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Protecting your own map?
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 3:26 pm
by monaster
And yet another topic to be discussed (or linked to an already existing thread which I have overseen
): is there a chance of protecting your Quake 3 maps created with let's say the GTK radiant editor?
Any guess is welcomed reaching from "there's one slightly buggy tool to apply passwords to your own maps" to "just delete some of your script settings" (crippling your scripts in Warcraft 3 TFT is one way to protect your maps from being modified or contaminated with a virus and so on).
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 3:52 pm
by obsidian
If you're worried about corrupting your map, make backups fairly often. Radiant has a snapshots option in the preferences menu to save a new map file every fixed period of time.
Why would you want to stick a password on your map? Most people just slap on a EULA of some sort if you're worried about that kind of thing, it's not a relevant problem in the gaming community so there's little need for anything else.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 4:00 pm
by monaster
Having my map saved every 5 minutes so a crash won't do me any harm by destroying the last 5 weeks of work ain't a problem to me. What I meant with protecting is somehow decoding maps so that no one else can alter or change them; so the aim is to assure that your own map will be only available in ONE version after you publish it on the net; 'cos nothing's more annoying than having your map changed several times by other people and then republished thus having several buggy or hacked/cheated versions of your work existing and ruining your reputation at either a very early stage or after you made yourself a good rep.
Edit: Or am I too cautious right at the moment?
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 4:05 pm
by obsidian
obsidian wrote:Most people just slap on a EULA of some sort if you're worried about that kind of thing, it's not a relevant problem in the gaming community so there's little need for anything else.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 4:06 pm
by monaster
Understood, thanks!
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 4:17 pm
by sock
monaster wrote:Or am I too cautious right at the moment?
Yes, there is nothing you can do to protect your map once you have released it. If someone is going to copy your work without any credit, nothing is really going to stop them. The MOD communities are generally self policed and if someone takes someone else's work and calls it their own, people will generally call them out on it.
Most people nowadays release the source files of their maps anyway. If your source map will help someone else to understand something, then why not? Did you ever hear that copying stuff is a form of flattery towards the original author? Well lets face it, someone is not going to copy something they think is terrible, so if it happens to you, take it as a compliment and be happy
Sock
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 6:33 am
by a13n
AFAIHD, you can partially protect your map by scaling your map by 0.33333 as such.
At least this sets an additional difficulty on thieves.
Besides that you can set a password for your pk3 file.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 10:13 am
by seremtan
a13n wrote:AFAIHD, you can partially protect your map by scaling your map by 0.33333 as such.
this, unsurprisingly given the author, makes no sense
as for protecting a .bsp file from being decompiled, iirc q3map2 allows decompile but unfortunately borks all the text coordinates, which effectively protects your map. or, you could map in hammer which has a switch in the level properties to make your .bsp vmex-proof, though why you would want to i don't know. decompiling maps and studying them is a great way to learn
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 12:04 pm
by dichtfux
I publish my .map files with my maps, GPL.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 7:38 pm
by ^misantropia^
seremtan wrote:as for protecting a .bsp file from being decompiled, iirc q3map2 allows decompile but unfortunately borks all the text coordinates, which effectively protects your map.
Until I tell you about a tool I wrote two or three years ago, that decompiles a map and leaves the texture coordinates intact*. Point in casu: the determined hacker will always find a workaround, so don't bother.
* Though I never could find the time to add support for patches, it simply skips those.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 11:14 pm
by a13n
^misantropia^ wrote:Until I tell you about a tool I wrote two or three years ago, that decompiles a map and leaves the texture coordinates intact*.
Does that mean q3map2 is a slacker?
Anyway why don't you release your tool?
It will save a lot of time and make it easier to learn from great maps.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 11:53 pm
by bork[e]
it's been many months since I've done any work with radiant/quake, but the last version of q3map2 I downloaded had support for decompiling .bsp files like seremtan said.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 12:37 pm
by Fjoggs
You could decompile any map you wanted with q3map aswell. It's not a feature introduced in q3map2. It was just better because it extracted everything, not just brushes.
