big work it was stopped again (I don't even remember why, maybe another problem with the project leader's machine?). Last year I contacted the project leader and he told me its old computer with Quake 3 was abandoned in a corner of his home.... two days ago I contacted him again and he told me he's returned to Quake 3 so, maybe, will be (finally!) able to publish the second release.
But, after all this time, I don't even know how to contact the other beta-testers (except for one which is still on ICQ). Also our coder guy is vanished, so the various bugs in the interface will still be there when we will release it... (is it possible to reverse-engineer a Q3A mod's interface, to fix it without its source and without restarting from scratch? Anyway, they were elementary modifies to the interface, if a coder of you wants to help us, he should be able to make it in a short time, in this case please contact me).

About resolution, OA's e7panelwood.jpg is 256x256, like the previous images I created for FR, so changing the background in my .psd files has been easy. Maybe I could create bigger textures starting from my photoshop images, but I would need a bigger background texture...
« Last Edit: April 28, 2010, 02:44:07 PM by Gig » Logged

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Neon_Knight
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« Reply #3 on: April 28, 2010, 02:54:42 PM »

Just to avoid any kind of conflicts... did you've read this on the Wiki about the requirements?

(DO NOT LINK) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/DeveloperFAQ#Anything_I_need_to_know_before_I_contribute.3F
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Gig
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« Reply #4 on: April 28, 2010, 03:44:34 PM »

Well, let's make a try.
You can download the textures from here.

Please tell me what's right and what's wrong.
Bye! :-)
« Last Edit: April 29, 2010, 12:50:30 AM by Gig » Logged

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« Reply #5 on: April 28, 2010, 03:57:16 PM »

- having 100% replacement for Q3A textures is more or less a goal, yes.
- about the oddities you mention, there is something unclear. I think it's not allowed to modify Q3A images. They are copyrighted, so no modification, no distribution. However you can make maps which uses them, because you only distribute the .map file. So, it's your mod's problem if it modifies Q3A textures, maybe it was a common practice, but is not allowed.
- The texture pack you mention can be found here: http://download.tuxfamily.org/openarena/files/pk3/ ; though there are other versions around, from RN's forum and also from Q3Min's project.
- [free software promotion Cheesy]This is the problem with such projects ... some persons work on it, then they lose interest, then the work is more or less lost. This doesn't happen with opensource projects which can always be reborn (code is public, more decentralization hence failure-proof), within OA it's sure this work would stay lively. Tongue [/fsp:D]
- Maybe the interface could be recreated though I doubt anyone here would have time to put efforts into that.
- About the resolution, if the OA texture was 256, then I guess it's fine to keep it that size.

(edit: currently downloading your textures ...) Smiley

edit2: hehe, some funny ones, quite specific to the mod you were working on I guess, but it's still something Wink

edit3: your readme.txt and COPYING seems all fine to me
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Gig
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« Reply #6 on: April 28, 2010, 04:32:03 PM »

Well, interface changes weren't many... let me remember:
In menĂ¹:
- Gametype name changed from "Capture the Flag" to "FlagRaiders"
- Other gametypes and original Q3 maps not shown.
In-game:
- Added two speed meters for horizontal and vertical speed, that change colour when you reach certain speeds.
- "Capture time" (time counter) shown on-screen when you hold the flag.
- "Last capture time" and "Best capture time" shown in console when you capture.
But there were some bugs... sometimes (I don't know why only sometimes) the capture time counter disappears or does not reset itself (even if you change map).
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Gig
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« Reply #7 on: April 29, 2010, 04:12:10 PM »

Hello, I tried the external texture package "z-gpl-q3a2oa-textures-v5". Some textures aren't of high quality, but it is very very much better than the standard "missing texture" black an gray.
If you have it, you can play FlagRaiders with OpenArena! Sweet! :-)

Are these external texture packs linked form the manual in the wiki site? They are important, waiting for OA 0.9...
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« Reply #8 on: April 29, 2010, 04:17:51 PM »

Are these external texture packs linked form the manual in the wiki site? They are important, waiting for OA 0.9...

