One of the things I'm planning to add is a way for people to list their game on an art page when they use a particular piece of art, so we can see where all it's being used.
I don't necessarily have an issue with a subscription model as long as you're providing value and people who stop subscribing don't lose access to the software that they've already paid for. (It's worth noting that a program can be both free software and subscription based.)
That being said, I'm not a fan of the idea of software as a service. Microsoft and Adobe are doing it this way, I think, because they can see the writing on the wall. With each successive release of Office, Microsoft provides less value -- in fact, Office 2000 is still a perfectly reasonable piece of software that does what most people need even now. The only way for them to get people to keep giving them money is to go to a rental model and take away access to their software when people stop paying them.
Honestly, in comparison to the major mods that have come out, Mojang's updates to minecraft have been pretty underwhelming. The big thing about this latest update was horses, and modders have had horses for ages now.
I think part of the problem is that they may be focused on Xbox Live, which IMO has been nothing but a drain on the PC gaming scene.
As for minecraft resources, what I've seen of that reminds me a lot of how ridiculously petty and self righteous people who rip and edit sprites from professional games can be. I avoid them both for that reason. Too much drama!
Oh man. Yeah, it's unbelievable how many people I've seen demanding that people ask permission to use "their" (unauthorized) sprite rips.
@Duion
The thing is a modder donates his work to improve the main game without getting paid and the owner of the main game profits from it, but at the same time does not support or care about the modders and when they decide to make a part two of the game the old mod has become completely useless, so the modder would have to buy part two of the game and start again with his work, this continues all the time.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Quake and its sequels are some of the most modded games in history, and although the latest version of the engine is usually proprietary, they always GPL their code rather than abandoning modders. The Quake 2 engine, for instance, is used all over the place now.
The reason it's even on here is that it's a comment that we've gotten more than once, and frankly I personally agree with it. On the other hand, OGA's official position on licenses is that we don't have an official position on licenses, so it might be better to change the answer to something more vague, like:
"While it has been argued by some people that the GPL and LGPL aren't really meant to be art licenses, they are included anyway due to the fact that they were widely used for art before the CC licenses became compatible with free software. It is up to individual artists to decide which licenses are best for them."
That being said, with respect to preferred forms: Licensing is complicated enough already. I really don't want to get into having people specify what the preferred form of modification is for their art. If someone doesn't specify and they disappear, suddenly the art has a lot less utility because it's not clear what the appropriate way is to modify it. Whereas, with the GPL, you always know you can modify the source code and release your modifications under the GPL.
Also, while the hex editor case may be ambiguous, it's also a very rare case. I doubt there's any license that someone couldn't come up some way in which it's ambiguous, but in the case of the GPL when applied to art, that ambiguity is ever-present. Asking artists to specify what constitutes a preferred form for making modifications is self-defeating, because we'll be adding an additional layer of complexity to something that's already dauntingly complex.
Regardless, if you find the quoted text agreeable, we can end the discussion here and I'll just change the answer to the question.
This is a slightly different direction than what this discussion is taking, but I think it's on topic enough to be worth adding.
One of the things that stops computers from being able to write coherent plots is a lack of "common sense". Apparently there's a project going on at MIT right now called ConceptNet, which is a large collection of concepts and how they relate to one another. Apparently it's licensed CC-BY-SA, which means that it's free to use and fit for inclusion in FOSS projects. The download is over half a gigabyte compressed, so it contains an incredible amount of information.
What drew my attention to this is an article I saw on slashdot about how apparently ConceptNet has roughly the IQ of a 4-year-old, which may not sound particularly impressive, but is actually a pretty big deal in terms of artificial intelligence. (Caveat: ConceptNet still does dramatically worse than average on reasoning skills, but better on vocabulary and comparisons.)
Anyway, the point is, that "common sense" required to write decent plots isn't completely finished just yet, but it's out there in a form that people can at least play around with. Maybe in 5 to 10 years, the database will be at a point where it can handle some more complicated reasoning tests.
Hey, out of curiosity, what was your process for these? It might be cool if we could have a community project to create some more tiles in this art style.
It's hard to say, really.
One of the things I'm planning to add is a way for people to list their game on an art page when they use a particular piece of art, so we can see where all it's being used.
