https://www.eurogamer.net/star-wars-battlefront-classic-collection-used-modders-work-without-credit
A modder who believes their uncredited work was included in Star Wars: Battlefront Classic Collection says the whole ex…
How does this KEEP GETTING WORSE??
Their lawyers tie you up with a lot of legal fees trying to get you to defend it, if you don’t they take you to court for a frivolous suit.
Either way they win and you lose, even if you’re right.
I don’t see it playing out positive unfortunately.
Can the lawyers on the receiving end of a DMCA takedown take the other party to court for a frivolous suit? I thought one of the problems was that there is no recourse for those on the receiving end of a bad DMCA takedown?
What I think would happen is the modders send a DMCA takedown, and EA either does take it down, or they file a "we're not violating copyright, promise" form and then that's the end of the DMCA. If they file the "we're not violating copyright" form, then from there the modders can file a normal copyright violation suit if they choose.
Right, EA would file a counter-notice. Then the modder would have to get lawyers involved and file an actual legal complaint, and EA would respond with their lawyers.
But once they file the counter-notice, you could just stop there. They could sue you for filing in bad faith, but I've never heard of that happening.
Sounds like it, not a lawyer, but if you’re wasting peoples time and money, yeah there will most likely be a way for them to get back at you.
Nothing. Modders suddenly feeling they should be paid is really entitled and kind of crazy. Hey I made some fan art of a marvel character, should marvel pay me?
Modding isn't a job, and you can't make money off of someone else's game
You're conflating two different things.
There's modders who whine about working for free. And yes, modding is a choice.
Where in this incident is stolen work.
It's not work . I'm currently modding a game, it's a hobby. And I'd be entitled as hell to think I should be paid for it.
This "pay the modders" thing will just lead to more micro transactions. You want to download that created wrestler in the new game? It was made by so and so, you now owe. $9.99. fuck that
If you make something and give it away for free, that's fine.
If you make something and I sell it to the masses for a profit without your permission that's theft.
It’s not about pay the modders so much as if the developer of the game took your mod, put it in the game proper, claimed it was their work, and charged people for it.
Can you link your mod files so I can sell them without your knowledge or consent please? Seeing as you have no problem with it…
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/work
I found several definitions where this meets the definition of "work", but I'm interested to hear your argument about how "time and effort spent doing a task" is not work.
Nobody hired you to mod someone else's art. It's a hobby. I can't put brush to someone else's painting and demand payment
This is the wrong comparison. If you painted a modified version of an existing painting, the original painter can't take your work and sell it against your will.
Actually it's more like you modifying someone else's video game and then selling it as your own
Hey I made some fan art of a marvel character, should marvel pay me?
When they use that fan art in the next official marvel movie, yes absolutely they should.
But it's their character, you didn't ask permission to make the art out of a copyright, why should they pay you?
It’s their character, but it’s your work.
They cant just steal your work for their own monetary gain, just the same as you cant steal their character for your own monetary gain.
Both sides have contributed something here, but one side is profiting off the other through theft.
But the rub is, under fair use you can’t profit from it though, so as soon as you accept payment, now they can sue you. So in the end, they win and get it for free regardless.
If the rights holders enter into a contract and pay you for your work, I don't think they can turn around and sue you for making a profit off of it. I'm no lawyer, but I don't think the law is that far gone.
But how can they make a contract? Signing it would violate fair use exemption before that could be argued.
Corps are abusing a conflict within the laws, it’s not even a loophole, it’s just the unfortunate way the laws that protect each person/industry don’t agree.
They're still taking something they didn't make and selling it as though they did. I have every right to write and film a Batman movie, spend as much time I want making it professional, and then show it to people, as long as I don't charge them for it. That doesn't give Fox or whoever the right to take my movie and charge for it instead. Even if I did break the law by making people pay for it, the actual owners would only be entitled to that money, not to go make mroe money off of it themselves. It's still my work even if it uses concepts invented by someone else.
There's a reason every franchise under the sun has mountains of fanart and fanfic without the companies that own them trying to take control of it: it's blatantly illegal.
Their art, their copyright.
They don't expect to be paid, but they do expect that their copyright not be violated.
They might expect pay in exchange for granting a license to use their copyright art.
