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I'd love to do this with my VR game, but it contains at least a dozen thirdparty paid assets -- some of which contain heavy modifications. I'd have to withhold

I'd love to do this with my VR game, but it contains at least a dozen thirdparty paid assets -- some of which contain heavy modifications. I'd have to withhold these assets from a release, making it unbuildable, unless someone could prove with invoices that they also own them. Kind of bums me out, because there aren't really any released projects from commercially successful Unity games. And then there is the legal ramifications of having your source out there. What's stopping a bad actor from trying to find something trivial they could sue you over because of vague patents?

Waterluvian 6y ago
Are they the kind of assets you can stuff into a folder and if absent fallback to some dummy assets?
- hesdeadjim 6y ago
  No unfortunately not. The most important ones are code assets. For instance I use heavily modified versions of: - PuppetMaster from http://root-motion.com/ http://root-motion.com/ - Chronos from https://ludiq.io/chronos https://ludiq.io/chronos Trying to fake the API surface area of these assets would be... hard. And without them the game is entirely non-functional.
  - deelowe 6y ago
    I've seen other devs open source their games and simply release it in a non-functional state with statements clarifying what's not included, why, and what it would take to get things up and running. Just about anyone looking to build a modern game from this sort of source release is going to know what they are getting into with or without these assets and may still get value out of the release even if it doesn't provide all the necessary bits to create an executable.
  - mcpeepants 6y ago
    Could you theoretically supply patches to those libraries alongside your code? I'm curious what the legal implications of that are.
    - hesdeadjim 6y ago
      It's possible, but the patches would be tied to a very specific version of the asset. Unity has made this easier recently by making asset store assets part of the package manager, but my stuff predates all of that.
  - brokensegue 6y ago
    You could still release what you can. Might be helpful as a reference or for modders of your game.
boarnoah 6y ago
Hobbyist gamedev, kind of a concern to me too. There is no way to make such a project FOSS to any degree without treading on license obligations from the Engine or third party assets (most of which only allow redistribution within a clearly defined team). A compromise I've seen (and what I do with my hobby projects) is to publish source code to github without a FOSS license, so at least the code I write has some value to others to look at, binary assets (including third party) are included in the project over git LFS so its possible to deny access to those by not providing LFS credentials. An example along the lines is a project I follow a lot, the developer publishes their core gameplay mechanics code as MIT[1] and it's been very useful to me in a UE4 context (for things like understanding good practices re: building larger systems in UE4). I guess I mean realistically impossible for you to release projects as FOSS but IMO there is still value if you can push any content you do have ownership to in an open way (at least for educational purposes for others). 1 - https://github.com/alanedwardes/Estranged.Core https://github.com/alanedwardes/Estranged.Core
- zelphirkalt 6y ago
  Well, in theory, if you had used a free libre engine, you would not need to fear such a thing. That would have been an ahead of time consideration, when choosing your tools. Whether or not you could have done what you have with a differently licensed software is a different question, which is about licensing of big companies and their ethics.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    At hobbyist scale, it's usually more of a problem with assets rather than the engine itself, or with tools. For example, in a game jam you might want to be able to push something to a public Git repo that anyone can pull from and build, and license it so people on the team have no question about whether they can share the code with other people. Easy way to do that is to have an agreement like, "Let's license our code under MIT and make the art CC BY 4.0. Agreed?" Then drop copies of the license text in the repo with everyone's name on it, and make the repo public. As soon as you use third-party assets then you probably can't do that any more. Just speaking from a practical perspective here... I'm working with people and want them to freely use the code that I've written and the assets I've made.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
masklinn 6y ago
> I'd love to do this with my VR game, but it contains at least a dozen thirdparty paid assets Note that the release doesn't contain any assets. It's buildable in the sense that you can build the binary (and even then it looks like that doesn't actually work quite yet for any random setup). IME this is common for OSS release of commercial games, generally you have to provide the game assets to get a playable artifact. Though I guess it's more complicated if building the game assets is part of your build pipeline.
- hesdeadjim 6y ago
  This is one reason I'd love to be able to fully open it up. It's great to read code and see how things are done (or shouldn't be), but without it being playable it kind of comes and goes. At this point with my game I'd be happy to have the whole damn thing up such that people could build and play it, and even make new levels if they wanted to. The long tail on my PC sales have dipped enough that any potential loss of income would be irrelevant to me because of the cool stuff people might come up with.
  - masklinn 6y ago
    Seems like it would be easier to open it up earlier than later with something like a complete listing and documentation of assets? That way if people are interested they can assist in re-building “unencumbered” assets.
kllrnohj 6y ago
If you're doing it for community contributions then yeah you're stuck. But if you just want to let other people see & learn from your code you're perfectly free to release whatever you can. For example DOOM, the thing ported to freaking everywhere, was released without working sound on DOS because of licenses ( https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM ): > The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on linux. We couldn't release the dos code because of a copyrighted sound library we used (wow, was that a mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I honestly don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft did to windows. And also without any game art assets - no textures, no levels, no sounds, no etc... Just the code, and just the code that wasn't covered by a license agreement.
danShumway 6y ago
I have a policy with the games I'm working on that I won't include any resource, engine, code, etc... unless it's Free (Libre) or I personally own the IP. I often wonder if I'm too strict about that, but seeing comments like this makes me feel like it's the right move. I don't want to be in a situation where I want to do something with my game and can't because I would need to track down the rightsholder. As a consumer I want to have some semblance of ownership over the things I buy, but even more than that as a creator, I really want to own the things I make.
- chrisweekly 6y ago
  Kudos! Also, I just checked out your personal site and WOW does "Reset Hard" (2018) sound amazing! https://danshumway.com/blog/reset-hard-announcement/ https://danshumway.com/blog/reset-hard-announcement/ On my phone, no time now to look closer but plan to soon.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    Thanks! I've been really bad over the past year at updating the site about progress, but the game is still being worked on and I'm still pretty excited about it. Just still in the middle of development.
- hesdeadjim 6y ago
  This is just my opinion, so grain of salt. But I think this is an untenable restriction for a tiny indie team if you want to ship something across multiple platforms in a relatively short amount of time. We were ten months from start to finish on PC SteamVR, a couple months to Oculus, and then four to PS4. With two people. My game is built on top of literally millions of man hours of development. This game would basically never have happened without a ton of proprietary software. That all said, it's awesome to see when people have the opportunity to go full custom engine like they did with Amnesia or Noita.
  - account42 6y ago
    > My game is built on top of literally millions of man hours of development. This game would basically never have happened without a ton of proprietary software. Sure, starting from scratch will only be realistic for few projects but there is also millions of man hours worth of non-proprietary software that you can build on. If that would have been possible for you is impossible to say without knowing the specifics, but you should not jump to the conclusion that it is impossible for everyone. VR specifically is a field where this may be more difficult than elsewhere because it's new and niche so good open source solutions have not yet settled.
tinus_hn 6y ago
I’m not sure if this release contains assets either, it looks like it is the engine only.

