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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Using Unlicensed Assets From Doom 3?

Posted by Zonk on Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:06 PM
from the that's-a-serious-charge dept.
Entertainment Games
segafreak writes "ShackNews reports that S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:Shadow of Chernobyl may contain unlicensed assets from other commercial games such as Doom 3 and Half Life 2. Though this has yet to be confirmed by any of the developers involved, if true this would be somewhat worrying. 'Responding to inquiries made by Shacknews, id Software CEO Todd Hollshead stated: I've seen a post on a web forum that claims DOOM3 assets are used in another game, but we've been working hard on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as well as our own internal project and have not had the time to fully investigate or otherwise verify that the claim is true. Only from what I've seen on the Web, it's concerning. However, it may turn out to be nothing.'"
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[+] S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Team Not Art Thieves 62 comments
Via Kotaku an Inquirer article reports that, despite earlier claims to the contrary, it looks like the folks behind the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title are not guilty of art theft. It seems both Half-Life 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. use textures from a pack produced by Marlin Studios. The similarities are there because both teams used pre-canned materials for their titles, not because of any tom-foolery on the part of GSC GameWorld.
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Using Unlicensed Assets From Doom 3? 50 Comments More /

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  • Brown AND Gray! (Score:5, Funny)

    by jandrese (485) <kensama@vt.edu> on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:13PM (#18678079) Homepage Journal
    OMG, that could be true. I'm pretty sure S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has brown walls too!
  • It seems that Half-Life 2's normal maps and water are used. For those too lazy to read TFA. Wouldn't it be ironical if the reason Stalker finally turned from vapourware into a real product is that they "borrowed" HL2 and D3 assets...
    • No, it would not be 'ironical'. It would be 'ironic'. Ironical is not a word.

    • Wouldn't it be ironical if the reason Stalker finally turned from vapourware into a real product is that they "borrowed" HL2 and D3 assets..

      Indeedy. Or it could be even more ironicalized, and a totally ironicalizational version of "Duke Nukem Forever" could be made using stolen components.

    • I kind of doubt it that they "borrowed" the asserts to get release ready. I would assume that they used them as placeholder early on, which is a very common thing, and then forgot to replace them in the end before release. Its not like any of the asserts is some artistic masterpiece that would be impossible to recreate in a day or two.
      • I would assume that they used them as placeholder early on, which is a very common thing

        Why would any developer take that kind of high-risk chance? Maybe I'm missing something obvious here, but using crappy "sketch" textures would prevent this kind of huge potential legal issue *and* make it very obvious which textures still needed to be replaced before release.
        • Given how long Stalker was in development I kind of doubt that they had everything well planed from the beginning, normally of course you would keep foreign data very well separated from your own and only use in very early in engine prototyping to begin with, but then in all those years things might have gotten a bit wild and uncoordinated and things ended up where they didn't belong.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Cyberax (705495)
        Boris Strugatskiy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkady_and_Boris_Str ugatsky) allows copying and reproduction of his works without royalties. He's a rare example of a writer who does not write only for money.

        I've played STALKER and it's absolutely not similar to HL2 or Doom. I don't deny that they may have 'borrowed' some models (probably, it was accidental) but the game itself is absolutely NOT a rip-off from Doom/HL.
  • I say let the corporate execs fight this out the new-fashioned way...

    An in-game cage match.
  • From the linked screenshots, the alleged borrowed assets appear to be shaders or bumpmaps and such. That is, tools for the map developer that the gamer doesn't "see" per se. Perhaps, like sound effects, companies license the use of such "tools"? I know I've heard the same gunshot noise in 500 movies and video games, and that crazy death scream...
    • I know I've heard the same gunshot noise in 500 movies and video games, and that crazy death scream...

      Yeah, good ol' Wilhelm Scream has been in every single movie since 1977. I think he even put out a new wave album in the '80s.

      • I know I've heard the same gunshot noise in 500 movies and video games,

        There's an infamous ricochet sound that's appeared in dozens of movies. I once went to a talk by an audio guy from Lucasfilm who showed a collection of about thirty short clips from movies made over several decades, all with the same ricochet sound. It was recorded in the 1940s, used heavily during the Western movie and TV boom of the 1950s, and picked up from old Westerns in later years.

        • there's also one of a semi honking a horn as it passes the camera. i've heard it in probably at least 15 different places.
        • I notice this a lot. It's most noticeable if the sound is in a video game where you hear it over and over, and then on TV or in a movie. The absolute WORST has to be the "128 and central.." police radio chatter. In every police show and movie ever made. And Sim City.
          • If you watch reruns of the "CHiPs" series, many of the "journeys" between home and police headquarters simply involving driving round three or four times round the same street block.

        • Re:The infamous gunshot noise (Score:4, Interesting)

          by blincoln (592401) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @03:24PM (#18681285) Journal
          There's an infamous ricochet sound that's appeared in dozens of movies.

