No assets released, which is a problem for the following reasons:
- Piece of history lost
- Makes it harder to boot up anything because not a complete, running application.
- Derivatives of the art are impossible
- Artists will have a hard time starting to tweak things, because there's nothing to tweak.
- Coders will despair trying to provide even a basic set of art (because we're usually crap at art) so they could start poking at the code.
Sadly, this "here you have the source, off you go" thing seems to be very prevalent, and it always irks the hell out of me.
If you don't want to release everything, alright, that's workable. But something, at least some basic art, say the first level or whatever suits you. I don't get it why that should be a bad thing. I also don't get why people seem to think that idea is bad.
While I would like to see it, absolutely, it misses the point a bit in regards to how Carmack is approaching this.
He's a tech guy, first and foremost. He's been dedicated to releasing the source to his games, because he's dedicated to sharing the tech that went in to these games. To the point that he went back and made changes to the Doom 3 source[1], at the time a four year old game, to appease the lawyers who were shy to allow them to release it because of software patent concerns.
If you're looking for the game, then yes the source is useless to you. If you're looking to learn what went in to the game to make it work, the source is literally invaluable. With art assets, it would be better. But by itself it is such a precious treasure. No one else in the industry is releasing the code to their AAA multi million dollar budget games. There are not enough words to describe the value of the contributions Carmack has dedicated to open source and release.
A colleague and close friend of mine directly attributes his early programming days to the fact that he was able to take the Quake 2 source and hack away on it. He's now a programmer in the games industry. You just cannot put a value on that kind of knowledge and examples and source being freely available. It sings to the core tenant of what Free as in Freedom is all about.
It does not miss the point. And I'm not looking for the game, it's not that the only use of assets+source in freedom form would be able to play the game (that is one side-effect).
- Curation history is crippled: Games are a piece of cultural history, and if you care about curating that history, then a complete release is important.
- Learning/Derivation is crippeled: Releasing works is about being able to learn and derive from them and to release what you've done with it. There are more kinds of people than coders, and there is more to a game than code. You can learn and tweak assets in many meaningful ways as well.
- Practice of Culture is crippled: Derivation is also about re-contextualization and remixing. Code can be remixed by programmers, and by programmers only. However sometimes remixes of content are interesting, for instance as a total-conversion of the code to something completely different (webgl for instance) or by re-contextualizing the assets entirely (you could make it props in your next CG movie).
Concerning your first statement, that the curation history is crippled:
Obviously, you can get your hands on the artwork of the game if you want to, you just have to pay for it. Same as you have to pay for that picasso if you want to "curate" it. I don't see many people complaining that entry to a gallery should be free (although I would agree that it would be a very good thing and happened already in the UK) and that you are entitled a free copy of the artworks (by free I mean that you only have to cover the reproduction cost) to play around with.
So, please, you may get the full artwork for $2 on Amazon/Steam/Whereever.
You're comparing interactive art to painting, which is a flawed analogy. This isn't about cheap, or free, and it's only cursory about freedom. It's about that in order to curate digital history, you have to be able to redistribute it, and to be able to keep the software running.
I agree that it is not the best comparison. It is the best I could come up with... The problem might be that I compared out of context - a texture is not very different from a painting (in theory, physical anomalies aside) - I did not intent to compare paintings to complete games. However, the interactivity results from the combination of the textures ("static part", somewhat comparable to paintings) with the code (making the textures interactive, animating them etc.). So I would come to the conclusion that the interactive part has been shared freely.
iD/ZeniMax owes you nothing, but they still gave you the source code and went to considerable effort to do that. Complaining about what you feel entitled to receive for free makes you look bad. Someone else mentioned that all the assets are available for $70 or less. Go and do what libraries do when they want to curate materials so that others can learn from them and enjoy the culture: buy the damn thing.
There's already been a rich culture of mods, re-contextualization and remixing. You've been able to do all of the above before this release of the source code.
Wrong, legally you can't do anything with the content. You can't modify and you can't redistribute it or anything. You're gonna exist in a legal grey zone in which ID has the right to sue you at any time, this is not good.
I'm pretty sure the mod community would disagree. id, epic, etc. wouldn't have released editing tools if they didn't expect modifications to be made. But the expectation is that you're going to make that available back to the community.
If you're trying to just simply take someone else's IP and make money off their work without their consent, that's something else. Negotiate a license and get out of the grey zone.
It's not about getting something for cheap. It's about being able to make derivations and incrementally tweak things. It's about that not having any base tweak makes it quite hard for both Artists and Coders. It's about that there's many ways that things could be tweaked that would be fun, but if you're beset by a wish to do that you're gonna spend a year creating art for a total conversion. It's about that culture in games is not code, it's assets as well, and if the assets aren't released, they're lost and never to be derivable of, because of the perpetual copyright crap.
- Piece of history lost
- Makes it harder to boot up anything because not a complete, running application.
- Derivatives of the art are impossible
- Artists will have a hard time starting to tweak things, because there's nothing to tweak.
- Coders will despair trying to provide even a basic set of art (because we're usually crap at art) so they could start poking at the code.
Sadly, this "here you have the source, off you go" thing seems to be very prevalent, and it always irks the hell out of me.
If you don't want to release everything, alright, that's workable. But something, at least some basic art, say the first level or whatever suits you. I don't get it why that should be a bad thing. I also don't get why people seem to think that idea is bad.