Not sure about all that but that texture pack is used in various OA servers. i doubt there linked in the wiki.
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Gig
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« Reply #9 on: April 30, 2010, 01:15:36 AM »

If it is not a problem, I would like to write about them somewhere in the Wiki... But where? In the FAQ page? In the "manual" page?
« Last Edit: April 30, 2010, 06:36:30 AM by Gig » Logged

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« Reply #10 on: April 30, 2010, 06:09:29 AM »

It it is not a problem, I would like to write about them somewhere in the Wiki...

There are some issues with those packages. The v5 package made by Speaker and Missbehaving contains direct copy of the Q3A shaders, which is copyright infringement. The latest package made by Jack Thompson is v4, but fromhell once said it's a derivative of the original Q3A textures, thus cannot be included into OA.
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Gig
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« Reply #11 on: April 30, 2010, 06:34:15 AM »

Well, I'm not saying to include them into an official OpenArena package or to host them on an OpenArena web server... I'm saying to mention the fact that exist third party packs that substitute many textures from Q3A, and that they could improve the compatibily with Q3A maps, waiting for next releases of OpenArena. Is it our problem if in their pack there is a 5% (just an example) of not really free material? It should be their problem, no? And maybe they will release a totally free package soon, who knows? I'm just trying to help people approaching OpenArena....

We cannot check ''every single'' texture or shader from every third-party mod, model or map of which we talk about. We say that the package exists, but we can't verify it is really 100% original work (and technically, how could we be sure? If they say "I did this texture", how could we know if they modified an existing texture from Max Payne or Serious Sam or really they created it from scratch?).
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« Reply #12 on: April 30, 2010, 07:24:10 AM »

Once again I wanted to get clarifications on this texture pack too.

- you can promote any texture pack if you want, even if external, through the wiki. Though if it's illegal, it's not totally okay.
- even jack thompson's first attempts were not clean, if derived from q3 textures.
- I forgot about the shader issue, which is another copyright infringement. Following some clean room design might have been a solution.

I may remove this archive from tuxfamily repo (I wasn't the one who put it there, but I'm accomplice for leaving it there, heh).

Thanks to copyright absurdities:
- you don't even have the right to get the main color of some texture.
- there are so trivial stuff it's hard to look at them and design them in a different way.
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« Reply #13 on: April 30, 2010, 07:38:17 AM »

If it's the same texture pack i'm thinking of, it's not even GPL compliant since I was denied the source for them upon request. Misleading.
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Gig
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« Reply #14 on: April 30, 2010, 09:47:02 AM »

... so people will have to come here to the forum, and ask about missing textures, so we will anwser that some extra third party packs exist, and link them even if they are not 100% really free.... while we cannot write about them directly from the wiki site? :-/
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« Reply #15 on: April 30, 2010, 09:25:31 PM »

- you don't even have the right to get the main color of some texture.
Frankly, I believe there is nothing wrong with that, legally or ethically.  Converting a texture to a single color is like converting a song into a single note or converting a poem into a single letter.  Everything which made it original and unique is lost.
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« Reply #16 on: May 01, 2010, 05:27:54 AM »

Probably right.
Why I said that is that from a technical point of view, one pixel images are derived from the larger images, and this derivation/modification is something which is explicitely allowed (like in GPL) or forbidden. It's like samples and quotes, I don't remember if they are legal or not (maybe they are or are simply tolerated thanks to some exceptions).
Well, legal dumbness Cheesy
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« Reply #17 on: May 01, 2010, 07:47:13 AM »