          According to one of my music/audio professors back at University, the reason for that is that it's very, very difficult to get a real ricochet to happen (I assume this is qualified by "...in a way that's safe for the shooter and audio engineer."). I seem to remember something about the people who recorded it having someone shoot thousands of rounds to get a handful of ricochets on tape.
          • Fire a .22 from a rifle at a shallow angle towards a 1/4" deep puddle on top of mud/dirt and you'll get the bullet whizzing about 9 times out of 10. Too steep and you'll just get a splash and the mud eats the bullet. Not really any way to be too shallow.

            When the bullet hits the water at the right angle, you don't get much of a splash, but the impact destabilizes the round enough for it to start spinning rapidly.
        • The most annoying re-used sound effect must be the metal door.
          It's being used for damn near every door opening AND closing in
          games and movies, whether appropriate or not.
      • 2 sounds I first heard in doom 1 makes its way into numerous movies.

        BFG swish sound as the ball of plasma explodes is used often with fire shots.

        Door opening sound seems to be used often. the clang of the heavy doors seems ot show up everywhere.
    • but, from TFA:

      the original filenames from the Doom 3 folders remained the same--for example, a file with the Doom-esque name "lights_impflash.dds," referring to one of the game's enemies, was visually modified in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. folder but retained the filename.
      i doubt one of those media licensing companies would have referenced the Imp when creating the files. unless, perhaps, they were originally commissioned by id and its original intended use was in Doom.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by dunezone (899268)
      I swear Ive heard that damn door opening sound from Doom in so many different places, home, work, school, etc.

    • Re:Possibly not stolen (Score:5, Interesting)

      by freshmayka (1043432) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:48PM (#18678757)
      Commercial businesses provide a ton of licensable and even public domain content for developers to use. It's like stock photography but for things that game developers need like textures, bump maps, sound effects, etc.

      It's also possible being that HL2 and Doom3 are highly moddable games that an individual on the STALKER team borrowed assets because they needed quick place holders but then they forgot to replace them - or it's also possible the assets they borrowed are in the public domain.

      Still, I've seen this getting a lot of coverage on the web and some people even insulting the developers saying things like "only russians steal". It's quite ridiculous considering the artists clearly spent thousands of hours designing unique assets for this title. It's like harping on three or four words used in a novel that also appear somewhere else.

      Even if this was flat out stealing assets from one game to use in another, it appears to me not unlike stealing a high-hat from one song to complete your song. It's such a small piece of the artists work that it seems silly to consider it a stolen asset used to get rich quick - so sue the crap out of them. What is more likely is the asset was just "the right one" and the artist used what worked best in that situation.

      Still, if the files in question are actually (c) to a specific company, I still think it's unlikely they'd take much legal recourse over it. It'd be hard to prove it has caused major damages or that it's been the sole reason STALKER is making money.

      oh and for reference, I understand what it's like to have your violated. my music is all over russian mp3 websites being sold and I don't see a penny. But hey it's getting out there! :D

      • Re:Possibly not stolen (Score:4, Funny)

        by Ford Prefect (8777) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:56PM (#18678879) Homepage

        Still, I've seen this getting a lot of coverage on the web and some people even insulting the developers saying things like "only russians steal".

        Yeah. GSC is Ukrainian!
      • some people even insulting the developers saying things like "only russians steal".

        Russians, and the team that gave us Duke Nukem [dosclassics.com]. They even stole graphics from Hi-Tech Excretions' horrible PC port of Mega Man, for gawd's sake!

        Perhaps that's the real reason DNF is taking forever -- the team is actually creating their own graphics resources this time around.

    • Re:Possibly not stolen (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ford Prefect (8777) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:53PM (#18678845) Homepage

      From the linked screenshots, the alleged borrowed assets appear to be shaders or bumpmaps and such.

      The du/dv and normal maps for Half-Life 2's water definitely aren't shaders - they're inputs for shaders, but don't themselves contain a single line of program code. As with Doom 3's light textures, they're definitely artwork - while the player indeed won't 'see' them as they appear in the games' datafiles, they're quite distinctive and do contribute to the original games' artistic directions.

      It would be quite strange to licence such textures from third-parties. They're not photographically sourced, so no big photo libraries would carry them - and in the case of the light textures, anyone halfway competent with Photoshop could make some decent facsimiles from scratch fairly quickly. It makes sense to buy sound libraries (to save shooting guns, breaking objects and releasing monsters in a clean and tidy office) and photo references (need to find some rusty old machines, tumble-down buildings etc.) - but not 128x128 pixel blobs of light.

      I suspect the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. graphics programmers were independently implementing some fairly similar engine features to Doom 3 and Source, and to test their work 'borrowed' the shader input textures from the games they were emulating. Then, through forgetfulness, miscommunication or deceit, the original placeholders got left in the game.