IIRC q3map didn't export entities. Correct me if I'm wrong please.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 11:36 pm
by GONNAFISTYA
A EULA attached to your map with your name and a simple statement that you own and produced the work and that you don't want your work distributed without your permission is all you'll need to protect yourself.
If someone wants to decompile your map and open it up in an editor to look at your geometry nothing in the world will stop them.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Wed May 07, 2008 11:38 pm
by GONNAFISTYA
^misantropia^ wrote:seremtan wrote:as for protecting a .bsp file from being decompiled, iirc q3map2 allows decompile but unfortunately borks all the text coordinates, which effectively protects your map.
Until I tell you about a tool I wrote two or three years ago, that decompiles a map and leaves the texture coordinates intact*. Point in casu: the determined hacker will always find a workaround, so don't bother.
* Though I never could find the time to add support for patches, it simply skips those.
Seriously...if you have that tool I'd greatly appreciate it. Just PM me the details. I have a .bsp of a map I haven't finished and the .map file was lost in a hard drive failure. I'm simply too lazy to go and retexture it again. I don't care if I have to re-do the entities, but the texturing was the bitch that didn't want me to open Radiant again.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 8:56 pm
by ^misantropia^
There's this very solid deadline I have to make right now, but PM me in a day or ten and we'll work something out.
Maybe I should polish the thing up and release it to the public. Two people showing interest in it, I must have half the Q3 mapping scene cornered.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 9:35 pm
by ix-ir
/me reminds misanthropia of my interest in this program. I'm sure there are plenty of mappers who've managed to lose their .map files who could benefit from this too.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 10:46 pm
by bork[e]
GFY wrote:I have a .bsp of a map I haven't finished and the .map file was lost in a hard drive failure. I'm simply too lazy to go and retexture it again. I don't care if I have to re-do the entities, but the texturing was the bitch that didn't want me to open Radiant again.
I completely read your earlier post wrong ^misantropia^... I wiped my drive a month or so ago in a "spur of the moment" situation, and about a day later I realised I forgot to backup my treasured little baseq3 forlder.
Not like my work is worth a damn, but I sure would like to have a map file of them again with textures like they were. I have all the pk3s, but I never put a map file in unless it was in a very early stage.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Fri May 09, 2008 12:21 am
by Scourge
Yeah, there's a few that I'd like to work on again since it would be much easier with your tool.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 6:21 pm
by monaster
Thanks for everyone's tipps so far! And yet another question concerning copyright and such: does anyone know of cases where people like me and you (mappers, developers and so forth) got into trouble using textures from already existing games even if they had hinted that not all of the textures used in their maps are self drawn? I just want to be sure that it's sufficient to write down the games I've taken a few textures from before having my soon-to-be-published map deleted on each and every single site on the internet due to copyright violations.
PS: The games list would be added to the pk3-file and says something like: A few textures/shaders here and there were taken from other games, such as: xxxgame1, xxxgame2, xxxgame3, etc.
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Tue May 13, 2008 11:20 pm
by dichtfux
monaster wrote:does anyone know of cases where people like me and you (mappers, developers and so forth) got into trouble using textures from already existing games even if they had hinted that not all of the textures used in their maps are self drawn?
If you're talking about commercial games and their usual licenses here, this can easily get you into trouble. Even using retail Quake 3 textures for a Quake 2 map most likely violates the Quake 3 EULA (though I doubt that id would kill you for that - but it's a matter of respect not to abuse that imo). Things like using Unreal 3 textures for a Quake 4 map most likely
will get you into trouble.
It's a different story for games like Nexuiz, Tremulous or other open source games that also distribute their media files under open licenses (though sometimes the media files are distributed under a license that differs dramatically from the license that applies to the source code/rest of the program). You should have a look at the licenses in every case to be sure. (Yes, I know that means work that isn't fun at all.)
Re: Protecting your own map?
Posted: Wed May 14, 2008 12:20 pm
by monaster
Oh yeah! That's the answer I wanted to here!
Seems, there's gonna be a whole bunch of work before my map's gonna be released. Dammit...
