[C4:AC] Using SMAC media, legal and technical issues dicussion.

[Blake]

Okay I want to get an idea where other people stand. I've seen it suggested that we should ignore Firaxis and just go ahead and do whatever we want, even to the point of directly defying Firaxis. My stance would be to try and slip a few small things past Firaxis but by no means try to upload all of the SMAC content. If Firaxis takes offense then we either have to do without or make SMAC/X a requirement for running the mod.

Anyway, onto some details. I'm including approximate size, using the most suitable compression (ie png's for graphics).
Media we can use (technically, not necessarily legal):

Small Logos: ~1mb in size. These are citizen icons, facility/tech icons etc. I'd be inclined to try and rip and bundle these with the mod itself.

Terrain Textures: ~200kb. These might make for the basis of placeholder art until we make stuff more suitable for Civ4's 3D engine.

Faction leader/base art: ~150kb per faction, for 12 factions that's ~2mb. Certainly this is small enough to bundle, but is starting to smell like something Firaxis is likely to take offense at. There does exist faction art made by 3rd parties.
Note: In order for the base art to look good as-is it would be necessary to lock the camera into a isometric view.

Voiceovers: ~35mb. Tech/Fac voiceovers and the "Drones need you!" one. I suppose this is small enough to upload separately, but it stinks like trampling over intellectual property. It'd be easy to support this as an optional addon (could just include blank mp3's that users can overwrite with the mp3's from the SMACX installation/CD and this could be automated by script, the only thing that could foul up this plan is Civ4 being anal about all files being identical for multiplayer gaming).

Movies: ~370mb. It'd be fairly hard to find people willing to host or players who can be bothered downloading these. The technical challenges are significant as the format is obscure and no open source player can play them (apparently SMAC .wve's are different to normal .wve's). However a free player does exist Wing Commander Movie player this is reverse-engineered from a Wing Commander executable and it seems the format used by that WC game happens to be the same as used by SMAC, handy. Anyway wcmv can rip to raw avi, but it would be necessary to use another utility to compress the avi.
Another (possible) alternative would be to get in contact with the author of wcmv and get some code that could then be put in a dll that could be loaded by Civ4 enabling it to play .wve's - this may or may not be technically possible and is likely to be harder than just using a batch conversion.
Either way we'd do the same thing as with voiceovers - including blank movie files and include a script that the user can run to rip the movies from SMAC to C4:AC.
Note: It might be possible to compress the movies down to about 150mb using a modern codec.

Blurbs, Book of Planet etc: Tiny. In principle there's no reason why we can't convert these files to .xml and use them directely. The blurbs are labelled the same as the icon/voice files. Script (ie diplomacy dialoug) Information could also possibly be extracted into a usable form - if so this could be of some benefit in reusing existing language translations.

Media we can't use:

Unit graphics: There Are No Unit Graphics. The units are constructed on-the-fly from a complex combination of 3D voxel models that use an obscure format. Pretty much the best we can do is screenshot the units. The exception is native life, battle ogres and a few others.

Music: Appears to be composed on the fly from lots of little .wav files. It's unlikely we'll have the resources to rebuild this custom music player.

[wgabrie]

I've been able to play the Project movies, shipped in the Mac version, using Quicktime. I haven't tried doing this in Windows yet.

[Senethro]

Firstly and most importantly, we do not defy Firaxis. If they say we can't use their materials, we respect that.
(Aside: Where has DanQ got to with asking Firaxis about legality?)

I think the ideal version of the mod would be using as few materials from SMAC as possible and as much of its own new material in the style of the original. That the original SMAC be a prerequisitie is ridiculous.

I see the mod development taking two routes from here depending on what skills we can attract. One in which we have 3D modelers and maybe some sound/music people and go straight to a final complete release. An alternative would be to do a small scale release of an early beta with many placeholder 3D graphics (I've seen that some of us can do good 2D already ) in the hope of attracting talent. While I've got a couple of forums of talented people identified that are already looking at Civ4 and to which I've subtly introduced the meme of a AC mod, I'd really like to have something concrete to show them before trying to recruit.

In short, lets try and make C4:AC look different, if we can't make it look special. 2D bases on 3d terrain won't work. If the talent doesn't come to us, lets make the mod in whole or part and go to them.

[MarkG]

It'd be fairly hard to find people willing to host

not really. we have no problem with hosting big files

for example we currently distribute Ages of Man, a 500+ MB file
http://apolyton.net/forums/showthrea...hreadid=134392

[Blake]

I think the ideal version of the mod would be using as few materials from SMAC as possible and as much of its own new material in the style of the original. That the original SMAC be a prerequisitie is ridiculous.

