Licensing of crawl tiles


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ss

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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 10:24

Licensing of crawl tiles

I'm new to the forum, and if this is not the place to ask this, please redirect me to the correct place.

I'm writing an AGPLed roguelike game (will NOT be a clone of DCSS (DCSS is awesome but too tough for me :D), and I will attribute whatever tiles I copy) and I came across http://code.google.com/p/crawl-tiles/. I am planning to use these tiles. However, it appears that DCSS is under the GPLv2 or later and the AGPL is GPL-compatible. So if crawl's tiles are also under the GPL just like crawl itself, I can use all the crawl tiles in my game.

I repeat that I have no intention of stealing credit for others work and I will credit crawl for whatever tiles I use. Can I please confirm whether crawl's tiles are also licensed under the GPL or whether they are under some other license?
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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 15:15

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

Why not just use text...? Also it's in bad taste to use another game's artwork. Legal or not no one will want to play your game if it uses Crawl's tiles. It just makes the player feel like they're playing some cheap ripoff.

Finally anyone who finds Crawl "too difficult" shouldn't be making a roguelike of their own.

ss

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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 15:47

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

Thanks for your ideas!

However, using text will make my game look primitive and unfortunately making my own tiles just needs too much resources and time. The game I've planned will definitely mention that crawl's tiles are being used and I will openly thank crawl on my homepage as well as in my program's credits. If my game draws enough momentum then I may get enough support to create custom tiles for it. In any case this is just an open source hobby project not a commercial game.

As for "Also it's in bad taste to use another game's artwork.", IMHO the reason the aforementioned project was created was to encourage re-use of Crawl's tiles: Quoting from its home page:

In an effort to promote sharing of this wonderful resource, this project seeks to periodically package these tiles from Crawl Stone Soup's version control, and provide them in a format easily consumable by other projects.


Also, as my next post indicates I've found a few games that use crawl's tiles (one even commercially), so it should be ok.

As for "Finally anyone who finds Crawl "too difficult" shouldn't be making a roguelike of their own.", I've played quite a few other roguelikes, but none of them have been as tough as crawl. It would have been really nice if crawl had difficulty levels or such. Crawl is excellent but it is disappointing to die after retrieving three runes, and entering Zot.

PS:I dont want to start a flame war on the ethics of re-using art work from crawl. I just dont want to do something that invokes the hate of the crawl community at large, or of its devs. I only considered using crawl's tiles because of the aforementioned project, and the existence of other games using crawl's tiles which indicates that at least *some* crawl developers dont mind re-use of crawl's tiles.
Last edited by ss on Friday, 5th August 2011, 16:20, edited 2 times in total.

ss

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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 16:11

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

I've found at least 3 other games that use crawl's tiles:

http://code.google.com/p/magecrawl-arena/
http://code.google.com/p/magecrawl/
http://itunes.apple.com/in/app/rogue-touch/id303471870?mt=8

Also this post from the mailing list seems to clarify using crawl tiles as OK:
http://www.mail-archive.com/crawl-ref-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net/msg00614.html

However I'm still not sure about the licensing of some of the newly added crawl tiles.
Please confirm whether the new tiles (not at http://code.google.com/p/crawl-tiles/) are also GPLed

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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 17:13

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

snow wrote:Finally anyone who finds Crawl "too difficult" shouldn't be making a roguelike of their own.


This, in fact, is a ridiculously uninformed statement. I'll let dpeg explain why:

dpeg wrote:I don't think he [Linley Henzell, creator of Crawl] is playing Crawl these days. (In fact, I'd say he never played Crawl very much or, in fact, very well. This is not so surprising: a number of recent devs are lousy or even non-players.) He is, however, somewhat aware and happy with what we're doing to his game.


The above taken from https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=2284.

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Majang, ss

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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 17:18

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

Didn't Crawl tiles formerly use many of the NetHack tiles? I'm an ASCII diehard myself, so I wouldn't recognize them...
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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 17:55

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

Linley's version of crawl used ascii. There isn't a tiles version on his site so NetHack's tiles clearly aren't used.

