Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby Julius » 17 Feb 2014, 13:08

Hello FGD community!

I got contacted by the guy behind the seemingly defunct Unity (former BGE) Zombie FPS Necrosis about a possible indiegogo to release all the assets under an creative commons or public domain license. The background is that we helped him before with crowd-funding the release of these nice assets: http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2013/06/d ... ender.html

You can learn more about the Necrosis project here:
http://www.moddb.com/games/necrosys
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/sho ... ger-on-BGE

Quite honestly I am not sure if another "art-dump" like this will attract much interest though, especially if it is all geared towards Unity (or BGE which better as it makes exporting it easier, but the game engine itself is kind of on the way of becoming obsolete by now).
So I am trying to see if this couldn't be turned into something more, e.g. convince the guy to maybe make it a larger campaign for crowd-funding an open-source game/mod based on those assets and an existing open-source FPS game like Red Eclipse/Octaforge or Xonotic etc. (or maybe the Torque3D engine? The new Godot engine might also be interesting as BGE is scripted in python and the Godot engine has python compatible script, but I guess the game code would have be to rewritten anyways...).

The assets are really quite nice, and an open-source coop Zombie Shooter does not exist yet ;) (although they start getting a bit old IMHO :D).

So any ideas, or suggestions?
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby vellis » 17 Feb 2014, 22:03

Based on the screenshots and videos of the game, the assets could be used in a wide-array of open-source projects. Modern-military shooters, zombie-slaying, Rust-esque games, etc. etc. The liberation of those assets under CC0 would be a great addition to the community, specially due to their high quality. Tying this to a specific title or genre wouldn't do much good. Releasing everything for anything is good, specially because the author can use that as a living portfolio. Setup a portfolio website for him, with an "asset pack" section or something like that, maybe an "open source art" blog, where he posts all his art and people can crawl and add to their games.
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby Julius » 18 Feb 2014, 21:39

The point is that the author would much rather try to get some monetary compensation via crowd-funding (I don't blame him, must have been a lot of work and AFAIK he is from Romania), for which a proper project that would also attract donations from players and not only developers (and FOSS enthusiasts) would have a much higher chance of reaching a good amount.
Even the recent, very well prepared effort of RotC, barely made the $1500, and I feel the general willingness of people to crowd-fund (especially also open-source stuff that is "free" anyways afterwards) has declined significantly lately (e.g. the hype is over).

Other than that... general art releases sound good in theory, but I have yet to see one that actually did much good in regard to actual projects (both in singular and plural) benefiting from it. As this is a quite complete and well extendable set, a direct beneficiary project is IMHO the much better approach and doesn't mean the assets can't be used for other projects too.

Btw: all available in .blend format, and BGE script would be also released. Hud arms and weapons are fully animated, but the set is actually missing a full 3rd person view playermodel, which is a pity.

P.S.: There is OpenGameArt.org for just releasing open-source content. No need for an extra blog or such.
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby charlie » 19 Feb 2014, 12:04

e.g. > for example
i.e. > that is / in other words

"I feel the general willingness of people to crowd-fund has declined significantly lately (i.e. the hype is over)"

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/i.e.
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby Julius » 19 Feb 2014, 20:37

Very relevant reply, i.e. please tell us about your thoughts regarding the art assets :p
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby Julius » 22 Feb 2014, 17:40

direct link to a video of the BGE version for the lazy: http://youtu.be/O34Kzz0Ye6E
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby Julius » 25 Feb 2014, 22:50

Really no-one interested? I think at least the weapons and 1st person animations etc could be used for a lot of games, not only Zombie FPS.
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby andrewj » 26 Feb 2014, 08:56

People would be interested if the dude actually released the assets.

Until that happens -- what is there to discuss?
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby Julius » 26 Feb 2014, 13:32

That is the entire point, a crowdfunding campaign would be much more interesting for the general "gaming" public if it wasn't just an "art-dump", thus I was hoping to find some developer interested in taking it up from the start.

Looking at the history of such "art-dumps" I am unaware that any ever got a significant take-up for what ever reason (just had a discussion about it were I was accused of "recycling mentality" and how that is the opposite of creative game design...), thus I really hoped to push things in a different direction this time.

However given the very lackluster response so far (which I have a hard time understanding given the high quality of what is being offered), I just recommended to the guy to just do a flexi-funding campaign and see how much donations it will attract (probably not much though).
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby gouessej » 15 Apr 2014, 10:20

In which format(s) are his models? I have nothing against creating "original" artworks by recycling existing ones and as I'm not a computer artist, it's easier for me but if I can't import his models into my editor, it will be hopeless. I support Collada, OBJ, MD2 (fully) and MD3 (partially).
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby Julius » 15 Apr 2014, 13:33

As I wrote before, it is all in .blend native files for blender from which you can export to all the file formats you mentioned. However I haven't heard from the guy in a while after I told him that there wasn't too much interest so I don't know what will happen.
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby gouessej » 15 Apr 2014, 13:47

The problem is that recent versions of Blender requires SSE2 and since 2.50, tons of import/export scripts haven't been ported. Even the collada exporter exported only the first frame of an animation for years... It would be better if he used a real exchange format instead of a format bound to an editor, even though the source code of Blender is available. It's worse than nothing anyway.
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby Evropi » 15 Apr 2014, 13:57

Well, .blend has excellent backwards (and in some cases forwards) compatibility so it's great when everyone uses Blender. But you're right, the Blender development team needs to step up its game and improve the exporters for popular standards like COLLADA. Besides, I don't expect to see .blend support implemented elsewhere anytime soon; it mimick's Blender's internal structure very closely (just like the GIMP's XCF file format) and was always intended to be a Blender-specific format.
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Re: Brainstorm: huge Zombie FPS asset liberation

Postby gouessej » 15 Apr 2014, 14:04

Yes, I confirm the excellent backward compatibility but for me, choosing a format which is both open, standard and widely supported is better than supporting the format of one editor. When I collaborate with some computer artists, they use different softwares, nobody would impose the format of a particular editor by principle. On the long term, I never store my meshes into a file using a file format of an editor. Collada support is good now, I was talking about the past... The Blender-specific format isn't designed for exchange of course.
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