Tiles & Tilesets

[DarkArts Studios]

It has been drawn to our attention that some of the tiles being used in the community edition are modified tiles from other sources.

The history of Vulture, as a project, has it's roots deep within the open source community and most tiles have been donated, from time to time, by various community members in an ever ongoing and progressive improvement of the visuals as a whole.

One large update included, after having gained permission from the creator, several tiles from the Absurd Tileset[nethack.wikia.com].

It's been pointed out to us that some of these tiles were, without our knowledge, originally taken from other sources to be used within Absurd, which we in turn, in good faith and having asked permission from the Absurd creator, then re-used within the Vulture project.

Although in some cases this is okay, public domain pop culture references, in other cases it's not.

DarkArts Studios, and the Vulture team, take licenses and copyright incredibly seriously.

For this reason we will be replacing those tiles soon & will keep you updated on this thread about progress in that regard.

We would like to thank those of you that pointed this out and encourage others to please report any images or tiles you may find within this project to us via our support lines so that we can expedite the replacement of any offending images to [e-mail]

It's always been our intention to eventually replace the entire Community Edition tile collection with more consistent art, created specifically for this project. This is, in fact, a large part of why Vulture made an appearance on Steam - to help fund this progressive update to even the Community Edition. We will be beginning work on this immediately and tile replacements will be coming during the course of other updates.

The high quality update coming later this year is still ongoing and still coming and falls outside of the context of this post, that will be an additional, modern, & optional upgrade.

[DarkArts Studios]

Healer graphic, which was reported to be sourced from another game (via the open Absurd Tileset), has been removed.

[EDIT] Healers, for now, share the priest graphic - a new healer graphic is being created however that (healer) graphic had to be removed immediately.

[archindividual]

The Absurd tileset was never intended for a commercial release, which is why the guy who made it* grabbed assets from just about everywhere without any care or thought about intellectual property as the assumption was fair use without profit. There was never a claim that that tileset wouldn't cause all sorts of copyright grumbles.

I don't know how many assets in Vulture were taken from the Absurd Tileset, but I can tell you that close to half of the bipedal creatures are found art that has been altered or directly lifted images from branded materials. (Plastic Golem is Plastic Man, Clay Golem is Gumby, a large number of monsters are the art of Tony Diterlizzi used in second edition D&D books, A Cyberdemon is the Mail Daemon, ED-209 is one of the Keystone Kops, cave man and cave woman are Charelton Heston and Linda Harrison from Planet of the Apes, the Medic From You Know Where Because That Game Was Awesome at the Time (tm) etc.)

Anyway, if you're going to use assets from Absurd, don't mess with the bipedal monsters in particular, because you're treading near copyright all the time there. Everything else, items etc are original content or just plain photographs of random stuff and shouldn't be any sort of problem apart from the ocassional "Frobozz" reference in text. The words "Hilton", "Crayola" and the Mastercard logo appear as well.

Hopefully DAS doesn't have to deal with any stupid legal stuff because of all of that. The dude in charge of that joint is good people.

*Three guesses who. The periodic complaints that there were IP concerns from random strangers on the internet is the primary reason why that tileset isn't being hosted any longer. Didn't care enough to go back to it and I got tired of listening to people ask me to apologize for using a bunch of found art that I wasn't planning on making money on anyhow.

[DarkArts Studios]

About a year ago someone contributing to Vulture used several tiles from Absurd. I'm going to have to go through it all this week and make sure. There's been a lot of loud talk in some reviews about us "stealing art" and other even stranger claims.

That was *never* our intent, and with people working on this in their free time and contributing as-and-when something's bound to slip through. I wonder if these same people go through all the workshop items for various games (which is also community contributed) -- just saying.

That said: I'll be going through the tiles myself & thanks for the heads up about bipedals.

[archindividual]

People who want to make you miserable and do lots of work over a 100 pixel image lifted from Google Image Search in 2003 to make an open source game look cooler because it would be fun to do should probably find better things to do.

Then again I may be biased. The game is cool. I gave you money.

[DarkArts Studios]

Mail Daemon graphic removed, same reason as healer

[Treatz]

Lol? how much affect will this have on how the game looks? cause i really like the way the game looks now?

[Treatz]

Its only the door texture.... unless its another one i have not got to see yet...

[DarkArts Studios]

@Blitzkrieger: The more long term goal we're working on is to support multiple tilesets. With that addition we'll also be adding the choice of look & feel. So while we're planning to replace the current default look we will definitely leave in what will probably called the "traditional set" or "community submitted set" which will be what we've been using the last 10 years, what you're seeing at the moment.

[EDIT] - traditional set: barring of course those obvious offenders that have been reported and we've already removed (and any others if we see or find them) - copyright violations have to be removed, but as at the time of writing this we think we've already removed those that needed removal.

[FatalFramerate]

Speaking of tiles, how hard would it be to remove the Isometric view to add other Tilesets? I could integrate DCSS and Dawnlike tiles if it weren't Isometric.

If I'm not mistaken, Dawnlike's liscense would even allow it to be used commercially.

[DarkArts Studios]

Originally posted by Fatal Framerate:

Speaking of tiles, how hard would it be to remove the Isometric view to add other Tilesets? I could integrate DCSS and Dawnlike tiles if it weren't Isometric.

If I'm not mistaken, Dawnlike's liscense would even allow it to be used commercially.

I recently mentioned something about this in another forum thread. While working on adding our new high quality set (coming later this year) we will in fact need to add support for multiple tile sets. It's our feeling that adding multiple tile set support and not adding support for other existing tile sets while doing so -- would just be silly. So it's definitely on the roadmap but I'm loathe to give timeline estimates yet.

[Chravis]

Can we expect the new native graphics to be in the same line as the teased "Fanboy Edition" update on Desura? Will the new tile sets come with a paper doll, visible armor, buff and weapon system?

[DarkArts Studios]

There will be a fanboy edition on steam as well. The fanboy edition on steam will be in line with the fanboy on desura. Those that own fanboy on desura will get keys for the fanboy on steam.

that said: even the non fanboy edition will benefit from UI updates and general improvements to the base gameplay as the Vulture engine will be the same for both the differences being higher quality overall graphics, music, sound for fanboy.

[Pixie]

thank you, that's great! i already purchased the fanboy edition on desura! the sneak peek looks beautiful!

[Pixie]

but i also like the old tileset (i love the background music)

[DarkArts Studios]

Originally posted by pixie:

but i also like the old tileset (i love the background music)

This is exactly why one of our first priorities after everything that's been promised for the base edition of steam will be to add multiple tileset support. Those that own the fanboy content (in our opinion) must be able to switch between sets at runtime.