Waterluvian 6y ago

Are they the kind of assets you can stuff into a folder and if absent fallback to some dummy assets?

hesdeadjim 6y ago
No unfortunately not. The most important ones are code assets. For instance I use heavily modified versions of: - PuppetMaster from http://root-motion.com/ http://root-motion.com/ - Chronos from https://ludiq.io/chronos https://ludiq.io/chronos Trying to fake the API surface area of these assets would be... hard. And without them the game is entirely non-functional.
- deelowe 6y ago
  I've seen other devs open source their games and simply release it in a non-functional state with statements clarifying what's not included, why, and what it would take to get things up and running. Just about anyone looking to build a modern game from this sort of source release is going to know what they are getting into with or without these assets and may still get value out of the release even if it doesn't provide all the necessary bits to create an executable.
- mcpeepants 6y ago
  Could you theoretically supply patches to those libraries alongside your code? I'm curious what the legal implications of that are.
  - hesdeadjim 6y ago
    It's possible, but the patches would be tied to a very specific version of the asset. Unity has made this easier recently by making asset store assets part of the package manager, but my stuff predates all of that.
- brokensegue 6y ago
  You could still release what you can. Might be helpful as a reference or for modders of your game.

boarnoah 6y ago

Hobbyist gamedev, kind of a concern to me too. There is no way to make such a project FOSS to any degree without treading on license obligations from the Engine or third party assets (most of which only allow redistribution within a clearly defined team). A compromise I've seen (and what I do with my hobby projects) is to publish source code to github without a FOSS license, so at least the code I write has some value to others to look at, binary assets (including third party) are included in the project over git LFS so its possible to deny access to those by not providing LFS credentials. An example along the lines is a project I follow a lot, the developer publishes their core gameplay mechanics code as MIT[1] and it's been very useful to me in a UE4 context (for things like understanding good practices re: building larger systems in UE4). I guess I mean realistically impossible for you to release projects as FOSS but IMO there is still value if you can push any content you do have ownership to in an open way (at least for educational purposes for others). 1 - https://github.com/alanedwardes/Estranged.Core https://github.com/alanedwardes/Estranged.Core