That isn’t what a DMCA is for. Someone being compensated for the work they’ve done is unrelated to suing a company for using your art/code/work without permission or reference. Weirdly aggressive to modders though.
Edit: for your edit, you can’t monetise a mod for someone’s else’s game directly but you can absolutely make money modding. And even if their EULA enables them to do so, taking a modders code without at least a reference is pretty dogshit. Literally a million dollar studio ripping off people who did it out of passion knowing full well they wouldn’t get compensated. I’m surprised a EULA can protect them legally for doing it tbh.
Hey I made some fan art of a marvel character, should marvel pay me?
Depends, did Marvel sell the fan art you created as part of a comic? Because thats effectively the situation here.
And this is not even beginning to touch content and features from other released versions of these games from 20 years ago not present, like four-screen splitscreen."
It's so cool and amazing that we finally have home theatre systems in every fucking house, and that's when devs decided we don't get split screen anymore. Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?
It’s so cool and amazing that we finally have home theatre systems in every fucking house
Yeah I've noticed this too and it bothers me. We had 4 way split on 20inch tube tvs on hardware that measure their ram in MBs... But on modern 75+inch tvs on consoles with GBs of ram... Nah, too hard. You need to buy 4 copies of the game and have 4 separate setups... and probably need to be in 4 separate houses.
Couch co-op dying is basically when I stopped bothering with consoles all together. If I'm going to use a glorified PC, might as well just use a full fat PC and ignore consoles all together. I miss the N64 days.
We had 4 way split on 20inch tube tvs on hardware that measure their ram in MBs
And were still compute-bound. Things like the N64 pretty much used resources per pixel, mesh data being so light that the whole level could be in the limited RAM at the same time -- and needed to be because there weren't CPU cycles left over to implement asset streaming. Nowadays the only stuff that is in RAM is what you actually see, and with four perspectives, yes, you need four times the VRAM as every player can look at something completely different.
Sure you can write the game to use 1/4th the resources but then you either use that for singleplayer and get bad reviews for bad graphics, or you develop two completely different sets of assets, exploding development costs. I'm sure there also exist shady kitten-drowing marketing fucks who would object on reasons of "but hear me out, let's just sell them four copies instead" but they don't even get to object because production-wise split-screen isn't an option nowadays for games which aren't specifically focussing on that kind of thing. You can't just add it to any random title for a tenner.
I completely agree but I doubt you can afford a StarWars license if you're making an indie game. Needs oomph and AAA to repay itself, and that's before Disney marketing gets their turn to say no because they've seen the walk cycles in Clone Wars and went "no, we can't possibly go worse than that that'd damage the brand". I'm digressing but those walk cycles really are awful.
Aren't you also effectively down-resing the 4 screens? You're not running 4x 1080p streams, you're running 540p, textures can be downscaled with no perceptual loss. Non-consoles are already designed to be adaptive to system resources, so I don't see why you need two completely different sets of assets. (IANA dev)
Textures can be scaled quite easily, at least when talking about 4k to 1k below that could cause GFX people to shout at you because automatic processes are bound to lose the wrong details. Meshes OTOH forget it.
Also I kinda was assuming 4x 1k to throw at a 4k screen as people were talking about home theatre screens. The "uses 4x VRAM" equation is for displaying 4x at 1/4th the resolution as opposed to 1x at 1x the resolution, whatever that resolution may be, and assuming you don't have a second set of close-up assets -- you can't just take LOD assets, being in the distance is a different thing than being in the forefront at a lower resolution: Foreground assets get way more visual attention, it's just how human perception works so you can't get away with auto-decimating and whatnot.
Yes, so much this! We played 4 player goldeneye on screens the size of a postage stamp for goodness sake.
Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?
I think a lot of the blame is erroneously placed on devs, or it's used as a colloquialism. Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment as a developer knows that the developers are not the ones making the decisions. You really think that developers want to create a game that is bad, to have their name attached to something that is bad and to also know that they created something that is bad? No, developers want to make a good game, but time constraints and horrible management prioritizing the wrong things (mostly, microtransactions, monetizing the hell out of games, etc) results in bad games being created. Also, game development is more complex since games are more complex, hardware is more complex, and developers are expected to produce results in less time than ever before - it's not exactly easy, either.
