Project "Sample FOSS data for VCMI"

[Ivan]

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.

[q4a]

Some suggestions:

• turn sample data into a mod…
• better names…

I’ll check this a bit later.

• license. Your repo has GPL2 license…

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

The Battle for Wesnoth:
The game’s source code and artwork, sound, and music assets are provided under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2, or (at your option) any later version. Note that for artwork, sound, and music, we interpret “preferred form of the work for making modifications” as the modifiable form that the author chooses to ship us for the source tree. For convenience, a reference copy of the GNU GPL version 2 is provided in the COPYING.txt file in this distribution.

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:

Note that right now this replacement is not supported fully

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

[Ivan]

By the way, Can I use .json file + .png-s insteam of .def?

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

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

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

[val-gaav]

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.

[q4a]

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: …

[val-gaav]

Anyway, main question is: Is it legal to create sample data with seperate license for each file?

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
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.

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

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.

[Ivan]

he rest is not clearly defined because game is a whole you cannot just turn of some graphic files and, run it without.

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

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

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.

[Macron1]

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

[josch]

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

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 )

[Andrettin]

There was a talk about it on acidcave recently and it is not only my opinion. Just think about it if it was ok game studios would make copies of their competitors games with the same mechanics and sold it cheaper. I also do not know of any FOSS game that recreates exactly an comercial game.

If that doesn’t convince you look at other life examples . is it ok to make exactly the same car as your competitor and just name it differently? (Well maybe in china it is ok )

You can’t do that to a car because of patents, not because of copyright per se. Mechanics cannot be copyrighted; they can be patented, but patents have a much more limited duration. An example of a game mechanic that is patented is the “tap” mechanic used by Magic: The Gathering. But it is extremely unlikely that creature stats and etc. in HoMM3 were patented.

As for creating copies with the same mechanics, that happens all the time, specially for mobile games. For PC games (which are much more complex), there usually isn’t enough incentive to do so (if you’re going to develop an entire engine and artwork set, why not put your ideas in there?), but it’s still legal.

What may be copyrighted are certain artistic expressions like gorgons being bovine creatures, but even that is a stretch.