S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Team Not Art Thieves

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.

Good thing

Good thing we all jumped to conclusions.

Re:Good thing

Goes with our guilty until proven innocent society, and even then your ruined for life becuase no believes your innocent.

Re:Good thing

Excuse me for a moment if I quote a person of great wisdom, myself, from when this story came around the first time.

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.

Re:Good thing

Indeed! I always find it interesting to hear about the little things that go on behind the scenes of game development. Had no one jumped to these conclusions, I never would have known about this interesting Marlin Studios.

Damnit.

I bought all 38 copies of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. from the local Best Buy thinking it'd be a good investement.

Fantastic News!

I'm a big fan of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The game is very original, and I see a lot of promise in this game in the way of mods, expansions, and sequels. This game is so good it made me feel like I was playing a first-person-shooter version of Fallout. In fact, I recently reinstalled Fallout, and am beating it again. If S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is good enough to remind me of such a golden age game, they must have touched on the right nerves.

Hopefully any previously mentioned projects will take less time to develop than the game itself did! :)

I sort of doubted the original allegations were true, and figured that some kind of licensed or public domain material must have been involved in this. Glad to hear that is in fact true.

This developer shows promise, and it would be unfortunate if its reputation were inappropriately tarnished.

Makes the first post in the previous /. thread

more insightful than funny, right in one.

WE ALL KNOW what stalker stands for

Stealing Theiving Appropriating Looting Kleptomanias Extortion R... ER... wait.. doh!

The perfect poster for STALKER?

Or maybe anti-Stalker

http://www.starfild.pri.ee/pildid/ajaviide/imagepa ges/image270.html [starfild.pri.ee]

Tarkovsky

Anyone who has seen the original 1979 movie that i imagine is heavily influencial to this, may well disagree. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/ [imdb.com] But then again, will have to play the game first.

I like this

So, game developers are not constantly re-inventing the wheel... this is great. How many times in an FPS have you burst into an office, seen a desk, a chair, etc, then wondered how long it took developers to model it, texture it etc? Probably not many. But I have! Really, a few good chair models is all we need. This will hopefully free up development time for more important things like design, AI, plot and innovation.

Even better, these kinds of resources need to be made available to small time and independant developers. Writing a 3D game would be a lot easier if a huge number of the objects were already done.

Pff, so the STALKER dev team's innocent...

But someone ought to take a good look at Marlin Studios. Apparently some of their textures were lifted straight from HL2!

Doom3's textures were stolen indeed

Kenneth Scott made the light images himself and he knows it. Not licensed. :)

Re:In the minds of the consumer

Do you have any idea the hundreds of thousands of hours that would be wasted if every game made all of their own unique textures. How different do you want that crate to look from game to game? What about that door? Or how about on a smaller scale, what about the trash texture used to cover the top of a garbage dumpster, do you want to recreate that for every game just to give it another point of difference that nobody will notice?

Re:In the minds of the consumer

just as unoriginal aesthetically as the other major players.

Nah, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.'s dark brown halls look much nicer than DOOM 3's dark brown halls.

Re:In the minds of the consumer

So... they're not thieves, just as unoriginal aesthetically as the other major players.

Yes, because games sharing the textures for some of their lamps are then all junk. :-s

Give me aesthetically innovative lamp textures, goddammit!

Re:How do they explain the Doom3 specific filename

Do they even need to?

Re:How do they explain the Doom3 specific filename

From the last sentence of the article: "the IMP_Light texture that it was thought could have been pilfered from Doom 3 was, in fact, just a standard Impact Light texture, rather than referring to the Doom 3 monster."

Re:In the minds of the consumer

These "textures" were things like the light attenuation pattern of a flashlight. You buy this stuff from a specialist because you can't afford the time it'd take for one of your artists to even figure out how to make something like this, let alone perfect the process to where it's going to look as good as the ones you can buy.

Point torch at white-painted wall. Take photo. Adjust levels in Photoshop or nearest equivalent so that white-painted wall is now black, and pattern from torch is only thing visible.

Oh no, really difficult!

I seriously doubt the textures in question (lights, and animated water textures) are from Marlin Studios. Why? Well, they don't appear to have such things for sale, and the idea that two companies would independently end up with pixel-perfect copies of a du/dv map [valvesoftware.com] for rendering water refractions in DirectX 8, when this texture library company isn't even selling such a thing, seems a bit unlikely.