I notice that there are a lot of people that

[jonwil]

want to recreate older ID fps games like doom, wolf3d and such in a modern quake,quake2 or quake3 era FPS but that its very hard to know how far you can go legaly...
I think that we should make a list of questions pertaining to such matters and ask ID once and for all whats legal and whats not.
We all know that its definatly not legal to use anything taken straight out of a wad file or whatever but what else is not ok?
Is it ok to, for example, make a 3d model of a doom monster and distribute it? (I notice that on the one hand some mods for quake and stuff make 3d models of doom stuff and get in trouble but on the other hand we have various opengl source ports with good 3d models of doom stuff and its ok, why is there a distinction?)
Or is it ok to, say, create a weapon for your mod (any weapon) and call it a BFG?
Or is it ok to, say, recreate doom e1m1 in another game WITHOUT using anything from a wad file, merly using doom E1M1 as a reference and making a level that looks similar?

For the things that arent ok, finding out why would be good also :)

If this has been discussed before and there is a clear cut boundry as to whats ok and whats not then please tell me where I can find out such info :)

[Mordeth]

You might want to contact the Reborn (Q3 mod designers, hosted on Planetquake) designers about this, since they (unfortunately) have first-hand experience in this matter.

In a nutshell: apparantly you can't re-create Doom levels for modern engines without getting into legal trouble. I also heard that id objected to the use of doom-based monster models... don't know if there's any truth in that (I'll have to look that up).

Somehow you CAN recreate Quake2, -3 levels for the Doom engine without anyone making any fuss. It might still be illegal for all I know, but perhaps id feels that this won't harm sales?

[Arioch]

It apparently was ok for the SOG team to use custom models that look similar to Doom characters, as well as to use custom models that look like Doom weapons.

It apparently is also ok for the Generations Arena team to use weapon models based on Doom weapons, as well as recreate Doom levels in Q3A.

[Guest kristus]

Arioch: The Q3 generations team aren't making anything that's not already in Quake 3. The only weapon in Doom that Id really can claim intellectual property on is the BFG: and there's a BFG in Q3.

All the toerh weapons are regular weapons. Exept the Plasmagun. but ID wasn't the first to come up with a plasmagun since Terminator 1 from 1984 asks for one. Plus there's a plasmagun in q3 aswell.
and the caracters they need from the other games are already in Q3. Ranger Doom and Grunt.

---------

Oh yeah. About Generations for q2 and SOG. You're right. Back then ID said Generations was illegal cause they ripped the quake stuff directl from quake. Not couse they had recreated the doom and wolfenstein stuff.

[Arioch]

My point about the Doom class, as well as the recreated Doom levels, still stands.

[SteelPH]

Mordeth said:

You might want to contact the Reborn (Q3 mod designers, hosted on Planetquake) designers about this, since they (unfortunately) have first-hand experience in this matter.

In a nutshell: apparantly you can't re-create Doom levels for modern engines without getting into legal trouble. I also heard that id objected to the use of doom-based monster models... don't know if there's any truth in that (I'll have to look that up).

Somehow you CAN recreate Quake2, -3 levels for the Doom engine without anyone making any fuss. It might still be illegal for all I know, but perhaps id feels that this won't harm sales?

has anyone noticed the following 2 things:
(1) there are two versions of the generations mod for quake2
(2) the voices of all the classes in sog (except the quake2 guy) SUCK!