It's an annoyance of mine and I'm sure you meant no harm by it, but as a developer (and as someone who has done game development on the side and knows a lot about the game development industry), it's something that bothers me when people blame bad games solely on devs, and not on the management who made decisions which ended up with games in a bad state.
With that said, I agree with your sentiments about modern hardware not being able to take advantage of long-forgotten cool features like four-screen splitscreen, offline modes (mostly in online games), arcade modes, etc. I really wish these features were prioritized.
I agree with you on this point. I think”devs” is conflated for the developing company and its management and not individual devs.
It's not a question of capability. It's a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use.
Couch coop was a thing because there was no way for you to play from your own homes. Nowadays it's a nice-to-have, because you can jump online any time and play together, anywhere in the world, without organizing everyone to show up at one house.
It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use
Which is super ironic when you look at games that had an obviously tacked-on, rushed multiplayer component in the first place, such as Spec Ops: The Line, Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 3
Goldeneye 007. Yeah seriously. The most famous multiplayer game of its generation very nearly didn't have multiplayer. It was tacked on when they finished the game and had a little bit of extra time and ROM storage.
I would go back in time to 1995 and give John Carmack modern tools and maybe UE5 and see what happens.
Even if you gave him a current-day computer to play with (otherwise, even supercomputers of the time would struggle to run UE5), he wouldn't achieve much, consumer grade computers back then really struggled with 3D graphics. Quake, released in 1996, would usually play around 10-20 FPS.
4x splitscreen needs approximately 4x VRAM with modern approaches to graphics: If you're looking at something sufficiently different than another player there's going to be nearly zero data in common between them, and you need VRAM for both sets. You go ahead and make a game run in 1/4th of its original budget.
I can't do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game. Had they simply re-released the game that they already made, it wouldn't be an issue. Us fans of the old games didn't stop playing because the graphics got too bad. Even if we did, this weird half step towards updating the graphics doesn't do anything for me. Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game's size are the worst possible middle ground.
My flatmates and I actually played through a galactic conquest campaign on the OG battlefront 2 like 2 months ago. It holds up.
I can’t do that, but you know who could? The people who originally made the game.
How to tell me you're not a gamedev without telling me you're not a gamedev. You don't just turn a knob and the game uses less VRAM, a 4x budget difference is a completely new pipeline, including assets.
Low poly models with textures that quadruple the game’s size are the worst possible middle ground.
Speaking about redoing mesh assets. Textures are easy, especially if they already exist in a higher resolution which will be the case for a 2015 game, but producing slightly higher-res meshes from the original sculpts is manual work. Topology and weight-painting at minimum.
So, different proposal: Don't do it yourself. Scrap together a couple of millions to have someone do it for you.
I had no idea and it was the game that was listed without "2" or "3" etc. so that's the specs I used.
Yeah no the 2004 thing should run in 16x splitscreen on a quadcore Ryzen with a 4G RX 570. With headroom.
The general point still stands, though, you can't do the same thing with a 2015 game. On the flipside you should be able to run the 2004 game in different VMs on the same box, no native support required.
Output resolution has negligible impact on VRAM use: 32M for a 4-byte buffer for 4k, 8M for 1080p. It's texture and mesh data that eats VRAM, texture and mesh data that's bound to be different between different cameras and thus, as I already said, can't be shared, you need to calculate with 4x VRAM use because you need to cover the worst-case scenario.
Aspyr really keeps stepping on rakes with this one don't they? Rereleasing a classic like this should have been a slam dunk. It's really becoming a trend with Aspyr to have issues with their Star Wars ports, but at the same time I have to wonder if if there was pressure from Embracer to rush this out the door. When you're still desperately axing and selling off studios, rereleasing a fan favorite Star Wars game probably sounds like easy money no matter how much more time the game needs to be finished.
Aspyr has a history of laziness and incompetence, unfortunately. I really want to like the company because they were one of the few companies bringing my favorite games to Linux (KotOR and the Civ series) before Steam and Proton got so damn good. But their Civ ports were always plagued with weird bugs not in the original games, not to mention they didn't have cross-platform multiplayer, preventing me from playing online with my Windows-using friends unless I dual-booted or tried to fight Wine. And somehow their Civ save file format is different, so you couldn't even switch between Windows and Linux and continue the same game. It was baffling.
