Creaphis
I will deliberately take a contrary position just for the sake of writing incredibly long arguments
Posts: 1389
Registered: 10-05 |
As someone sees where I'm coming from, I'll go to the effort to explain more thoroughly exactly what I'm saying. Maybe this thread can be of use after all.
In the "Heretic equivalent of Chocolate Doom?" thread, it was suggested that a utility be made so that mappers could legally use resources from multiple iwads in their pwads. This utility would be used by the pwad-player to combine the resources from multiple iwads into the pwad via some method or other, creating a copy of the pwad that would be illegal to distribute, but would legally have resources from multiple games. The pwad-player would thus have to own all iwads from which resources are taken to play the wad properly. However, as I tend to do in too many threads, I decided to introduce a different standpoint: this just might cause more problems than it really fixes.
If the long-standing practice of resource-ripping from other Doom era games continues, there will be no negative consequences. Raven and id have not indicated any disapproval of this practice, and whoever owns the rights to Strife doesn't seem to mind that their entire game is on abandonware sites. There is no external pressure to stop doing what we're already doing. The only problem with this is that it is, of course, illegal.
The proposed utility will solve this problem; it will give map makers a method by which to use external resources fully within the letter of the law. For this reason, I believe that such a utility probably should exist. However, there are several reasons why such a utility concerns me.
Most mappers will decide not to use this utility. Making maps that require this utility will limit the audience only to players who own all the iwads necessary. It absolutely should do this, as this is its purpose, but most mappers won't want this audience-limiting factor in their own work. Also, unless the utility's use is very simple and streamlined both for the mapper and the player, more mappers will avoid using it to avoid hassle. Thus, it's most likely that only a small group of mappers would decide to release their maps this way. This would be fine, as long as these mappers hold a live-and-let-live attitude. But, as this is the Doom community afterall, there's a very good chance that this minority would become very vocal. They may cause unnecessary tension every time another mapper rips resources and packages them in a wad. They could be another source of flame wars, tension and division. We might see just a few too many rants about the criminal ways of other mappers - even though Raven and id never seem to care, and even though most of us wad players seem to own all the iwads anyway.
Also, such a utility would be too limited to be useful anyway. It would be useful when resources are intended to be used exactly as they are in the iwads, but, most times when resources are taken from another game, they are edited in more complex ways than just a simple palette translation. Such a utility could easily put Heretic textures in a Doom wad, but there's no way that some automatic process could put Heretic-derived textures in a Doom wad. The small group of people who choose to use resources legally is suddenly up against a new artistic limitation - it's absolutely impossible for them to use textures derived from an iwad other than the iwad that their own pwad is for. This prevents the use of most of the available textures in the community. There just aren't a lot of high-quality, free-to-use, original textures floating around out there, and most of us lack the skill to make our own. If mappers are willing to accept this limit, that's fine, but if they then try to force other mappers to map in a more limited way, that's bound to cause some problems.
This is why it really just makes the most sense to continue what we're doing. It's not like resource theft is severe or ever will be; community policing has done a very good job of drawing the line of what sort of theft is inexcusable. We all instantly shun wads that use other levels as a base without permission, or include illegal mp3s, or violate the unwritten rules in some other way. This just isn't a problem worth worrying about.
I think it's a stretch to say that I'm "advocating" resource theft - it just doesn't bother me when people take textures, because Doom 2 maps with Hexen textures don't seem to bother anybody else either.
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07-01-08 18:25 
