id Software Releases id Studio

[cityy]

I just had a chat about this with the result that if you don't pur your EULA like this you end up with undefined rights user content.
A prime example is Valve now making dota 2 with the original dota being a Warcraft 3 mod. Blizzard went to court over the dota trademark apparently and lost although it was a mod for their game and they had a part of the rights to it. So Valve pretty much made their own sequel to the dota mod while saving quite a bit of monies.

[Kat]

That may be true, but I've seen similar things in EULA's from Nintendo and recently Instagram.

Well.. sort of.. The two, in terms of language, are similar yes, but the intent is wholly different... I can't speak to Nintendo without doing some research but Instagram was set up to specifically share User Generated Content (UGC) for both technical (network) and general service reasons, so they (naturally) have an inbuilt automatic 'grant of rights' to facilitate that. Without going into privacy issues over the *type* of UGC shared, even they (Instagram) goes above and beyond stripping users of what any reasonable person would regard as being .. reasonable, because it allows them unfettered usage for not just technical or service reasons (and that's not even getting into the 'requirements' of the Patriot Act, its ilk, and data retention).

Don't get me wrong.. I understand the need for companies to use creators UGC for promotional purposes, but I don't think writing unconscionable EULA's is the way to do it. And for myself, I'd encourage people spend their time learning tools that don't carry such harsh *legal* restrictions.

@ cityy: Blizzard went after Value for issues of trademark and copyright not the content they produced, i.e. it wasn't wither the *content* was ripped, pirated, 'illegal' etc. So that again is not quite the same thing. The EULA discussed here isn't about either of those but rather a gross limitation on your ability to exploit your labour in a fair and reasonable manner. As an example.. socks Quake mod posted in this very forum... sorry sock, that's now 'owned' by id and it'll be distributing as part of a commercial mod for which you'll receive no remuneration, except the kudos of course (and we all know how much food that puts on the table).

But... I'm starting to sound like a negative Nancy so I'll stop...

[Eraser]

I think you're wrong Kat. At least partially. I agree that EULA's like these are bad, but I'm sure it's not Bethesda's intent to steal people's work. I think the agreement is there to protect Bethesda and/or to allow them to use the content in promotional activities. The wording of the EULA is overzealous, but again, as naive as it may sound, I don't think the intent is to steal the work of others.

Still, having said that, the EULA would be reason enough for me not to use the tools.

[Kat]

I'm not suggesting their are "stealing" in a literal or traditional sense, but they are most certainly taking 'ownership' and 'control' from the author over the material submitted. So in terms of the license, once you submit something to them you cannot have it removed or taken down, even through DMCA because, and this is the key, a Creators submission to the license conditions is purely voluntary - voluntarily submitting to being subjugated (loaded words being used deliberately to make a point), largely invalidates arguments of unfairness or unreasonableness.

So the main thrust of the above was that an EULA belonging to a system or service where third party, non-associated creators, are encouraged to [paraphrasing]"create something cool"[/paraphrasing] aught not grant corporations unfettered use of a creators materials simply in return for their ability to "create something cool".

Lawyers are not naive with respect to wording, terminology or semantic meaning where agreements, contracts and licensing is concerned. Do they make mistakes?. Yes. Do they cover their asses in a such a way as to, de facto, strip a person of their 'rights'?. Hell yes.

But point/criticism taken nonetheless.

[BISTROMan]

Might be worth noting that it's not likely any studios outside of the Zenimax family will ever use idtech5 anyway, since they are no longer liscensing their engines.

Huh, why ?

[GONNAFISTYA]

Might be worth noting that it's not likely any studios outside of the Zenimax family will ever use idtech5 anyway, since they are no longer liscensing their engines.

Huh, why ?

id Software's John Carmack and Tim Willits are glad to be out of the engine licensing business

Last year id Software revealed that it would no longer license its engine out to game developers unless they resided under the Zenimax roof. The move wasn't all that surprising given that the studio really hasn't farmed out the id Tech engine over the last decade or so, eclipsed by Epic Games who has seemingly marketed its Unreal Engine technology to the point where it dominates the gaming sector like Intel dominates the PC sector.

"It's interesting when you look at our technology licensing -- it was never really a business that I wanted to be in," id co-founder and lead programmer John Carmack admitted to Gamasutra. "In the very early days, people would pester us, and we'd just throw out some ridiculous terms, and we were surprised when people started taking us up on it."

"I didn't want to be in the process of supporting a lot of outside teams, because you feel beholden to not make radical changes when it's going to pull the rug out from lots of other people," he added. "When it's your own team, you can make the sensible decision that [a big change] is going to be worth it, that it's going to suck for a while, but we make our way through it. But you don't want to do that to other people."

[lightmill]

Discouraging license to say the least.

[kaustic]

Besides the apparrent license issue ,What sucks for me is ,I have a computer that that would run this editing software
Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor
G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2400
EVGA 02G-P4-2678-KR GeForce GTX 670 FTW 2GB ,2 in SLI
and lack the knowledge required to use it. I'm still getting a grip on the Tech 3 Engine and havent messed with the tech 4 Engine
at all. I doubt very seriously its something I would be able to pic up by reading the user manual. I'de be in a wheelchair with a pocket
full of pacemaker batteries befor getting somewhere with this.

[D-Meat]

Well the licence sucks if you want to make something work outside of rage ... As far as I'm concerned, I really look forward giving it a try.

when I first loaded the editor, the wellspring default map was really a pain to manage, it took too many power. But starting from a blank space, it might be interresting to try out stuff.

as an artist, I think the megatexture is an incredible opportunity. I thought it also would be a great occasion to use procedurally genereted textures on a very large scale (I saw that all the textures were in traditional / tiled form in the library). For example, since one great big wall is only 1 big texture, why not havint it uniquely generated and thus avoiding any tiling artefacts ? The same could be said about geometry for generic / repetitive structure, but could be managed outside the editor. The "broken stairs" object is the first one where I noticed in the game that it was very often the same (cracks in the same place, etc).

Once I get the trick creating a map with all the built in tools, I'll have to test importing some outside assets to see how everything works. When I have time. Of course. This is the hard part.

[obsidian]

Megatextures aren't procedurally generated at all. The way the megatextures work is that they a bunch of traditional textures that you apply to geometry. Then you stamp and layer on additional textures and decals in the editor to remove any tiling and add high amounts of texture detail. Then you bake (flatten) the textures and decals down to a big compressed megatexture file which the game reads and streams to GPU memory as needed.

[Eraser]

Yeah that's his point. He says id Software still used tiling (base) textures for large surfaces and he was wondering if procedurally generated textures could remedy that problem.

[o'dium]

Megatextures aren't procedurally generated at all. The way the megatextures work is that they a bunch of traditional textures that you apply to geometry. Then you stamp and layer on additional textures and decals in the editor to remove any tiling and add high amounts of texture detail. Then you bake (flatten) the textures and decals down to a big compressed megatexture file which the game reads and streams to GPU memory as needed.

True... And false I *THINK*. The mega texture tech employed in past titles (Quake Wars) allowed you to use reference noise/mask textures to generate a tiled texture that was unique when viewed from far away. Again, I *THINK*, I haven't used it in a long time now.