http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/46449
Lightmaps and a water texture seemingly lifted wholesale. id Software apparently didn’t sign off on it, either.
Valve hasn’t commented yet.
Edit: Fixed a typo.
jeez, like they didn’t have enough time to make their own…
Wow, that looks pretty conclusive evidence to me. They didn’t even change the filenames in some cases. THQ must be going batshit crazy right now.
Next questions–
Are said assets original or stock?
Are they even used in the game?
Judging by the textures in question, I’d guess this is a case of oversight more than a case of active theft.
They probably threw those textures into the engine in lieu of programmer art when testing the code and just forgot to replace them with original assets later… not that that makes it right or legal, they are still responsible for making sure they don’t distribute other people’s work without proper authorization… but it just seems more like a mistake than intentional theft.
I’m surprised by how much stuff is from royalty-free stock these days. Royalty-free lightmaps don’t seem too far-fetched. We’ll see.
I’m surprised by how much stuff is from royalty-free stock these days. Royalty-free lightmaps don’t seem too far-fetched. We’ll see.
I did a little research. I remember hearing that this also happened with Id assets in Tomb Raider Legend:
http://www.forumplanet.com/planetquake/topic.asp?fid=1482&tid=1895420&p=1
After perusing Moby Games, I found this guy:
An artist who worked on both TR:Legend and Stalker? And both games contained assets stolen from Id? Quite a coincidence…
I have a recollection (I might be wrong) that the old borrowed textures issue was present in one of the “press leaks” of this game that appeared many moons ago. I even remember some of the sound files for weapons being borrowed from counterstrike or something according to the guys who “acquired” the “press leak”. This was prior to GSC going to a weapons range in the USA and recording weapon sounds from real guns.
Maybe GSC can give the boys from iD a holiday to the real chernobyl and $25,000 towards Carmacks space shuttle project as compensation…
An apology and an out of court settlement looks in order.
Doom 3 had water? I didn’t see any. Not even in the toilets.
Hey, its Russia. I’m sure there’s some law that allows them to do this.
Hey, its Russia.
It’s not.
-Julian
Ukraine.
They all look the same to me!
Shit, at least they used them to make something other than a tech demo. Valve and id should just shut up and learn.
Pretty embarrassing stuff. If it’s intentional, they should be hung out to dry. My art budget is like $2k a game, and yet I make all my own art or buy royalty free stock stuff. If an indie bedroom coder can ensure he is using only legit assets, why the fuck can’t a studio doing a ‘triple a’ title?
And what ever happened to big projects having some kind of asset control software and version tracking, let alone file naming conventions. If it is a mistake, it just goes to show serious lack of organisation.
That part is established, what with the game taking 6 years to see the light of day.
Well, at least it saw the light of day and made it to retail. Can’t really say that for other games that have been taking forever to come out. :P
HL and HL2 were tech demos? First time I’ve heard that one.