Well, to cut the Gordian Knot I should change the texture replacing process from a map-to-map approach to a work-fast-but-ugly approach and have a rough but complete package with all the missing stuff. I would still thoroughly document the textures and provide the SVGs XCFs etc., but instead of spending long hours with the details I would make them fast. And only if everything has a rough replacement would we improve the textures. The first version wouldn't mean the release of 0.9.0 of course, but at least servers could have something to use. The first version may be ready in autumn (May and June is full of exams for me). Who knows maybe with this approach the final textures could also come faster, since it's easier to open up an existing source file than starting from scratch.
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« Reply #18 on: May 01, 2010, 08:25:22 AM »

Why I said that is that from a technical point of view, one pixel images are derived from the larger images, and this derivation/modification is something which is explicitely allowed (like in GPL) or forbidden. It's like samples and quotes, I don't remember if they are legal or not (maybe they are or are simply tolerated thanks to some exceptions).
Well, legal dumbness Cheesy
I don't think that this can possibly be right.

Copying a pixel colour is like copying "return 0;" or "int main() {}". Nobody can possibly claim copyright on that.

Copyright doesn't apply to things like one or two notes of music (I think you need at least Cool, or short citations. You can't get sued if you quote a famous movie line on the internet, or a verse by the Beatles, although it's clearly copying. It doesn't apply to trivial lines of code, and I can't imagine that a colour of a pixel can qualify as "copyrightable".
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« Reply #19 on: May 01, 2010, 09:51:22 AM »

In France and in Europe, there is a quotation right, which is ruled by Berne convention, article 10. So they are dealt as exceptions.
Audio sampling also is illegal, some quick google search seem to confirm that.

These examples tend to show no matter how altered or reduced the modified version is, they are not legal, except a few cases which are explicitely stated in the law (quotations, parodies...).
Now it turns these derived versions are both very trivial and can have nothing or few to do with the original, but I think it's up to a judge to decide that. It happens the closer you are to elementary structures (like "language", or scientific tools), the likelier copyright won't apply. Words and pixels are means with a wide variety of uses.

So maybe you're right, maybe these derived images are not subject to copyright, because we don't consider them anymore as derived images.
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Gig
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« Reply #20 on: May 01, 2010, 10:02:05 AM »

Probably the situation is similar to these:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-ineligible
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:PD-shape

Anyway, if you create a plain texture using a "colour meter" with a copyright texture, and you copy its hexadecimal code (for example 000000 -black-, but it may also be A7K6C9 -i don't know what-), what's the difference with someone else creates a plain colour texture by its own, without starting from another texture, and makes it black (000000), or randomly uses a color and selects A7K6C9... its texture will be idendical to yours and will use one of the (many) colours used in the original copyrighted texture. But he may have never seen your texture or the original one. How can you say who copied who? I think a single colour texture is not copyrightable at all.

And probably also simple drawings, like triangles and squares, are not copyrightable...

About music, It seems to me that once I red something like a music is copyrightable after 7 notes, but I'm not sure about it...
« Last Edit: May 02, 2010, 06:11:34 AM by Gig » Logged

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Neon_Knight
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« Reply #21 on: May 01, 2010, 11:39:06 AM »

Well, to cut the Gordian Knot I should change the texture replacing process from a map-to-map approach to a work-fast-but-ugly approach and have a rough but complete package with all the missing stuff. I would still thoroughly document the textures and provide the SVGs XCFs etc., but instead of spending long hours with the details I would make them fast. And only if everything has a rough replacement would we improve the textures. The first version wouldn't mean the release of 0.9.0 of course, but at least servers could have something to use. The first version may be ready in autumn (May and June is full of exams for me). Who knows maybe with this approach the final textures could also come faster, since it's easier to open up an existing source file than starting from scratch.
NO! Don't do that. Better take your time and do a good job, instead of rushing it. We all know what happens when someones rushes his/her work. Your textures are amazing and are looking good. Keep it that way, please. Smiley
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« Reply #22 on: May 02, 2010, 05:11:49 AM »

I wasn't aware of these pages in wikipedia. This article about a "threshold of originality" clarifies a few things.

Some more link for fun: A formerly copyrighted pixel, hehe.
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