Using TMW's graphics in another game

[Hanno]

Hi!

Before I start:
I wasn't sure if this post fits into the graphics development forum, so I just placed it here. I hope this place is not too wrong



First I want to introduce myself:
My name is Hanno, and I'm a student from Germany. I've been working on online game development for quite a while now (it will be 5 years this summer), as part of the Elrador project (the website is in german, so it may not be interesting for most of you).
When I started I was a total newbie, and over the years I produced many failures as I learned. So far I haven't done anything playable, but hopefully that will change soon



My server-side software has become quite usable recently, so I decided to code a small techdemo. Nothing special, just a primitive graphical chat.
Unfortunately I totally lack any graphical talent, also I don't know anyone who could make graphics for me. But lucky as I am I found this project and its wonderful graphics. Kudos to the artists!

I searched this forum a bit, and I got the impression that all your graphics are licensed under the GPL. If I'm wrong with this, now is definitely the right time to tell me, as I haven't released anything, yet.



I want to discuss some points, regarding the GPL and how it applies to my work. Please tell me if any of those points is not ok for you.

1. As far as I understand the GPL, including your graphics makes my demo a derivate work, which means that the conditions of the GPL apply to the whole package, when everything is distributed together.
My code is licensed under the MIT license (BSD-like open source license) and some other libraries (MIT and LGPL) are linked statically, so everything should be GPL-compatible.
I'll provide the source code as a separate package, which can be downloaded from Elrador's download site. Additionally I'll bundle the code with all precompiled packages I'll provide.

2. As I said, my demo will be quite primitive. It won't feature a menu, an about box and things like that. Is it ok if I display a short message at startup ("includes art from The Mana World" or something like that) and provide more detailed info in the README file?

3. Who are the artists I should credit? I'm using your male player sprites and the woodland tileset. According to your AUTHORS file Clef, Neko-mon, Neorice and Talaroc may be the authors. Is that right? Or is it enough if I just say "art created by The Mana World (website address), get details there"?



Giving back:
As I already said, I totally lack any graphical talent, so I won't be able to contribute any art that may be interesting for you. You may use my code, however. Here's what I wrote:

1. The demo itself. This is just some badly written Python code, so I don't think that it's of any interest for you. Nonetheless, I'll post a download link here as soon as it is available.

2. My online gaming engine. While all my concrete game development efforts take place at the german-speaking Elrador project, I outsourced the development of the underlying engine into a separate project, called Elrador Engine.
Website: http://www.elrador.net/elrador-engine
Code repository: http://elrador.net/svn/elrador-engine
Most of it is written in Java, and licensed under the GPL-compatible MIT license. It's still in pre-Alpha stage, though.

3. Thousands of lines of old code from all the failed attempts I mentioned above. Most of it is Java some is Pascal, most of it has never been released to the public (which is actually a good thing). Believe me, you're not interested in this



Ok, that's it. Feel free to comment on everything I wrote. I'll also gladly answer any questions, especially about my projects


Regards,
Hanno

[Bjørn]

If indeed the MIT license can coexist with the GPL then of course you are free to use our graphics in your project and make sure your project is dual licenced, also available under the GPL. I think you'd have to make sure to state that the graphics are not available under MIT though, and just licensed as GPL. If this is a problem you're free to ask the authors of the graphics for permission to use it under different terms.

Do you have some screenshots of your demo?

[Hanno]

If indeed the MIT license can coexist with the GPL then of course you are free to use our graphics in your project and make sure your project is dual licenced, also available under the GPL. I think you'd have to make sure to state that the graphics are not available under MIT though, and just licensed as GPL.

Ok.

If this is a problem you're free to ask the authors of the graphics for permission to use it under different terms.

No, it's not a problem.
I don't want to have any GPL-stuff in the engine itself, as this would impose restrictions on people who want to develop their own games on top of it, but for my demo GPL is fine.
Your stuff, your rules

Do you have some screenshots of your demo?

http://elrador.net/~hanno/stuff/demo.png

[Crush]

3. Who are the artists I should credit? I'm using your male player sprites and the woodland tileset. According to your AUTHORS file Clef, Neko-mon, Neorice and Talaroc may be the authors. Is that right? Or is it enough if I just say "art created by The Mana World (website address), get details there"?

i am the one who made the woodland tileset (Kinetic helped a little bit, too. the leaf texture of the trees is made by him).

you may use the tileset under the terms of the GPL of course. when you want to give credit (although the GPL doesn't require to give credit to the creators of base work AFAIK) i would appreciate a sentence like "graphics created by <Authors> for The Mana World http://themanaworld.org"

[Hanno]

There have be some delays, but finally the demo is nearly ready.
The only things left to do are installing the server software on our server and uploading the download packages.

I have created a README file which includes credits and copyright information. It would be nice if someone could check if I correctly credited all artists. The README:
http://elrador.net/~hanno/stuff/README.en
(LICENSE and COPYRIGHT/CREDITS are the interesting parts)

Unfortunately I wasn't able to get the damn thing compiled for Windows, so there will only be a source release.
However, Linux users shouldn't have much problems compiling this.

[Hanno]

I finally released that damn demo. Download links:
techdemo.tar.gz, techdemo.zip

I've written some more info about the demo on my blog:
http://elrador.net/~hanno/blog/index.ph ... hDemo.html

Thanks again to all the artists who created those wonderful graphics!