I agree.

Ideally I'd like to bundle a small amount of SMAC stuff with the mod.
The icons for facilities and techs.
The leader portraits.
Maybe the blurbs.

All unit and base art should be made from scratch by us, it might look like crap or be mixed with Civ4 modern age stuff (like reskinned tanks) but would do the trick. Graphics would basically be a permament work in progress.

The voiceovers and movies are what I'd be inclined to have as "Optional enchancment" for those who have a SMAC/X CD or install. These are pure eye/ear candy, nice to have but by no means essential. Also fairly easy to implement just by including blank placeholder mp3's that can be overwritten by the real things.

I'd only consider "SMAC as a requirement" if Firaxis raises a stink and we can't legally use anything from SMAC. I dont think they'd do this though. If they say we can do anything we want with the media files then I'd still be inclined to have voices and movies as optional seperately downloaded files.

I've been able to play the Project movies, shipped in the Mac version, using Quicktime. I haven't tried doing this in Windows yet.

Good to know, it's the same with Linux SMACX (well they are mpg's that are trivial to play). This will probably make it very easy to also support ripping the data from Linux/Mac CD's, the movies should only require a fraction of the work to make Civ4able. (the file paths are a bit different on all the different medias but that's not really a problem as the file names are the same)

[Kinjiru]

I think SMAC as a requirement is okay. After all, how many people are going to be interested in this mod that are not SMAC players already?

That said, I also agree that base graphics should be remade by our team. They will end up looking much better that way, we have lots of talent here.

Regarding the voice-overs, does anyone have solid knowledge of just how protected those are? Meaning, if we had other people record them as mp3's or whatever, but use the exact same words, would we be in violation of copyright?

[Kataphraktoi]

i just would like to see a good thing that would come out of firaxis cooperation. of course poly couldnt support an illegal mod so another server would need to be found...which could be the main problem

having the main file on p2p could be a way around this,assuming its popular enough.

That the original SMAC be a prerequisitie is ridiculous.

edit: kinjuri why would only current smacers be interested? if its put up as a civ4 mod im sure hundreds if not thousands would at least try it. i could see a very large smac community forming up from new players,just look at counterstrike for example.

[MarkG]

Originally posted by Cataphract887
having the main file on p2p could be a way around this,assuming its popular enough.

that way would include having no connection, support and help from apolyton in the creation of the mod

[Kataphraktoi]

of course poly couldnt support an illegal mod

which is what i already said

so almost 99% says we will be going legal which introduces the very good possibility of being shut down

[Chaos Theory]

If we were to require SMAC so that we can use files from it, someone could create substitutes for all the files used and thus play without SMAC. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that such a mod would require a set of files, which SMAC conveniently provides. I say it would be a bad idea to try to enforce that the player actually has SMAC, by use of checksums or other means.

[PJayTycy]

Originally posted by Blake
Small Logos: ~1mb in size. These are citizen icons, facility/tech icons etc. I'd be inclined to try and rip and bundle these with the mod itself.

We can do this technically and I don't expect legal problems here.

Originally posted by Blake
Terrain Textures: ~200kb. These might make for the basis of placeholder art until we make stuff more suitable for Civ4's 3D engine.

The dataformat will probably be different. A simple conversion will probably not work. So, we'll have to recreate them and there is no problem about copyright anymore.

Originally posted by Blake
Faction leader/base art: ~150kb per faction, for 12 factions that's ~2mb. Certainly this is small enough to bundle, but is starting to smell like something Firaxis is likely to take offense at. There does exist faction art made by 3rd parties.
Note: In order for the base art to look good as-is it would be necessary to lock the camera into a isometric view.

Faction leaders : OK
Base art : won't work. Bases in civ4 are (as far as I can tell) 3D.

Originally posted by Blake
Voiceovers: ~35mb. Tech/Fac voiceovers and the "Drones need you!" one.
Movies: ~370mb.

Good suggestion here. It will probably work, and certainly no legal issues.

Originally posted by Blake
Blurbs, Book of Planet etc: Tiny. In principle there's no reason why we can't convert these files to .xml and use them directely. The blurbs are labelled the same as the icon/voice files. Script (ie diplomacy dialoug) Information could also possibly be extracted into a usable form - if so this could be of some benefit in reusing existing language translations.

