posted on December 23rd, 2010, 2:25 am
Last edited by Anonymous on December 23rd, 2010, 2:50 am, edited 1 time in total.
My opinion about the issue with the Century and the Valiant Classes.
The original design belongs to DJ's authority so you have to give credits to him. You also need to give him credits for the textures as I only edited them to fit to the Armada II model.
However, both the Century and the Valiant models for Armada II are my work and so they belong to me. If you want to port the ships from Armada II to FO, you'll need my permission which would be granted with the conditions of giving proper credits both DJ and me. That means that you would have to state in the readme that this is only a port, the original one was done by me, based on DJ's work.
Permission of porting includes the necessary edits in the model (adding glowies), the textures (if the lightmap would be used a different way) and the ODF, because they HAS TO BE DONE for properly porting the ship, but excludes changing the model or changing the textures more than it's necessary. This is nothing to do with DJ as long as you give him the deserved credits, as you're using my work.
This means that porting my Armada II Century to FO - which is the case in the current Century project - needs only an expressed permission from me, but needs to be credited both to me and DJ. So the project may continue.
For making a kitbash - which is the case of the Defiant Type Mod - is very similar. The model for Armada II was made by me, so if you want to change it, you need only expressed permission from me. In this case permission includes the modifying of the model, adding glows and the necessary edits of the textures. You have to state in your readme that your work is a kitbash of my original, which was based on DJ's work.
If Dircome would restart his project and he would ask me for permission (which would be granted) he would be allowed to realize his vision. So the project may be restarted and finished.
Both projects involve models which are built by me and so they're my authority. They would use textures which I used so if I give permission to port/kitbash my work, it's obvious that the permission includes the use of the textures used by my models or they couldn't be appropriately used.
It would be a more delicate situation of someone would want to make a retexture for the ships, but it's not the case here.
Also, you have to distinct a port from a conversion!
Porting a model/ship to another game means that you don't change the model and only make the textures fit to the other game (i.e.: converting them from .bmp to .tga).
Converting a model/ship to another game means that you create a new model and make new textures/edit the existing ones so they would fit to the new model.
In the first case, you didn't do anything original with the model or the textures and a third party would need permission from the original author. In the second case, you made an original model and (half-)original textures, and a third party needs only your permission for using/kitbashing/adding to a mod/editing the ship, as it's your work. But still, you'll have to give the proper credits to the original author. This stands as long as the third party stays on the same platform that your conversion uses (in our case this stands, as FleetOps uses Armada II, but it wouldn't stand of someone would want to port the ships to Legacy).
The Century and Valiant Classes for Armada II are conversions and not edits or ports.
I will stick to this opinion and will act accordingly from now on.
(jk)
