Project "Sample FOSS data for VCMI"

Star Control 2 (The Ur-Quan Masters), OpenTTD?

Of cause, foss version will not have exactly creatures lineup due to lack of content. Stats can be changed slightly.

For FOSS game quality is good already. It can be polished later or by other project members if there any.
Hey, we have Wesnoth. It’s a foss game with big community and constantly added assets. Community not stops even there are very poor graphics assets, most of units have only 1-2 frames of animation, and lineups are not very original for races.

On opengameart.org people are discussed about using Wesnoth graphics for VCMI :sunglasses:
opengameart.org/forumtopic/community-project-free-asset-packgame-for-vcmi

No, but as a whole units stats, abilities and whole game mechanics is a “rule set” and as a whole it falls under copyright. Game mechanics (like fe. creature stats or hero specials) would have to be changed here and there to make it legal.

BTW.
Cove an Forge are tagged as CC-BY-SA license in vcmi_launcher. After installing you can check mod.json file and the line is there. I however have doubts whether Hota team agreed to that. CC-BY-SA tag might have been added by Vcmi devs, but it might be only for json files not the actual art.

Since Oasis is done by the same team that did Forge I suppose it will also be cc-by-sa… but that is just my guess.

You should also check this topic forum.acidcave.net/topic.php?TID=2686&page=1
It’s in polish so probably google translate will be your firend :slight_smile:

Thank you for usefull links and your attention. First post updated.

Does this demo includes SoD? Not sure how well VCMI can handle lack of expansions data. Besides - using WOG is not the best option for you since it contains assets from various commertial games.

True. However take a look on Dota2. It is based on Warcraft 3 map that used W3 models, W3 names, W3 mechanics. And yet Valve have managed to remove anything W3 based without significantly altering the game. Same should work for H3/vcmi.

No. I personally asked Hota Crew about this and they agreed. Same goes for creatures by Axolotl. Cant say for forge though.

Demo does not include SoD, but WoG + demo files are enough to win on test minimal map.

Yes, but as I said, I want to have 1st minimal playable release ASAP. If I can reach this goal, then I can move next: add missing sprites/units/towns, removing WoG requirement, etc…

So, I can use HotA and Axolotl art with CC-BY-SA license? Or I should ask them again?

Yes. I received permission from hippocamus to use Hota content under CC-BY-SA license. You may contact them to make sure that this applies to current release but I dont expect any problems here.

As for Axolotl - if I remember correctly soon after our discussion he published all his units under cc by sa himself. You may want to check his thread on df2.ru to recheck this and to see if he has released something new.

“Attal: Lords of Doom” is an old abandoned FLOSS (GPL 2) project that achieves very similar gameplay to HoMM and Warlords. It has many assets that can be used in this project.
sourceforge.net/projects/attal/

Graphics is not that good, but there are 9 (not counting Sorcerer) townscreens with buildings (buildings count is lower than in HMM3, but enough for free town screens for first time).
It looks like HMM3 clone, there few icons from HMM3 already :sunglasses:
There are plenty of map buildings also in scale of HMM3

Seems I found townscreens to convert to VCMI for near times. :mrgreen:




















Thanks a LOT.

UPG Posted town screen here (9 towns with buildings, 1 town with only 1 building)

I think, that weekly post of current state will be enough (if there will be any news), so here it is:
No screenshots yet. I think, that video will be better, but a bit later. In a week or two.
Current state:

  • copy folders “Data”, “Maps” and “Sprites” from vcmi sample data repo
  • copy folders “config” and “Mods” from vcmi repo
  • install WoG mod from vcmilauncher
  • and you will be able to start main screen without any original data (only WoG required) =)

Some suggestions:

  • turn sample data into a mod. Should be easy to do since mods filessystem is based on game filesystem.
  • better names. “Sprites/AB01_.def” is extremely self-describing. While we do have a lot of hardcoded file names in code filenames for game objects are really easy to change. Something like this would work:
"core:knight":
	{
		"mapObject" : { "templates" : { "default" : { "animation" : "map/heroes/knight.def", "editorAnimation": "map/heroes/knight_editor.def" } } },
		"animation":  { "battle" : { "male" : "battle/heroes/knight_male.def",  "female" : "battle/heroes/knight_female.def" } }
	},

You don’t need to redefine entire class - defining only changed fields is enough for mods.

  • license. Your repo has GPL2 license but your content (according to source repo) has various licenses. Probably better to copy that file into release repo. Besides - GPL/BSD licenses were made for code, for content it is better to use one of CC licenses.

I’ll check this a bit later.

No, my “README.md” says “Check Licenses.txt file”. My “Licenses.txt” says:

I didn’t create anything from scratch yet, except color palette and some basic things. So any current data distributed under the original licenses for each file from github.com/q4a/vcmi-data-src
I know that I should make it clear, but don’t know easy way to do it.

Note that right now this replacement is not supported fully
By the way, Can I use .json file + .png-s insteam of .def?
I found Animation Format with note:

What is current state? How can I improve replacing def-files with .json + .png-s?

Still partial support. Good news is that you can use it alongside with def’s - just place json + high-quality png’s as well as low-quality def’s and game will pick json whenever possible with .def’s as fallback

Not much apart from rewriting battle UI & adventure map UI to remove all ancient code that relies on .def’s.

Right now you can use json for interface, town buildings & creature cards - all of these should work with png’s

Gpl and cc by sa licensed art are not compatible . You cannnot mix art with those licenses in one project. opengameart.org/forumtopic/pract … f-cc-by-sa.
wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/G … _use_cases

Since it is problematic I am not using gpl art in legends, even though there were nice gpled art. Probably with this sample project it would be better to also decide on one license.

