TEXTURE1 copyright

[fraggle]

If the genmidi lump is problematic, it should be fine to remove it, since none of the source ports use it (and you need a Boom-compatible source port to play Freedoom).

Edit: This is a note attached to the genmidi lump:

A decent GENMIDI.
By "Dan L'Ecuyer" (hope I spelt it right)
Uploaded (with permission) by cph. Public domain.

[myk]

fraggle said:
This is a note attached to the genmidi lump:

Yeah, but the text file says:

Secondly, I haven't finished all of the instruments. With 175 of them to be done, I think I may have tinkered with half of those. Some I am extremely pleased with, others refuse to work properly despite much effort, and some are pretty decent but not great. That's why there is a version number on this work (version 01). I intend to release updates as work progresses.

Both looking at the lump contents and listening comparatively confirms there are sounds from the originals in there, and "tinkered" may mean some of the changed ones could still be derived.

[andrewj]

Ahh I didn't know the GENMIDI lump in FreeDoom was based on the DOOM one. In that case I agree to remove it, or just memset(0) all the patches.

[fraggle]

Ajapted said:

Ahh I didn't know the GENMIDI lump in FreeDoom was based on the DOOM one. In that case I agree to remove it, or just memset(0) all the patches.

Indeed, neither did I; I assumed it was from scratch due to the "public domain" note. I'll remove this tonight.

[printz]

myk said:

What's with that seemingly trollish "myk is so concerned" sig, anyway? It's ironic in any case, since I'm "concerned" about the situation of a community project or with community aspects, whilst you are (apparently) concerned about my (personal) concerns. And what are you trying to say, that copyright matters and issues should be ignored?

Relax, it's not really trollish, do you think I'm such an idiot to troll my doom? It's just the fun of this phrase, extracted from someone's speech, that looks a bit odd here: myk is so concerned. Take it as an attention. What, are you offended because I noticed something? It's a joke. Do I really have to put in :) or :D? You thought it has a special meaning to attack you? Fine, fine, to stay fair, I'll add "leileilol said:". This discussion should continue via PMs, too, because it's offtopic. Just don't loser or disgrace me before doing the explanation, as you've done with others (and if you haven't, sorry), because of my acting odd.

I'm not concerned you're concerned either. I only liked how you quoted leileilol and kept that quote as a reminder. Fine, I'll add "myk quoted" for utter total convenience.

Or forget both narrations. It'll simply be appended with (it wasn't I who thought that).

Before that, myk said:

No one's talking about patents here. And "worthy enough" is not an attribute of copyright. It's not like you can say "I think this poem is lame, I don't think is merits copyright protection". It only matters whether its a written (or equivalent) part of the creative work which isn't public already in some way. So to address why it's not copyright worthy you'd have to point out how it's free to use or not part of the creative work.

I hope you know what I really mean by patents (okay, copyrights, call them what you want) and worthy enough, because I'm not 100% of the time keen on precision. Most patches, which can be negligibly considered all, are placed in the textures in a natural way, that even if we were to put them ourselves, we'd likely reach a (very) similar configuration. I hope you get what I mean. What, is there a clause forbidding playing with textures freely? Well if there is, then these copies should be burned <g>. And if it's still wrong to keep TEXTURE1 as it is, then I'll see the solution of using different patterns for skull-head-on-wood-or-brick-or-slad walls, kickable-not-pressable switches, other-way-around-overlapped-horizontal-trails-or-metal-supports, occasionally-completely-different-design. It's a bit saddening for the creator, but necessary for honour -- and clean hands.

EDIT: again you removed it. Can't you take a nonmalicious joke.

[myk]

printz said:
again you removed it. Can't you take a nonmalicious joke.

I can't edit your account info, nor did I request any changes. In any cae, mocking a mod is comparatively as stupid as ridiculing a cop doing his job in the street or as self-detrimental as pestering a bouncer at the bar.

Most patches, which can be negligibly considered all, are placed in the textures in a natural way, that even if we were to put them ourselves, we'd likely reach a (very) similar configuration.

