the iwad conspearicy

so yeah i'm blasted out of my mind like i am every night and i begin to ponder....
since doom mods keep growing more and more extreme, isn't about time that we can make our own iwads? Yeah i know i can merge a pwad to an iwad in wintex but its not the same. Like mixing wine with water, its too...forceful.
like sonic robo blast 2...its an independent. I'm sure some of the other mods out there that are popular might fit this discription, but hey, i've got such a small mind for a big topic.



where is my house anyway?

bah, the dumber posts always get the most replies.



to hell with being inteligent

I was wondering a similar thing along different lines the other day. If someone made a totally ground up IWAD, new sprites, sounds, levels, music graphics the lot, and the freely distributed it, it would enable you to play doom using a source port without having paid for the game... Or would it? Where does Id's copyright stop? Would they have reasonable claim to the wad file stucture, the name or format of the entries and so on? I know that's not normally an issue, but could it become one if someone is clearly trying to replace the game?

I am not proposing making such a wad (although the WAD for my TC does replace almost everything in the original IWAD - but with other copyrighted material, hence no public release), I was just wondering what the position on such a wad might be. Anyone got any clues or know of any parallel cases?

Well I couldn't see a problem with it... id only have copyrights on the source code and the original WAD. The GNU that the Doom source is licenced under states that the source code must be made freely available alongside the executable. Since you'll be making money off your own material and not the freely available source code, I don't think there'd be much wrong with it.

That's something we were thinking of doing in the future.

There wouldn't be a problem with id, because it would be a free IWAD (public domain). Not for sale.

I read somewhere that you could charge for the stuff that's in the new game... like, you could sell it as a package in a store for a regular game price, but only if you make it clear on the box that it's freely available for download somewhere else, and give that location.

Sonic Robo Blast 2 uses a modified engine so it will read the new file. The main file for srb2 is still a wad with a different name. So srb2.srb can be renamed to srb2.wad so it can be edited.

/me stealz Ralphis's mod and sells it for 15 coffee beans

By strange coincidence, just today I found out what I suspected was true: You can change IWAD/PWAD status just by editing the file in a text editor.

The first four characters. Change them to IWAD, make sure the wad has all the resources needed, and create a .deh patch that looks for your file first, and you're all go, theoretically.

Could somebody with a bit of time on their hands try this out?

By strange coincidence, just today I found out what I suspected was true: You can change IWAD/PWAD status just by editing the file in a text editor.

The first four characters. Change them to IWAD, make sure the wad has all the resources needed, and create a .deh patch that looks for your file first, and you're all go, theoretically.

Could somebody with a bit of time on their hands try this out?

I tried this years ago. Changing the P to and I in the title of the file with a text editor made the file inaccessible and crash every app that tried to work with it until I changed it back.

I'm not sure if a port would handle it differently, but I doubt it.

heh. I think there's more to it than the letter :P

Blow me you insipid chodeprobe.

shut up.

Jayextee

You are both right and wrong. You CAN change the status of an IWAD to that of a PWAD (and vice versa), and in so doing fool editors that would not normally touch the type of WAD you are changing. It doesn't work with a text editor though. A text editor would normally save the WAD in text format, and thereby screw everything up. If you use a hex editor it should work fine. I've been doing this for years.

Were you using some kind of fancy text editor that also handles hex?

Incidentally, on a sort of related note, the DeePsea import routines now allow you to save the WAD you are creating as either a PWAD or an IWAD. Useful if you want to import stuff into a conversion where you are making a new IWAD.

WTF?

I must have done something accidentally right/wrong as you are explaining. All I did was make a copy of the Doom2.wad, for tricking WadEd into using custom textures, from a .wad I merged with it. I couldn't edit it in WinTEX, so I opened it up in notepad, changed the 'I' to a 'P' and, uh, it worked.

Strange... I'm 100% sure that what I did was no different to what you described, so what went wrong, uh, right?

I said exactly this in another post about a month ago. Say a bunch of people create a totally new iwad (for arguments sake lets call it "freedoom"), it would also remove the problem of people on here asking for doom warez as they could simply download FreeDoom instead. The only trouble of course would be finding the people to make such a wad, and whether it would be worth it.

Where does Id's copyright stop? Would they have reasonable claim to the wad file stucture, the name or format of the entries and so on?

You can't copyright "numbers and words". One can try the "trademark" route - but that won't fly with numbers:)) Indeed, that's why Intel dropped the "586" name and went to the "Pentium" names - direct result of a "486" lawsuit.

Copyright is geared towards the tangible "output" of an individual/corporation, not the intellectual concepts. So they could have tried to "patent" the layout, but they didn't. Patents have to pass a pretty rigid test - except when the reviewers are just plain stupid, which has happened in recent times.

So if one makes an IWAD that has all the right names, but different content - no problem.

Of course, they could always copyright the word "IWAD", in which case you're screwed :)

Heh, actually I'm totally clueless about copyright/trademark laws, especially American ones. So you can ignore the first sentence in this post ;)

technically sonic robo blast 2 is a "free-doom" and this one is used in both the doom and sega like communitys.


2 days without sleep

.. copyright/trademark laws, especially American ones.

There's an International agreement in this area that all the Western countries abide by and a lot of other countries too - since the late 70's. They are working on the Far East to get them to accept and enforce the same - seems they made some progress last year in China.

Single words can't be copyrighted - it has to be a complete expression - like this one. So what we write/post in the forum is a defacto copyright (Except for Moo<g>).

Technically, nobody can take ones post (pgm, Wad, etc), lift it and post it somewhere else without the author's permission. That's why CDROM.COM has you agree to a "waiver" when you upload stuff there.

i always thought it would be possible, to generate an iwad and use modified "ZDoom" source to make it happen.