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BlueFireZ88

Does the Red Cross issue apply to us?

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I think changing it to a pill was a better solution than changing the colors. You're going to run into problems with visibility if it's dark green or blue, or it will look too much like other things (armor bonuses are already brown and green). You could perhaps use a red H, but I don't think it would fit on the small ones, or it would look too pixellated in DOS.

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Enjay said:

The soul sphere that I added to my earlier post looks OK though.


Except for one thing. It's not a sphere.

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Enjay said:
Let's get some perspective here.

Compared to noting J&J's involvement in the issue, to explain the situation (and why the Red Cross never gave a shit before), your post looks more like a genuine contribution to the childishness or just something to add to your title.

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gamul312 said:

You're going to run into problems with visibility if it's dark green or blue...


Not really. Blue is the only colour range in the native palette that doesn't go completely greyscale in dark areas:



That sector has a light level of 0, and those SS still stand out. A blue cross on a Medikit would definitely stand out in dark areas.

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myk said:

Compared to noting J&J's involvement in the issue, to explain the situation (and why the Red Cross never gave a shit before), your post looks more like a genuine contribution to the childishness or just something to add to your title.

gotta disagree. so there's a corporation involved, that makes it okay to ignore the internationally recognized laws behind it and pretend it's for the good of internet communism (which is always good)? it's a symbol to be respected and apparently the gaming industry grew big enough to become a blip on the other industries' radar. why would you defend zenimax's interest against j&j's interest?

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It's really much too late to care about this when applied to old games like DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D, etc. They sold millions of copies, they all have red cross on white background health items. It's all water under the bridge. It's just something for newer games to be concerned with...

Freedoom did change the medikits btw (green cross on white background). But Freedoom has "legal" standards far above any other DOOM project, and I don't expect anybody else to really give a damn when they realease stuff for classic DOOM.

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yeah, but the recent reedition of doom did change medkit graphics, didn't it?

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Enjay said:

Not quite as ass as I expected, but definitely not particularly clear.

Actually that looks great, it's blue like a miniature blue bottle or soulsphere. Blue is a beautiful colour and some medical substances are already blue (like medical ethanol).

BaronOfStuff said:

Not really. Blue is the only colour range in the native palette that doesn't go completely greyscale in dark areas:

And not just in Doom, but also in real life, the human eye is more sensitive to blue in darkness.

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dew said:
so there's a corporation involved, that makes it okay to ignore the internationally recognized laws behind it and pretend it's for the good of internet communism (which is always good)?

I said that? Maybe you should drink less beer at this time of day. I never addressed whether companies should or shouldn't follow these rules, and fan communities mostly don't care and fall off the radar here. But you think it's good that the Red Cross organization is wasting charity money meant for saving lives to condition companies making video games, because J&J executives and lawyers wanted it?

why would you defend zenimax's interest against j&j's interest?

I doubt Zenimax gives much of a shit about it, but if my interests somehow coincided with Zenimax's, I wouldn't change my mind simply because of that coincidence.

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myk said:

your post looks more like a genuine contribution to the childishness or just something to add to your title.

Well, the short version of it is:

The Red Cross symbol is protected - as it should be. It stands for something far more important than grabbing 10 health points in a game. Game companies should never have used it in the first place but the Red Cross should have been on it more quickly too. As a principle, games using something else to denote health is already established and trivial for them to keep doing so. The same cannot, and should not, be said for changing the status of the red cross symbol.



I don't think that's particularly childish. People throwing their teddy out of the pram and getting all stroppy for no real reason just because an already protected symbol is now having its special status enforced (in a situation where it isn't an important symbol anyway) is childish IMO. It's too late for the original Doom, Duke, Quake, whatever and no one will care about a mod for those games either. New games, however, can and should abide by the rules and the re-released Doom is nothing but a novel quirk of the situation.

So we're all arguing over something irrelevant anyway. :P

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I'm up for the green and white medikits and stimpacks myself, as that is very much what I'm used to seeing IRL.

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Doesn't look bad.

Note that the + takes six-by-six pixels. The six-branch star cannot be represented in so small an area; it'd need at least nine-by-nine pixels to keep its shape. There are excessively few symbols that can be done legibly with 36 pixels on a small sprite.

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I doubt most people know a symmetrical red cross is a symbol for the organization that shares the name Red Cross. To most people, it's just a symbol for sanctuary/neutrality/hospitality. This is precisely *because* of the wide promotion that organization has given their symbol.

Still, it's not like they invented red crosses on white backgrounds. If you want, add two pixels to make it an oblong cross and hooray it's not the Red Cross anymore. However now England is your sworn enemy. Ok invert the colors? Then Denmark and Switzerland will come get you while you sleep. Ok fuck crosses, how about a red circle. Surely nobody thought of a red circl-- oh hi Japan.

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Vorpal said:

I doubt most people know a symmetrical red cross is a symbol for the organization that shares the name Red Cross.


I suspect that most people do know that the cross in question is a symbol of the organisation. However, I guess that many people didn't know that the cross was legally protected and isn't just a universal symbol for healthcare/first aid/health/whatever.