Also I stand by my statement that if you find Crawl difficult you shouldn't make a roguelike. There's a difference between adding to a project and designing core mechanics from the ground up. Linley clearly had a lot of experience playing roguelikes. Simply put if you understand the core mechanics you can easily ascend. If you can't ascend you clearly don't understand the core mechanics and if you don't understand them how can you improve them? You'll just end up making a bad game.

This whole conversation reminds me of how people say Einstein was bad at mathematics which if you did the research you'd find was clearly not the case. People take quotes out of context and it just creates a mess. Linley has ascended a few times in Crawl and moved on to develop other things. Just because he didn't have the time or desire to streak 10 or 20 wins in a row doesn't make him a bad player.

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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 18:31

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

As I see it, the difficulty of a game is the designer's utmost choice. Personally, I believe harder is better but it is obvious that many will disagree. So if someone wants to make an easier roguelike, more power to them! Diversity is good.

I also don't like the tiles bashing. Crawl has benefited a lot from the awesome tiles work over the last years (including the many user contributionsby players) and will profit even more from webtiles.

Regarding license: there was an attempt to make Crawl tiles properly free (freer than GPL) -- try to find documentation on that. I believe it was successful.

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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 19:58

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

The mechanics don't have to be the same. Here's an example: the way teleports and stairs work in NetHack. If Linley hadn't had experience with NetHack odds are he wouldn't have made them the way they are in Crawl. Now which game would probably be better: one made by a person who has had a lot of experience with roguelikes and deeply understands how and why players win in various games, or one that says "this game is too hard! I'm going to make an easier one!"

Sure an easy roguelike wouldn't be a bad thing but unless you're able to beat the hard ones you're probably making it easy for the wrong reasons and in the wrong ways.
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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 21:44

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

Those who can, do. Those who can't, complain on message boards.

Keep us posted on your progress, more roguelikes is always good.
(p.s. this is stupid some dev please make it not stupid) - minmay

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Post Friday, 5th August 2011, 22:10

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

Huh? The ability to beat every hard roguelike ever is hardly a prerequisite for having an understanding of roguelike design. I've never won any roguelike other than Crawl (unless Spelunky counts), but (I hope!) I have at least a vague idea of might be a good idea for Crawl and what isn't. So I'm sure someone making their own roguelike can make good decisions for it, if they have a specific design goal in mind. Good luck with it, I hope it goes well!

Edit: sardonica said it better than me. :P

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ss

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Post Saturday, 6th August 2011, 09:51

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

snow wrote:The mechanics don't have to be the same. Here's an example: the way teleports and stairs work in NetHack. If Linley hadn't had experience with NetHack odds are he wouldn't have made them the way they are in Crawl. Now which game would probably be better: one made by a person who has had a lot of experience with roguelikes and deeply understands how and why players win in various games, or one that says "this game is too hard! I'm going to make an easier one!"

Sure an easy roguelike wouldn't be a bad thing but unless you're able to beat the hard ones you're probably making it easy for the wrong reasons and in the wrong ways.


I think that firstly you are badly misinterpreting the intent of the OP; and secondly that you have very little knowledge of game design or coding. Obviously everyone is entitled to their opinion, but in this case yours isn't particularly helpful. Anyway; it's not worth fighting over. If someone wants to have a go at something, why discourage them?

ss

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Post Saturday, 6th August 2011, 15:10

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

Thanks for all the feedback!

I wish to clarify that I am not writing a roguelike just because crawl is too difficult for me. My roguelike is a small hobby project with KISS design to serve as both a simple game and a simple demonstration of how a roguelike can be written in C++ using OpenGL. I'm hoping that one day it will become big, but I don't intend it to be a easier clone of crawl, or even for that matter to compete with crawl. I just wanted to use Crawl' s graphics because I don't have resources or time to make my own tiles. I will of course definitely credit crawl for the tiles that I do use both on my website and in my credits.
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Post Saturday, 6th August 2011, 16:44

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

In traditional roguelikes the tiles version reads the output of the ascii version and displays it in a different manner. It's probably easier to make the ascii version then have the tiles version build on it than just make the tiles version. I do know a lot about game design and I do know how to code. And, with my experience, it seems that the OP is going at things all wrong. First of all you should have, on paper, all your ideas before you write a single line of code. This means all your enemies, items, builds, or whatever. How your game should be displayed graphically shouldn't be worried about until you've already coded your AI, dungeon generation, etc. Finally the language you write your roguelike in doesn't matter at all.