Only lone patches are placed in a predictable way (assuming no alignment is used), and Jon pointed to this above already, while many others are not, since they are more complex. And that arrangement is the main function of the lump; to be able to arrange the patches in different manners to produce actual viewable textures within the game. You don't reach "predictable" arrangements because the drawing and the arrangement depend on each other to produce the final texture. The artist can make patches that then determine the makeup of textures, or the designer can edit textures and demand new patches (or changes to existing ones) from the artist so as to modify these or create variants or complementary textures.

What, is there a clause forbidding playing with textures freely?

Should there be? I'm precisely suggesting that the texture set should be done freely, as opposed to being based on id's. Currently the design framework (TEXTUREx) is a copy of id's (or a merging of both games') while many of the patches are obvious imitations of the original artwork.

[Jon]

printz said:

I hope you know what I really mean by patents (okay, copyrights, call them what you want)

Since patents, copyrights and trademarks are totally different things, it's important to call it the right name to demonstrate that you know what you're talking about.

[fraggle]

I've removed the GENMIDI lump and also the DMXGUS/DMXGUSC lumps, as these are presumably also modified versions. I've been looking into the GENMIDI format and I'm pretty confident I can generate one using the instrument tables from the OpenBSD OPL driver. While the GUS lump isn't so important to include, it's desirable to have a GENMIDI lump because there are some ports that use it to program the OPL chip directly; it's also used by ports that have OPL emulation support.

[fraggle]

Okay, I wrote a program to generate a genmidi.lmp from the OpenBSD OPL values. Here's the code.

The resulting genmidi lump doesn't sound quite as good as the original Doom one, but it's good enough, I think. To test it out, save that link as genmidi.lmp, and run with "doom2.exe -file genmidi.lmp".

One thing that might be interesting to try is splitting the data into separate SBI files and building up the GENMIDI lump from them automatically as part of the build system. People could then create replacements for the instrument settings that aren't up to scratch. However, I doubt there are many people interested enough to bother nowadays, and it's a moot point anyway because most modern source ports don't even use the GENMIDI lump.

[leileilol]

fraggle said:

most modern source ports don't even use the GENMIDI lump.

of course, when using a midi mapper, genmidi goes unused.

Now only if Chocolate Doom/prboom had OPL2 emulation or direct OPL2 access (i know adplug can do that) GENMIDI would be a necessity.

BTW is our colormap lump snagged from Doom as well? Looks identical.

[insertwackynamehere]

Wait someone said something about not being allowed to use the palette... is possible for id to hold a copyright on an array of 256 colors stored in a certain format? What about just those 256 colors in general? Like if I were to hardcode those 256 colors into a program to convert doom pictures to bitmaps, would that be violating copyright?

[printz]

leileilol said:

BTW is our colormap lump snagged from Doom as well? Looks identical.

You'd have to look for a different light diminishing pattern and invulnerability tint, heh.

[Jon]

fraggle and I recently discussed how we might solve the TEXTURE1 issue and we decided that a "cleanroom implementation" would do the job.

We're working on a tool that

* displays the doom texture on the left hand side
* has a texture-composition pane on the right

You then compose the texture and try to get it to match, without any prompting on which patches are used or what offsets are used on the part of the program. We generate a TEXTURE1 lump from the composition effort which is completely distinct from the TEXTURE1 lump read to display the textures on the left.

Here's a screenshot of the current work-in-progress:

http://alcopop.org/temp/freedoom_cleanroom_ui.png

[Jon]

Ok, the tool is in a state where you can add patches to a blank texture, adjust their offsets, and save out a TEXTURE1 lump. A bit more hacking will make it actually useful, and then I'll start work on reimplementing the textures. If anyone else is interested in helping out, I'll write up instructions on using it (what OS do you use?).

I may turn this into a general purpose texture editor when I'm done, but first things first :)

[Jon]

Ok after a delayed train journey back from london (;)) I've nearly redone all the textures: 187 out of 212. Most of the remainders are ones involving transparency, as the cleanroom tool doesn't handle transparent blitting yet.

[boris]

Hoorj!

[Jon]

Good news everyone! I'm done. commit 412 removed the multipatch texture definitions, and r414 added in the ones I've defined in a cleanroom environment. I'll now update the 0.5-rc WADS.