The Dark Mod 2.0 Standalone: Id Tech 4 GPL Yields a Free Thief-a-Like Game

An anonymous reader writes "After nine years of development, The Dark Mod is now a standalone game. Thief fans can now enjoy over 60 fan made missions which capture the essence of the Thief 1 / 2 games. Originally created as a reaction to Thief 3; with the upcoming release of Thief 4, many are comparing what was done here (a faithful extension of the old gameplay) to what Eidos has shown thus far. Can a little Doom 3 mod compete against a blockbuster AAA title? Should we even compare them?" All code in the The Dark Mod is GPLv3+, and the art assets are all CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported which means it, unfortunately, cannot be distributed by even Debian. Still, an impressive feat!

Re:The "non-commercial" clause is overrated

[tlhIngan]

(In a lot of cases, the "No Derivatives" clause would be a better substitute for "Non-Commercial" with the share-alike clause, I think (i.e. "You can distribute my amazing genius musical works but you cannot incorporate them into the soundtrack for your $500,000,000 blockbuster Hollywood movie"), but that's probably not appropriate here since I assume The Dark Mod developers intend for people to be able to remix and add to it.)

Technically, ND and NC are both Non-Free.

ND because it defeats the entire purpose of sharing - that people can get inspired or use your work in their work, as long as they incorporate the other license terms.

SA is perfectly fine - if the music gets incorporated in that blockbuster movie, well, share away!

NC is thornier and also non-Free in that it restricts usage in ways that are potentially unintended, including putting the content up on a for-pay website. Like YouTube - perhaps you have a blog that you create content for and use a bit of music to. You put it up NC because it's a hobby, then you start making money off it (get popular enough an YouTube will split profits with you). Damn, that just violated the terms on the music you've been using forever!

It's not unusual that the CC folks have been getting a bit of pressure to remove ND and NC - if you really et down to it, ND+NC is only a minor variation away from "all rights reserved", so it's misleading to say it's a "free" license. ND violates the whole purpose CC because it's a "look but don't touch", and NC is so tightly worded to basically become practically useless - and a huge source of potential violations if you decide to distribute your software incorporating NC artwork and some commercial site picks it up for mirroring and such.

Thanks from The Dark Mod

[AluminumHaste]

We appreciate the exposure folks, thank you for stopping by and considering all our hard work. :)