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Post Saturday, 6th August 2011, 17:42

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

Making an ascii game in this day and age would be pretty silly, especially with the goal the OP has in mind. The only people who care about ascii roguelikes are the people who will very quickly be bored by a fairly easy one, so using tiles from the start is good. This lets people who might actually want to play an easy roguelike check it out without being immediately put off. Having only tiles instead of supporting both tiles and ascii also makes coding much simpler. And simple code is especially desirable in a demonstration project.

Also quite a few game studios are big fans of making a working prototype asap, then playing and iterating many times, adding and removing ideas as necessary, until the game plays well. This approach resulted in some extremely fun and very polished games. And it is directly contradictory to having all your ideas laid out before writing your first line of code, down to details such as enemies, items, and even character builds. Of course having a basic idea of what mechanics you want in your game before starting to code is necessary, but leaving the details for later has certainly worked great for quite a few games.

What part of coding you start with has very little relevance if you put some thought into interfaces and the like. Starting with the graphics is absolutely fine. And how are you going to test your AI without being able to play the game? The easiest way to test things like AI and dungeon generation is having a playable prototype, which includes some way of displaying things.

Finally, the language he writes his roguelike in matters quite a lot if it is intended to be a code demonstration. Besides, some languages are better for certain uses than others, so saying language doesn't matter is just silly. Write a working roguelike in brainfuck if you want to prove me wrong.

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Post Sunday, 7th August 2011, 21:32

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

@Snow:
Making a game is a creative process. It's not like coding the security for a bank network or such. Different strokes for different folks, and such. And, my display is the first thing I flesh out when I start a game project, even if it's just a barebones implementation. I generally know what gfx style I'm gonna work with, and I see no reason to waste time changing it later... And, coding anything else without a display system to see the results is kinda counter-productive.
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Post Monday, 8th August 2011, 21:28

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

@ the OP:

AFAIK, the crawl tiles are under a copyleft or even more liberal licence.

There is an excellent page of resources on Roguebasin:
http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment. ... ical_tiles

Also, from some resources from Planet Python (art and audio assets):
http://inventwithpython.com/blog/2011/0 ... our-games/

As an aside, you'd do very well to browse all of the developer pages on roguebasin. There are articles on A* pathfinding, LOS, FOV, AI, and dungeon generation. For general game design, this guy has a good site: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~am ... eprog.html

Good luck and have fun!

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Post Tuesday, 9th August 2011, 20:30

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

ss wrote:I just wanted to use Crawl' s graphics because I don't have resources or time to make my own tiles.

You are free to use all crawl tiles in your project if you release it under GPL. The google code project intends to clarify which tiles are public domain. Those ones are "more free than GPL" and can even be used in a commercial game. The new ones (since the google code project hasn't been kept up-to-date) are available under the GPL v2 license, like crawl's code and are thus free to be used in another GPL project.
Have fun with your project and let us know how it turns out.
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ss

ss

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Post Thursday, 11th August 2011, 02:26

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

Thanks for your ideas!

Are crawl's tiles under the GPLv2 only or under GPLv2 or later? I'm considering AGPLing my project and while the GNU AGPL is compatible with GPLv3 it is not compatible with GPLv2.
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Post Thursday, 11th August 2011, 06:31

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

It's 2 or later, as said in license.txt.
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ss

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Post Friday, 9th March 2018, 20:26

Re: Licensing of crawl tiles

ClickRaid using DCSS tiles. Good to know this is legal.
In Ziggurat:27 born and raised, on the Zot stairs where I spent most of my days chilling out maxing, relaxing all cool and all shooting some b-breath outside of lungs. When a couple CK - they were up to no good - started makin trouble in my neighbourhood!

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