I don't necessarily have an issue with a subscription model as long as you're providing value and people who stop subscribing don't lose access to the software that they've already paid for. (It's worth noting that a program can be both free software and subscription based.)
That being said, I'm not a fan of the idea of software as a service. Microsoft and Adobe are doing it this way, I think, because they can see the writing on the wall. With each successive release of Office, Microsoft provides less value -- in fact, Office 2000 is still a perfectly reasonable piece of software that does what most people need even now. The only way for them to get people to keep giving them money is to go to a rental model and take away access to their software when people stop paying them.
I would tend to agree with that.
Honestly, in comparison to the major mods that have come out, Mojang's updates to minecraft have been pretty underwhelming. The big thing about this latest update was horses, and modders have had horses for ages now.
I think part of the problem is that they may be focused on Xbox Live, which IMO has been nothing but a drain on the PC gaming scene.
I could see these being used to construct platformer levels, too.
@Sharm:
As for minecraft resources, what I've seen of that reminds me a lot of how ridiculously petty and self righteous people who rip and edit sprites from professional games can be. I avoid them both for that reason. Too much drama!
Oh man. Yeah, it's unbelievable how many people I've seen demanding that people ask permission to use "their" (unauthorized) sprite rips.
@Duion
The thing is a modder donates his work to improve the main game without getting paid and the owner of the main game profits from it, but at the same time does not support or care about the modders and when they decide to make a part two of the game the old mod has become completely useless, so the modder would have to buy part two of the game and start again with his work, this continues all the time.
I don't think that's entirely fair. Quake and its sequels are some of the most modded games in history, and although the latest version of the engine is usually proprietary, they always GPL their code rather than abandoning modders. The Quake 2 engine, for instance, is used all over the place now.
a few
Yeah, just a few. :)
Awesome work, guys :)
I moved this until it can be sorted out.
The reason it's even on here is that it's a comment that we've gotten more than once, and frankly I personally agree with it. On the other hand, OGA's official position on licenses is that we don't have an official position on licenses, so it might be better to change the answer to something more vague, like:
"While it has been argued by some people that the GPL and LGPL aren't really meant to be art licenses, they are included anyway due to the fact that they were widely used for art before the CC licenses became compatible with free software. It is up to individual artists to decide which licenses are best for them."
That being said, with respect to preferred forms: Licensing is complicated enough already. I really don't want to get into having people specify what the preferred form of modification is for their art. If someone doesn't specify and they disappear, suddenly the art has a lot less utility because it's not clear what the appropriate way is to modify it. Whereas, with the GPL, you always know you can modify the source code and release your modifications under the GPL.
Also, while the hex editor case may be ambiguous, it's also a very rare case. I doubt there's any license that someone couldn't come up some way in which it's ambiguous, but in the case of the GPL when applied to art, that ambiguity is ever-present. Asking artists to specify what constitutes a preferred form for making modifications is self-defeating, because we'll be adding an additional layer of complexity to something that's already dauntingly complex.
Regardless, if you find the quoted text agreeable, we can end the discussion here and I'll just change the answer to the question.
This is a slightly different direction than what this discussion is taking, but I think it's on topic enough to be worth adding.
One of the things that stops computers from being able to write coherent plots is a lack of "common sense". Apparently there's a project going on at MIT right now called ConceptNet, which is a large collection of concepts and how they relate to one another. Apparently it's licensed CC-BY-SA, which means that it's free to use and fit for inclusion in FOSS projects. The download is over half a gigabyte compressed, so it contains an incredible amount of information.
What drew my attention to this is an article I saw on slashdot about how apparently ConceptNet has roughly the IQ of a 4-year-old, which may not sound particularly impressive, but is actually a pretty big deal in terms of artificial intelligence. (Caveat: ConceptNet still does dramatically worse than average on reasoning skills, but better on vocabulary and comparisons.)
Anyway, the point is, that "common sense" required to write decent plots isn't completely finished just yet, but it's out there in a form that people can at least play around with. Maybe in 5 to 10 years, the database will be at a point where it can handle some more complicated reasoning tests.
Hey, out of curiosity, what was your process for these? It might be cool if we could have a community project to create some more tiles in this art style.
Didn't know that.
At least textures are relatively easy to replace. :)
Pages