FreeGameDev

Ok i know lots of people wanna have sauer maps in re. There are some (some?SOME???!? MANY!!! ) problems, and here is the thread u can write in your suggestions, ideas and code stuff.

My idea is to add the maps in pieces (like first 15 optimized maps, in the next update the next 15...) and we can vote wich maps we wanna have in 1.4 .

It won't be that simple For the maps to be just added in a official Red Eclipse release. First of all, the authors have to give permission to the RE devs to optimize the maps for RE. Without permission it's not possible to add the map. Putting the maps in RE also causes the problem that the game gets bigger due to the additional Sauerbraten textures. Besides, the the question is, if the RE developers even want Sauerbraten maps in RE. It's the decision of the developers in the end. For the size problem, my suggestion is that there could be provided a "Sauerbraten map pack", besides the Red Eclipse installer, for people who want to play Sauerbraten maps. In case that you try to join a server with a Sauerbraten map but without the map pack, the game should remind you to download the map pack.

A lot of the textures in Sauerbraten only allows distribution along with the full sauer game. Hence maps from sauer won't easily be included in RE, unless you install sauer side-by-side, as you've always been able to.

I also personally think that there's more work in properly bringing a map from sauer to RE than retexturing, due to the fact that they are different games. And that there's a positive thing being quite picky about what maps to include (and keep) in RE official.

arand {l Wrote}:A lot of the textures in Sauerbraten only allows distribution along with the full sauer game. Hence maps from sauer won't easily be included in RE, unless you install sauer side-by-side, as you've always been able to.

I also personally think that there's more work in properly bringing a map from sauer to RE than retexturing, due to the fact that they are different games.

But both are free games and use the same licenses (i think), why can't RE use the same textures?

arand {l Wrote}:And that there's a positive thing being quite picky about what maps to include (and keep) in RE official.

I don't get this part.

hulk {l Wrote}:But both are free games and use the same licenses (i think), why can't RE use the same textures?

Hulk, in order for a game like Red Eclipse to be COMPLETELY open source, everything has to be under a VERY specific license and have very specific instructions. Sauerberaten is not under the same licensing terms as RE, and is not completely open source either. Arand is our resident legal licensing guru. From hearing him talk on IRC and on forum it is obvious he knows what he is talking about so I would not ignore his advice because you may get us in trouble otherwise :/

hulk {l Wrote}:

arand {l Wrote}:And that there's a positive thing being quite picky about what maps to include (and keep) in RE official.

I don't get this part.

Every once in a while we have to remove old maps that have bad texturing, have not gotten updates, or are just plain bad in comparison to the new maps. Being picky is good since we do not want 60-70 random maps of varying quality in the official release, only the best ones.

The weapons' spawnpoints are very messy, I notice that you can't pick up the shotgun in any maps if you play with the "classic" mutator.
Shotgun is already included in Sauer, so why don't replace it with the RE shotgun?

Red Eclipse is truly Free Software, licensed under a Free Software license and with redistributable artwork. Including Sauerbraten artwork would make it impossible to distribute Red Eclipse as a whole, and you could only distribute an incomplete version which misses some artwork. Long story short: This would be a mess and therefore we don't do such stuff. In my view it also makes a game non-Free as it blocks you from Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute copies.

Pretty much as ballistic said, however, I think it is better to call Red Eclipse Free Software. Yes, Red Eclipse is also Open Source (as the source code is available to look at), but that wouldn't necessarily mean it is Free Software as Open Source does not give you the four essential freedoms. The only thing Open Source guarantees you is the ability to look into the code, but there may be additional limits on sharing, copying or modifying the code.

In the case of Red Eclipse, the artwork needs to be freely distributable, also for commercial reasons. Sauerbraten's artwork is not, as far as I'm aware.

Long story short: If we add non-Free artwork to Red Eclipse, we're gonna have a bad time.

TheLastProject {l Wrote}:Pretty much as ballistic said, however, I think it is better to call Red Eclipse Free Software. Yes, Red Eclipse is also Open Source (as the source code is available to look at), but that wouldn't necessarily mean it is Free Software as Open Source does not give you the four essential freedoms. The only thing Open Source guarantees you is the ability to look into the code, but there may be additional limits on sharing, copying or modifying the code.

Not true. What you're actually referring to is the 'shared source', sometimes called 'proprietary with source available', model. Open source is strictly confined to what is defined in the open source definition by the OSI.

But yes, the rest is exactly as TLP said it. Even if someone does release their maps under an OSS license, there would be bazillions of missing textures, none of which are licensed appropriately to be included in RE. You could ask for them to be more liberally licensed, but it's not really worth the effort and you probably would not get what you want anyway.

PS: I can't believe my spell checker corrected 'bajillions' to 'bazillions'.

Evropi {l Wrote}:Not true. What you're actually referring to is the 'shared source', sometimes called 'proprietary with source available', model. Open source is strictly confined to what is defined in the open source definition by the OSI.

Heh, embarrassing failure. But hey, an opportunity to learn! Thanks for that!

BioHazardX {l Wrote}:The weapons' spawnpoints are very messy, I notice that you can't pick up the shotgun in any maps if you play with the "classic" mutator.
Shotgun is already included in Sauer, so why don't replace it with the RE shotgun?

The spawn points chosen by RE are taken from the Sauerbraten map itself, due to the way RE does pickups though (press E to pickup) we need to do a second pass over the weapon entities to cull ones that are too close together. The shotgun you are talking about is probably close to other Sauerbraten ammo entities.