Seems like Tomb raider collection was the fluke, because that one is almost perfect. But I tried out the dark forces remastered and was met with a godawful AI laser rifle with visible artifacts.
The original was EA, this re-release is Aspyr, so as bad as EA are I'm not convinced that they're to blame here.
The original was not EA. It was Pandemic Studios, who released Battlefront 1 and 2 both before they were acquired by Electronic Arts between 2007- 2009.
Ah, thanks for correcting me there. I knew that EA were involved at some level and I didn't think to research that part of the post I was replying to, so I stand corrected, but I think the main point I was making is still valid, that the team that initially developed the game weren't behind this re-release.
Wait... I just had to look them up. The company behind kotar?? Okay now that fucking hurts. I'm used to the fall of EA but... Damn
Aspyr is the company behind KotOR's mobile, Linux, and modern ports. Bioware was behind the original KotOR, and they were bought and ruined by EA.
Okay, I should have looked a little more I was just looking at the years. It sounded like the original release years. That's what I get for half assidly googling while I work lol.
So it's like when Rockstar turned the GTA remasters over to the phone people and we ended up with a clusterfuck.
Aspyr's KotOR port was considered pretty good, I believe. I was disappointed in their Civilization series ports for Linux because their netcode was incompatible with the Windows versions, which is baffling to me, considering Linux users are already siloed so much in other ways. But the games ran okay, so it wasn't all bad.
But yeah, I haven't really heard any good updates or news come out of Aspyr for a while. If I recall correctly, they were the original devs for the KotOR remake, which was going to be their first game from the ground up from a technical perspective. But they had that taken away from them after working on it for a year or two, which is crazy. It must've truly been awful.
Man this is a shame. Slightly related... How's the switch port? I have a friend who's obsessed with Star wars and just got her first switch and I was going to tell her to get that
KotOR's console controls can be a bit awkward at times. I haven't played it on Switch, but I originally played it when it released on the OG Xbox. I assume the control scheme is similar. And the graphics are going to be dated, but that's a given for a game from '03. But other than that, I'm sure it'll be a fantastic experience, especially for a die-hard Star Wars fan. It's still my top game of all time, and if you can play it on PC with some graphical enhancement mods, it still holds up really well nowadays.
The mobile KotoR port was completely broken and you could never leave the Jedi Temple planet.
Jade Empire crashed on launch and was never fixed but they kept selling it.
Ask me how I know. Fuck Aspyr, they've been shit for at least 10 years and I wont ever touch their products again.
Embracer, actually, and while I do suspect that the blame for a lot of these problems lies with them (especially the lack of servers, which was almost certainly down to Embracer cheaping out), it's hard to blame this particular failure on anyone but Aspyr. While Embracer almost certainly created the conditions by not giving them enough time and resources to deliver good work, it's still on Aspyr that they used someone's work without permission. There's no real justification for that, even if you're in a bind.
I wonder if Embracer even had a lot of stakes in this? They sold of Aspyrs parent company (Saber) a few days before release.
Edit: My bad, apparently they kept Aspyr.
Amazing how you can just shit on EA and get upvoted even though they are nothing to do with it.
Almost like they earned a reputation or something. Almost like it’s expected.
Kinda like doing something 10 times in a row so on the 11th time an assumption is made….
I suppose someone could think that “amazing.”
I mean, it is pretty amazing. It's funny if they're ironic upvotes and it's wild if they're upvotes of agreement because it is complete misinformation.
Yeah EA has lots of bad rep and yeah they made a couple of games in the series. But the game the article is about, as well as the original game it is remaking were nothing to do with EA.
There were two heroes that were released as Xbox exclusive DLC back during the original release - Kit Fisto and Asajj Ventress. The mod added them into the PC version by reskinning Ki Adi Mundi and Ayla Secura respectively. The Aspyr release uses the reskinned versions from the mod rather than the official models from Pandemic/Lucasarts which they presumably had permission to use but chose not to despite the fact that the original models don't have graphical errors and do have the correct fighting style/animations.