Technically no problem to copy, but maybe legal issues.




summary : this project would definately benefit from a few extra volunteer artists...

[Blake]

The dataformat will probably be different. A simple conversion will probably not work. So, we'll have to recreate them and there is no problem about copyright anymore.

The textures are in a simple pcx file, they might be usable as part of a reskin for example, or atleast as a basis.

[Blake]

Originally posted by Chaos Theory
If we were to require SMAC so that we can use files from it, someone could create substitutes for all the files used and thus play without SMAC. Therefore, it would be more accurate to say that such a mod would require a set of files, which SMAC conveniently provides. I say it would be a bad idea to try to enforce that the player actually has SMAC, by use of checksums or other means.

I agree. The way I intend to write the ripper script will be simply have it take a "root" SMAC folder (be it an install or CD) then it'll recurse through the directory structure and locate and copy any of the optional addon files. (SMAC will have less than SMACX). There might be some hiccups if some media files change names between SMAC and SMACX, but I THINK that SMACX files purely additional.
This way it wont really care if it's fed a Windows install, a windows CD or a Linux or Mac CD. A few files (mainly the .txt files) are archived into cab's or tar.gz's (and probably something on Mac's) but the voice and movie files are easy to get at.

I'd also be inclined to have the SMACX only media (mp3's anyway) that we use uploaded so that players who only have SMAC can still enjoy the full experience, this way we could make it full SMACX or SMAC/SMACX hybrid (ie no Progeniters) with a clear conscious.

[Senethro]

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE!

I asked Soren last night, and his suspicion was that, regarding use of original files, we would only be on completely safe ground if we ensured only people with the original SMAC had these files.

But he admits hes only the developer, and if we want an actual answer we should really email the right person.

[binTravkin]

asked Soren last night, and his suspicion was that, regarding use of original files, we would only be on completely safe ground if we ensured only people with the original SMAC had these files.

Which basically means we can make a version which says - 'if you want sounds, videos etc. working, copy that and that SMAC directory over to your C4AC folder'.

Sounds doable but I wouldn't count on that.

[Kataphraktoi]

no that would include pictures as well,unless you redo every single bit of art

plenty of other mods have gotten server hosting,there isnt only poly....

[Kinjiru]

[SIZE=1] there isnt only poly....

SACRILEGE!!!!

Get out the tar and feathers!

[Illuminatus]

I would prefer to make it require SMAC so that we can avoid legal difficulties.

[Blake]

I'm actually inclined to agree.

[binTravkin]

Hey an idea:

Someone should write an installer then which seeks for SMAC entry in registry and if not found says to locate SMAC directory manually and checks if it can copy all the needed files from that directory.

We will need almost the same for C4 but probably without copying the files (locating the regkey and if not, prompting to browse for C4 dir).

[Senethro]

I'm not sure. If we're making a mod incorporating parts of SMAX, as SMAX isn't exactly widespread its going to be somewhat self defeating.

And writing software to take files from a SMAC installation is going to be hellish, remembering how many different language versions/localisations and reprintings of SMAC there were.

Really, lets speak to Firaxis and get a firm position on if we can include original SMAC files in a not-for-profit mod. If we can't, I'm not sure we should bother with voiceovers at all

[Blake]

And writing software to take files from a SMAC installation is going to be hellish, remembering how many different language versions/localisations and reprintings of SMAC there were.

I've already written it. It's a really simple script not rocket science, it works for Linux CD and Windows Install. (a lot of the files on the Windows CD are in a CAB)

[MarkG]

@ Blake

[Senethro]

Originally posted by Blake

I've already written it. It's a really simple script not rocket science, it works for Linux CD and Windows Install. (a lot of the files on the Windows CD are in a CAB)

For SMAC and SMAX and french/ger versions :P

This also doesn't really get around the fact that there aren't many SMAC discs about anymore

[binTravkin]

For SMAC and SMAX and french/ger versions :P

AFAIK most files are named the same in all versions.

[fluxcapacitor]

I have not read this entire thread but am a huge SMAC/X fan. I had to buy a monitor capable of 800x600 because back in '99 I only had a POS 1990 VGA monitor capable of no higher than 640x480!! Anyway, my reason for posting is because of something I read on the first post. If there's gonna be an SMAC mod for Civ IV, I'm of the opinion that there is really no way around REQUIRING having the original titles. It gets the authors past any legal entanglements and keeps the quality where we expect it from Firaxis titles. Whatever that's my 2 cents.