News S.T.A.L.K.E.R ripping off Half-Life 2?

THQ is just the publisher, GSC should be held accountable.

 

From skipping through the latest copy of EDGE I got the impression that the devs had gone ***s up and this was patched up alpha code, anyone know if there's any truth in that?

 

Obviously you haven't understood the story line correctly. Thought the story line was easy to follow to be quite honest.

 

BEWARE: STALKER SPOILERS FOLLOW!!





Well, no and maybe yes. Maybe I haven't understood it because the storyline was difficult to follow for me. I wake up after a jittery cutscene and a trader makes me work for him. He sends me off on tasks and at some point I hook up with a bartender who for no known reason helps me find and kill strelok who has a stash somewhere underground that these random guys help me find that tells me about Fang and Ghost. Tracking Ghost leads me to Lab X18 and lab X16 after the Agroprom centre where I got a load of confusing things about emmissions and a Brain Scorcher in the north.

I kind of know whats going on then, but I had to piece it together myself the hard way. It should have been relayed to me better.


END OF SPOILERS

 

CardJoe: use the [ spoiler ] tags

 

I followed this story from when it was broken originally on doom3world.org back on April 1st.

One of the main problems with this debate is also to do with the use of the textures. IIRC, Battlefield 1942 shipped with RTCW textures left over in the pak files from testing days. They weren't used in the game, so no-one seamed to mind. All m!chi:be did was discover D3 alike textures in Stalker's equivilent pak files, as far as I'm aware no-ones actually seen them in the game, which adds more grey area to all this.

As for Stalker using HL sound effects, it acutally used CS sound effects, but this was one a leaked internal beta, as such wasn't illegal because it wasn't published.

It's also worth pointing out id's Todd Hollshead's statement implies not only did GSC not get the textures for free, (Hollshead states that any asset used from Doom 3 is a problem) but id are prepared to look futher into this and take action, he didn't seem to think it was no big deal.

Time will tell I guess.

 

Probably interested in seeing the texture files for modding purposes or something like that. They noticed that the file name contained "imp" (and as was stated in the article imps aren't in the game) so they looked up textures from games that did have imps. Doom3 comes up positive and then they search for more similar textures, which isn't that hard if you are just comparing file names.

Who knows, there could be more textures which have been renamed.

 

modders dude. they were modding the game and came across something familiar from other games. they were not friggin auditing it.

IDK what the big deal is. they won't get much money from it. stalker ain't exactly a smash hit.

 

The 'deal', as I understand it, is that even if they don't get 'much money' from a lawsuit, they get restitution either through an injunction or monetary compensation for another company illegally using their property. You know - breaking the law 'n such? Which if nothing else, sends a message of "you can't do this and get away with it" to other such companies.

 

It's quite possible that a mod group spotted it, they'd obviously be quite familiar with the files and names etc

[EDIT]

Beaten to it

 

Regardless of the texture issue, I think Todd's quite clever.

Not only does he address the issue at hand, but he managed to throw in a little plug for his own game. Nice bit of marketing there, Todd.

-monkey

 

Doom3 sucked anyways.

I don't see what the big deal is here... I mean, are ppl actually losing sleep over this stupid thing.

Movies do it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio

 

Well, about Stalker... despite the gripes and downward comments about it, I must admit that I have not had this much fun playing a single player game in a very long while.

 

Especially when artists are using their own database of textures they have accumulated over the years, it's possible for some to slip through.

And, yeah, who cares? If it were hundreds or even dozens of files, maybe it would be a problem. But just one or two? It doesn't make it right, but it's asinine to pursue legal action over something so trivial.

 

TBH, if you rip off someone else's work, sell it, and take credit for it, you do deserve to get nailed.

 

Who said they didn't buy them from the repective people?

Doom3 was really a showcase of the new 3d engine, so why were they not able to buy and modify certain parts of it....

You dont know the whole story, so dont start pointing the finger of blame guilt and theft

 

I completely agree with mad4it, they were probably used in testing and never got removed at crunch time when the artists had their managers breathing down their back. Also, when you've been working 80 hour weeks for a couple of months, its so tempting to just leave something in that you know is wrong. (as in, "f#@k it, who's going to notice these few little textures, i can leave work on time today")

I've recently started work at a TV production company as a 3d animator (who said all those hours working on mod's wouldn't pay pff ) and the amount of stuff like this that goes on is crazy. When your dealing with a project that has 1000's of textures, trying to keep track of them is bloody difficult, especially when you've got 7 or 8 people working on it, jumping between different shots. A test scene might be made to check something is going to work, textures are thrown on that were found on google images, that gets passed onto someone else and they just use that image as the basis for something, without knowing where its come from.

 

True, _BUT_ what now defines different in the binary world?

With the onset of md5 sums, etc its very easy to see if a file is identical to another file.

So:

Stalker coder steals the texture from HL2, then adds a few bits of data, then puts it in STALKER...

now when you md5 the files, you see that they are different, but when visually looking at them, they look identical, which do you go by?

Oh so you say they are the same? well maybe those few bits he added actually changed some colors here and there, just that you didn't notice.

or, Oh you say they aren't the same? maybe he just added a 0110010001 at the end of the file? (which should make the files different enough that their md5 hashes will be different.)

 

To be honest, I thought I recognised the 'walking on metal' sound from HL2 also. It seems my initial reaction isn't unfounded after all.

 

Presumably the quotes from the IP owners saying they know nothing about it implies that it wasn't a commercial transaction...