Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

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drummyfish
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Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by drummyfish »

Hello, I've been just thinking (has anyone already suggested this? or does it already exist?) - how about making free assets and a complete game in the style of Morrowind for OpenMW, but under Creative Commons? Something you can just download and play, mod, reuse and redistribute however you like. I know OpenCS isn't usable yet, but the assets, lore and storyline could be already worked on, or the original editor could be used in the meantime. It would help OpenMW and the libre culture in general. I'd just like to hear your opinions.
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Capostrophic
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Re: Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by Capostrophic »

Example Suite is this exactly.
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drummyfish
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Re: Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by drummyfish »

Capostrophic wrote: 14 Apr 2018, 13:32 Example Suite is this exactly.
I thought it was just a smaller tech demo? Anyway thank you, I'll go take a closer look.
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by AnyOldName3 »

Making a game is a lot of work, especially if you can't just buy a load of existing assets as their licence is incompatible and you have to write a story. It would be nice if the example suite became a AAA-sized game, but we're limiting our expectations by what is feasible.
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drummyfish
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Re: Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by drummyfish »

Sure, I'm aware of all this, I'm just testing the waters, it would indeed be a years-long project. However, I see this possible, considering the community's been already able to recreate the engine and that there are free assets available to get started with (BlendSwap, OpenGameArt, Wikimedia Commons, Freesound etc.). The game shouldn't be huge (considering how long Tamriel Rebuilt is taking for example), but should be a full-featured game - such as the recently released campaign for the FLARE engine. But when there's the Example Suite project, there's no reason to start anew. It would probably be best to build atop of it once it's done.
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psi29a
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Re: Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by psi29a »

Be sure to talk with Destined about this, as he is heading up the Example-Suite and Template projects. A lot of time and effort has been put into that people can use those as a springboard to making their own game.

Don't forget the time and effort put into tracking down the authors of various mods who released their work under CC-BY licenses as a result of OpenMW.
https://github.com/OpenMW/UIX-R
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drummyfish
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Re: Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by drummyfish »

psi29a wrote: 15 Apr 2018, 00:01 Don't forget the time and effort put into tracking down the authors of various mods who released their work under CC-BY licenses as a result of OpenMW.
https://github.com/OpenMW/UIX-R
This is great, thank you!

I'd personally prefer to release everything under CC0, just because when you're managing hundreds of resources it's hard to keep track of different licenses, list of people you should credit, it's a lot of hassle etc. Not that I don't want to credit people, but sometimes a name gets lost in the credits file and then you're technically violating the license. So if anyone is thinking about a similar project, please consider CC0.
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psi29a
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Re: Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by psi29a »

The Template project I started, sub-project from the Example-Suite is CC-BY 4.0

https://bugs.openmw.org/projects/examplesuite/files

That being said, there are lots of other resources out there that are CC0.
unelsson
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Re: Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by unelsson »

I used the template for the starters of a project like this, and I can say it technically works, but it seems that there still was some Morrowind-related there, like some menu layout graphics etc, hud graphics etc. I wonder how it would work without Morrowind installed... Anyway, it seems it's still a long road before OpenMW actually is a full featured or "complete" free engine for stand alone game.

I (or a company I'm part of) own considerable amount of fictional rpg content that is licenced CC-BY-NC-SA, and it's intriguing to think if OpenMW could be used to develop that content into a game. To my understanding, OpenMW engine could be branched and further developed into a new open source engine, and as long the code remains free, one could even sell the actual game content (e.g. .omwgame -files). There also might be monetizing ways in selling game assets or gathering donations in order to develop free content, free assets etc. I don't have plans for this, but I guess it's good to understand what's legal and what's considered fair use. What do people here think of monetizing content for OpenMW?
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AnyOldName3
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Re: Free-licensed game in OpenMW engine?

Post by AnyOldName3 »

The engine is GPL, so you're even allowed to sell OpenMW itself (as long as you give anyone with a binary build access to the source code the binary was built from). Of course, unless you added some amazing features and didn't contribute them upstream, no one would pay for it as they could download it for free elsewhere. If you did add some amazing new features, there's nothing to stop the people you sell it to from sharing the source code you're obligated to give them access to back to the man OpenMW team, and then we could integrate it back into the main engine.
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