      I can't see it as being an attempt to save time or money during development - the screenshots I've seen contain some vastly more difficult and impressive map, character and prop texturing, so their artists are definitely more than capable of knocking together some quick light textures. Maybe a programmer did the original borrowing, and nobody on the art team realised where these new textures were actually from?

      Moral of the story, though - don't use other people's stuff as placeholders. You might forget!
    • There a sound of a metal door creaking and then closing that is also universal, from games to movies I always hear it.. Any movie where a metal door opens or closes will use this sound.

        i wonder where it originated...

      There was also a movie that used the background music from Warcraft3, but i forget the name of the movie offhand...

  • Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr. Eggman (932300) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:23PM (#18678275)
    While the Mapcore post that first made the alert was made on April 1st, I have remained skeptical mostly because of the very generic nature of the naming systems. How easily could two different companies come up with nearly identical images called "grate7" or "fanblade." I dabble in texture making a little and, for me atleast, all water normal maps turn out nearly the same, so I don't think I see the HL2 connection. We do know the developers are fans of HL2, though, as they refer to it directly in the game [gamespy.com]. I am significantly less skeptical about the Doom3 connection, however, once I noticed a certain file entitled "hellgate1"
    • Those of us intimately familiar with Doom3's assets know that the pictures floating around with this story do contain Doom 3 image maps.
  • They should have embroidered the images with a few footnotes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly tortuous DMCA laws.
    A later and wilier developer should send the images backwards in time through a temporal warp, and then successfully sue id Software for infringement of the same laws.

  • "Worrying Development"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RexRhino (769423) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @12:48PM (#18678755)
    I know I haven't been able to sleep since I heard this story! S.T.A.L.K.E.R., might have (may have, even), used some highly generic normal-mapping textures that the user doesn't really see, from other games!!! God damn that is worrying!

    Think of enourmous damage that has been done to the Half Life and Doom franchise by such a thing! I was looking forward to the next Doom game, but it is all ruined for me now.

    The next thing you know, people will be sampling a half second loop from other people's songs, adding other musical elements over it, and turning it into a new piece of music! And children will be encouraged to cut pictures out from magazines, and glue them on another piece of paper to create a new piece of artwork... IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS EVEN!!

    Won't someone think of the childre... er, the big multinational corporations!!!
  • Stock content. You don't honestly believe that every game shop has it's own team rendering water and grabbing those renders, transfering them into displacement maps and putting them on to each puddle individually, do you?
    There are dev-shops and kits for specifically this purpose. You buy trees and procedurals by the dozen. It's perfectly likely that both teams bought the same stock water procedurals. F.e. I bet the horses in LOTR and 300 are all from the very same rig.
    No news here. Move on.
      • There is a Hollywood Studio that specializes in digital animal rigs (dunno the name right now). They started of with a sophisticated horse rig which was their only product for quite some time (a few years I recall). A good mamal rig takes lots of experience and hundreds of hours to build and optimize. There is a market for this and studios use content like this all the time. The famous William screams are just one example. And that's not even something you'd need stock content for, 'cause it's easyly made.
  • able to finish the game that fast.

    No wait, you said S.T.A.L.K.E.R. ...

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zhe Mappel (607548) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @02:03PM (#18680019)
    S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is the mod that makes Doom 3 fun!
  • The flashlight texture in D3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. are the same.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CogDissident (951207)
      Remember this is a Zonk story.
      It is a allegation that stalker may possibly use the same assets as are used in HL2 or D3, and an assumption that they did not pay for the rights to use these (through purchasing the same developer tools, or simply paying eachother off).

      Good ol Zonk, posting a story that is not just an assumption, but an assumption of an assumption.
      • The evidence is pretty good - no assumptions needed.

        What I'm guessing will happen is there will be a patch to remedy the situation. It's unlikely we'll see legal action, but I suspect we'll see some apologies and maybe some firings.

    • Absolutely true (Score:4, Insightful)

      by UncleRage (515550) on Tuesday April 10 2007, @01:03PM (#18679011)
      With the small exception that it actually came out a few weeks back and, with some exceptions, is a relatively polished game. True that MP isn't nearly what many had hoped (8+ coop anyone?), but that doesn't detract that despite the long development cycle... it's a real game, not vapor.

      And, IMHO, it's a pretty good game at that. So, yer post is absolutely true... with the exceptions of comparisons to Daikatana and DNF. Oh and the bit about the boards... they're pretty jumping, actually.

      So other than the inaccurate reference to those other two games, and the comment about the dead forums... man, you're right on!

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Steal Textures And Later Kreate and Eventually Resell?
      You started out well... But unfortunately with one "and" used in the acronym and another not-used... It kinda killed it for me.

      Perhaps: Steal Textures, Abduct Lightmaps, Keep Extracted Resources?
    • Pish. Whoever modded the parent Flamebait probably doesn't know that the game was in development for a long time - it was previewed, with playable code I think, then disappeared from the games industry rader for a while. At the time I thought it had done a DNF.

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