As far as I know, CC BY-SA 4.0 now one-way compatible with GPLv3: creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/46186
Sadly, but opengameart.org/ is not support CC version 4.0 yet.
Anyway, main question is: Is it legal to create sample data with seperate license for each file?
I hope, that some day VCMI can load images without necessary to create def file, and I can create big AUTHORS-file with something like
License: …
Project/Author: …

I cannot give you an yes or no answer to that . After reading the opengameart topic and some others my understanding is that it may not be as cc-by-sa clearly states that all derivate work should have the same license. I am 100% certain that you cannot make such linking in single files.
The rest is not clearly defined because game is a whole you cannot just turn of some graphic files and, run it without. Take in consideration that some people question even using cc-by-sa art with gpl engine (vcmi is gpl). However imho code is separate and one could always defend one self that vcmi can work with other graphics, also there are a lot of foss games that use gpl for code and cc-by-sa for asets. However I have not seen any big projects that mixes gpl art files and cc-by-sa files. All go for one license for their files.

If you consider simple screenshots from the game. Those are derivate work and are in one file. So a screenshot of gpl adventure map and cc-by-sa interface is not legal. If you think about it then the game art as a whole really defends itself.

So to sum up I’m not an legal expert. I decided to use one license cc-by-sa to be safe, and because there were more art assets with that license that I needed. Secondly all the big project stick with one license. Sadly this means some really nice gpl art cannot be used by me :frowning:
I would suggest to do the same with your project, because it might really hurt you when someone requests his art out of your project. How will you defend yourself then ? Give a link to other projects that also mix gpl art with cc-by-sa ? Might be hard to do.

PS. This cc-by-sa relicensing to gpl is interesting. since 2.0 cc-by-sa is also relicensable to any former license. This probably means that all 2.0 and up cc-by-sa can be re licensed to 4.0 and then relicensed to GPL. However I’m not an expert so it a big if…
Also there is a lot of art that is gpl 2.0 only without “or later” so here is another incompatibility.

Ivan I know I was the one that cried two years ago for having this support but right now I’m not sure. Town screen windows will clearly benefit from high color background (buildings maybe to) The same can be said about battlefield background but probably one can use high color bmp fot it even now. I’m really unsure now about adventure map as I have not tried to replace any objects.

What I have tried however is creature animation and I think all of my units will be fine with 256 color and will not loose much . I’ve used H3DefTool and it was also possible to make a def out of 24bit bmp frames … and vcmi was able to use such file. The only problem was the special colors. Both transparency and shadows didn’t work. Maybe fixing that would be quickier and easier and you can claim such support in VCMI without the need to re write massive amounts of code?

The other thing to conider is the tools. Many years ago I tried doing defs and the tools were horrible, but now ? H3DefTool is quite nice. It lets you set/change the position of unit for all frames. It generates shadow for all frames !. For buildings in town it generates the outlines…

Well I am for certain sold. Doing those manually is a lot work and with pngs those things would have to be done frame by frame …For adventure map this would be doable but for creatures anims? well imho no… So yet again maybe some fixes to code to make those 24 bmps in defs work fully would be better and easier to do ? and if anything pngs on adventure map would be more usefull then creature anims IMHO.

PS . Sorry for sp errors and typos. I had one functional hand to type all that.

True for certain parts of the game but it should be possible to make certain parts of the game optional - e.g factions, map objects, campaigns. So from my point of view game content can be interpreted as set of separate works

Semi-transparency still missing. You can’t make “real” ghosts without full alpha (not counting H3 checkers-desk fake fadein/fade out animations.

Oh - and you simply can’t create def with 24-bit images - this is not supported by the format. What you have done is converted image to 8-bit and then added it to def.

Lack of modding tools is more general problem. A lot of configs were generated by some primitive scripts or some smart search & replace. Suitable for programmers but not suitable for artists. IMO generation of both configs and animations must be done automatically via some tool. And one that is more user-intuitive than all those DefTools and such.

Agree with this.
Of cause all jsons can be made manually. But it will be good to have advanced tool linked to vcmilib, that can edit creatures with preview. The hard part now is to assign 3 sets of x.y for missiles (as there is no preview, for each creature it must be done by small steps correcting coordinates and several game restarts to correctly place missile. So i’m not messing now with coordinates and leave them as they are in standard creatures settings.
And if PNG support with 32-bit and transparency is future aim, there new DefTool-like program needed to work with images and give json, not def

Hi,

as vcmi still needs def files for some parts of the game (instead of just using png files) you might find a converter from png to def handy. Since I only knew of proprietary software that can create def animations, I wrote my own tool a while back. You can find my work here, written in Python:

gitlab.mister-muffin.de/josch/lodextract

The README.md explains how to use these scripts to extract all data from the lod archives, store them as png images and json (for the animations) and then pack them up again.

Here are some relevant threads I started back then:

[forum.vcmi.eu/t/vcmi-for-debian-main/796/1)

[forum.vcmi.eu/t/creating-def-files/799/1)

Here is a video that shows how it can be used to modify all graphical assets: mister-muffin.de/p/kpyL.ogg on the other hand shows all graphics being replaced by rectangular boxes with the name of the corresponding DEF file in their upper left corner. Rectangle sizes are probably not copyright-able, so if you manage to remember which DEF file name corresponds to which graphic, then this would already give you a hardly playable free game :wink:

A friend of mine also started this git repository daten.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/s … libre.git/ where they tried to create free assets but didn’t get further than replacements for the interface. Maybe it contains something useful for you.

With my Debian hat on: when licensing your artwork under a CC license, please be aware that CC licenses before 3.0 are not considered to be free by Debian (see here for the reasons: web.archive.org/web/20140805044 … mmary.html )