zelphirkalt 6y ago
Well, in theory, if you had used a free libre engine, you would not need to fear such a thing. That would have been an ahead of time consideration, when choosing your tools. Whether or not you could have done what you have with a differently licensed software is a different question, which is about licensing of big companies and their ethics.
- klodolph 6y ago
  At hobbyist scale, it's usually more of a problem with assets rather than the engine itself, or with tools. For example, in a game jam you might want to be able to push something to a public Git repo that anyone can pull from and build, and license it so people on the team have no question about whether they can share the code with other people. Easy way to do that is to have an agreement like, "Let's license our code under MIT and make the art CC BY 4.0. Agreed?" Then drop copies of the license text in the repo with everyone's name on it, and make the repo public. As soon as you use third-party assets then you probably can't do that any more. Just speaking from a practical perspective here... I'm working with people and want them to freely use the code that I've written and the assets I've made.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

masklinn 6y ago

> I'd love to do this with my VR game, but it contains at least a dozen thirdparty paid assets Note that the release doesn't contain any assets. It's buildable in the sense that you can build the binary (and even then it looks like that doesn't actually work quite yet for any random setup). IME this is common for OSS release of commercial games, generally you have to provide the game assets to get a playable artifact. Though I guess it's more complicated if building the game assets is part of your build pipeline.

hesdeadjim 6y ago
This is one reason I'd love to be able to fully open it up. It's great to read code and see how things are done (or shouldn't be), but without it being playable it kind of comes and goes. At this point with my game I'd be happy to have the whole damn thing up such that people could build and play it, and even make new levels if they wanted to. The long tail on my PC sales have dipped enough that any potential loss of income would be irrelevant to me because of the cool stuff people might come up with.
- masklinn 6y ago
  Seems like it would be easier to open it up earlier than later with something like a complete listing and documentation of assets? That way if people are interested they can assist in re-building “unencumbered” assets.

kllrnohj 6y ago

If you're doing it for community contributions then yeah you're stuck. But if you just want to let other people see & learn from your code you're perfectly free to release whatever you can. For example DOOM, the thing ported to freaking everywhere, was released without working sound on DOS because of licenses ( https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM ): > The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on linux. We couldn't release the dos code because of a copyrighted sound library we used (wow, was that a mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I honestly don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft did to windows. And also without any game art assets - no textures, no levels, no sounds, no etc... Just the code, and just the code that wasn't covered by a license agreement.

danShumway 6y ago

I have a policy with the games I'm working on that I won't include any resource, engine, code, etc... unless it's Free (Libre) or I personally own the IP. I often wonder if I'm too strict about that, but seeing comments like this makes me feel like it's the right move. I don't want to be in a situation where I want to do something with my game and can't because I would need to track down the rightsholder. As a consumer I want to have some semblance of ownership over the things I buy, but even more than that as a creator, I really want to own the things I make.

chrisweekly 6y ago
Kudos! Also, I just checked out your personal site and WOW does "Reset Hard" (2018) sound amazing! https://danshumway.com/blog/reset-hard-announcement/ https://danshumway.com/blog/reset-hard-announcement/ On my phone, no time now to look closer but plan to soon.
- danShumway 6y ago
  Thanks! I've been really bad over the past year at updating the site about progress, but the game is still being worked on and I'm still pretty excited about it. Just still in the middle of development.
hesdeadjim 6y ago
This is just my opinion, so grain of salt. But I think this is an untenable restriction for a tiny indie team if you want to ship something across multiple platforms in a relatively short amount of time. We were ten months from start to finish on PC SteamVR, a couple months to Oculus, and then four to PS4. With two people. My game is built on top of literally millions of man hours of development. This game would basically never have happened without a ton of proprietary software. That all said, it's awesome to see when people have the opportunity to go full custom engine like they did with Amnesia or Noita.
- account42 6y ago
  > My game is built on top of literally millions of man hours of development. This game would basically never have happened without a ton of proprietary software. Sure, starting from scratch will only be realistic for few projects but there is also millions of man hours worth of non-proprietary software that you can build on. If that would have been possible for you is impossible to say without knowing the specifics, but you should not jump to the conclusion that it is impossible for everyone. VR specifically is a field where this may be more difficult than elsewhere because it's new and niche so good open source solutions have not yet settled.

tinus_hn 6y ago

I’m not sure if this release contains assets either, it looks like it is the engine only.