I confess, I knew that it was the symbol of the Red Cross but, until this issue first surfaced, I didn't realise that it wasn't a universal symbol that anyone can use. My initial reaction was similar to that of others a "you've got to be kidding me, how can they claim that" kind of reaction. I think that response is a consequence of the Red Cross not acting sooner or protecting the symbol more vigorously and thereby allowing it to fall into common usage when it should never have been in the first place.

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Enjay said:
I think that response is a consequence of the Red Cross not acting sooner or protecting the symbol more vigorously and thereby allowing it to fall into common usage when it should never have been in the first place.

You keep repeating this like a mantra but in many instances it never affected them in a practical way, so they weren't going to go out of their way to correct irrelevancies or harmless cases. The manly assertions restricting the use of their revered symbol started rather recently, and this may have been the very purpose of Johnson & Johnson. Forcing a huge charity to stop using an identical symbol is a smaller gain than getting that charity to scare all potential competitors from using it.

The Geneva Convention restrictions to the use of the symbol arguably refer mainly to public use, such as in ambulances, hospitals or whatever, where it could impact the international role and identification of the Red Cross. The Wikipedia cites the organization's reaction to the use of orange crosses on ambulances in the '70s, for instance. Concern about media that could hardly cause such confusion only started recently during the time of the trademark lawsuit. Being anal about the Red Cross symbol is like saying using a national flag outside official State representation is illegal. The use of one nation's flag by another to fake identities or in an insulting way would certainly be a problem, but simply placing a flag in an image or video game for isn't necessarily a problem.

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Regardless, I still suspect that at some level the fact that the symbol was being used for all sorts of things kind of snuck up on the Red Cross until they had an "oh shit, we'd better do something about this" moment. I also still think that they should have been quicker of the mark too.

Why they had that moment and how much the Johnson & Johnson case had to do with it I don't know. I suspect it was the main trigger and perhaps Johnson & Johnson did want to spur the Red Cross on to doing something. I don't know and I don't really care that much either. Personally I'm happy to accept the symbol as being something special and protected and if the Red Cross are now defending it, fine. If defending it is causing them more harm than it is benefiting them, not so fine.

I see the logic of Johnson & Johnson's case. Their point of contention was that the Red Cross had started licensing companies that produced products that were in competition to those of Johnson & Johnson and were allowing them to use the Red Cross name and symbol. It's a reasonable claim. I don't know if Johnson & Johnson's goal was to win the case outright or to get the Red Cross to spend its time and money preventing people using the symbol and thereby doing Johnson & Johnson's work for them or not. Or perhaps their motives lay somewhere else or just in the middle somewhere. It doesn't really alter anything that I said and, as far as relevance to Doom and games in general goes, it isn't really important at all.

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[i]myk said: The use of one nation's flag by another to fake identities or in an insulting way would certainly be a problem, but simply placing a flag in an image or video game for isn't necessarily a problem. [/B]


Agreed 100%!! Finally some sense in this thread!

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hex11 said:

Nobody really gives a shit and this is all academic, but I do like the health pickups in Quake:


Yeah, I always liked them too. The 25 HP ones (blinking) were always thought of by me to be new or, undamaged. And the lower 15 point ones were sort of defective/depleted energy battery or something, etc.

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Enjay said:

Not quite as ass as I expected, but definitely not particularly clear.

If it were pixeled and antialiased manually rather than being scaled down from a larger image, it'd probably be just fine. It's essentially an asterisk, the likes of which have been getting drawn crisply at low resolutions for small bitmap fonts and pixel art since the dawn of time. ;)

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I've gotten quite used to the pill ones -- it's the same colors so at a distance it's less noticeable than if they were blue. Also the green ones look like ammo packs for bullets.

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Yeah, I'm not a fan of the green health pickups. The pill was a better concept, although kind of poorly drawn. Anything more detailed than that is pushing it; I probably would've gone with a red H or green cross, myself. (At least Doom didn't get hearts like Wolf3D!)

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hex11 said:

Freedoom did change the medikits btw (green cross on white background). But Freedoom has "legal" standards far above any other DOOM project, and I don't expect anybody else to really give a damn when they realease stuff for classic DOOM.

Indeed, this thread reminds me a lot of the thread we had in the Freedoom forum :)

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I think the pill logo on the medikits looks really weird too. I'm also not a huge fan of video game heroes popping pain relievers in the heat of battle.

I thought it was a little eerie in Max Payne, however it was relevant to the plot. But it also caught on with games like Cold Winter, where in order to heal, the player had to inject himself with some unknown serum and his health would replenish rapidly for a short period of time. Also in games like Left for Dead and many others that I can't think of right now, the image of the player popping pills as opposed literally bandaging himself up, which was implied by the First Aid logo on the medikits is a little unsettling for me.

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fraggle said:

Eh, I disagree. Some details were probably designed for that stretch (Doomguy head), but spheres and squares (natural, isotropic patterns) becoming ellipsoids and rectangles, I don't think so as much. For example, square telepads lifted on the wall look ugly stretched (they're not in the original game, but ports do have a tendency to cling to that stretch effect just because computers wouldn't letterbox 320x200).

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