So can you or anyone else confirm then that CODI actually signed the contract for the Premium mod?
Yes, I can confirm that they did. All teams who signed on to make a premium mod signed a contract before beginning development. Even if I hadn't read it directly (And I have), it'd still be common sense. That's how business is run. Premium mods aren't community content, they're a business venture.
What about the rest of their stuff? That's not Forgotten Realms either but clearly Planescape.
They made that other stuff before they ever signed on to do their premium mod, as far as I know. I don't know whether they would have used it for said project or not, I imagine they would have.
My guess would be that it's not so much a legal issue as a question of
whether anyone actually still has the work or if it's lost (or that
"absurd sense of morality" in dealing with CODI's legacy that Jedijax
hinted at).
Like I said, it's the legal issue. This is not my opinion, it's a post I read (I think in the now-defunct DLA forums) from ex-team leaders of CODI just as it was all happening. It's entirely possible that nobody has the stuff anymore, true, but that isn't the reason it was first withheld. And you're right, that morality issue is absurd. I strongly doubt anyone would've kept anything to themselves out of "conviction."
Eh, I don't see the problem with posting it. If it's a dead project,
there's no monetary gain to be gleaned from hanging on to it, or lost
from sharing it.
Morally speaking, there's no problem. There's no money to be lost from sharing it, we'd all be very happy to have it. But it doesn't matter. Atari is a huge corporation, and they don't give a damn. The entertainment industry is littered with dead projects that had developed a ton of stuff, sometimes even entirely completed projects, before the plug was pulled. They're still all banned from seeing the light of day. I really wouldn't get my hopes up over this tileset.
If it were a legal matter regarding intricacies like the
Planescape-over-Forgotten-Realms dilemma, the same would have happened
to all of the CODI initiative custom content, which has been around for
ages
No. The content was made at various times, some of it before any contract was signed. You haven't read the contract, so you don't know the nuances and particularities of the wording (Maybe some types of content were forbidden and others weren't, who knows). And like I said, this isn't speculation; I read it directly from a CODI team leader.
That's what I was going to post. Perhaps someone could contact
Atari/whoever and get permission? As it's non-profit, I don't see what
it would hurt.
Like I said, I wouldn't get my hopes up. Atari is already looking forward to NWN3. Even in a world where corporations routinely don't give a damn about individual people, the videogame industry takes the cake.
Example: A group of fans of the old King's Quest graphical adventure games was working on a remake of King's Quest not long ago. They got the go-ahead from the owner of the intellectual property (I think it was Activision that bought out the rights to Sierra's IPs?) and made a brilliant game. They finished it, the old story put to a completely new engine, new graphics, new music, voiceover, all made from scratch.
Then Activision shut the project down for copyright infringement. They revoked their old permission and simply shut it down. The team had no choice, they shelved the finished project.
Modifié par Eradrain, 28 novembre 2010 - 07:20 .
