Using Wesnoth art in other GPL projects...?

[DogBoy]

Hi,

I am currently faffing around writing a fantasy "casual game" (i.e. <1 hr playing time) inspired by Glen Pawley's "Fastcrawl" (check it out if you haven't!) which I need graphics for. The Wesnoth portraits are more or less ideal for my purposes - they are available under the GPL as long as the entire project is distributed as GPL, right?

And if so, is there any one place where I can get all the Wesnoth portraits drawn to date (including ones for user campaigns)...?

My game is incomplete but playable; I haven't got around to setting up a SourceForge project or similar for it, so it's not downloadable from anywhere. Yet.

Cheers!

[zookeeper]

The Wesnoth portraits are more or less ideal for my purposes - they are available under the GPL as long as the entire project is distributed as GPL, right?

Yes.

And if so, is there any one place where I can get all the Wesnoth portraits drawn to date (including ones for user campaigns)...?

I'm afraid not. The mainline portraits you can find in the images/portraits/ and data/campaigns/*/images/portraits/ directories, but for user-made campaigns I think you'll just have to download some to get them. Northern Rebirth, Sceptre of Fire and Saving Elensefar are a few that I think have at least some good ones. You could browse the graphics library in the wiki somewhere, but that's not very reliable. Also, check the art forums and you might find some useful ones as well.

[Viliam]

If the campaign server is working, the easiest way is to install Wesnoth, start it, click "Add ons" and download all campaigns from server. Then you will find the pictures on your hard disk, divided to directories by campaigns.

(I would recommend using the stable version; there will be more user campaigns available for it.)

[zookeeper]

If the campaign server is working, the easiest way is to install Wesnoth, start it, click "Add ons" and download all campaigns from server. Then you will find the pictures on your hard disk, divided to directories by campaigns.

Except that downloading all makes no sense, really. Some (especially the ones near the bottom of the list or the ones with least downloads) are currently rather poor portrait-wise, and I doubt there's much useful ones contained in the lower half.

[Zhukov]

Eleazar has a pack of 150 or so portraits. Old, new, mainline, UMC, the works. He posted it once. I can't seem to find where he posted it though.

Actually... come to think of it... I downloaded it myself. I have it on my computer. Will anything bad happen if I attach a 9MB file?

[zookeeper]

Eleazar has a pack of 150 or so portraits. Old, new, mainline, UMC, the works. He posted it once. I can't seem to find where he posted it though.

True. That's probably enough and much more comfortable than downloading and checking random campaigns...

Found the link, too: http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic. ... 149#196149.

[Zhukov]

Wait, I found the link. Click here to download.

EDIT: Ah, Zookeeper got in first.

[Sgt. Groovy]

Remember that many of the portrait art is not posted in its original resolution. Many artists make their art in larger resolutions and downscale them for distribution (some even might be made in SVG or other vector format). If you need to rescale anything for your game, you should ask the artist for the original to get better quality.

[DogBoy]

That's fantastic, thanks everyone. I'll be sure to let the Wesnoth community know when the game is available for download!

[DogBoy]

Well, I've been busy with other things but recently I went back and did some more coding on this hobby project. It's potentially fun times as a quick casual game and even more. The ideal thing would be to start putting it out to playtesters, but there's a problem.

Basically, it would be a lot of work to turn the project into an open-source one. Apart from the hassle of organising code distros, it uses a third-party closed-source engine library which flatly makes it non-GPL-able.

Now various people have commented that GPL is a peculiar license for artwork, and it's not clear to me exactly what the legal position is on distributing GPL artwork with non-GPL software. I'm not a lawyer, but a surface reading suggests that it hinges on whether a computer program can be considered a derivative work (in the copyright law sense) of an artwork. (When I wrote to FSF and asked them, they wanted to charge me for the answer.)

Just as important as the legal issue, is the moral question of how the people who created the art intended for it to be used. What would people feel about seeing their Wesnoth art in a non-open-source game?

If it comes to it, I can swap out the Wesnoth portraits (and weapon pics) until such time as I resolve the third party dependency (if I ever get round to it) or until such time as I release the code under a non-GPL open source licence (if I don't). So it's not a deal-breaker. But I'd love to use the art and let people see what I am doing with it.

Thoughts?

Cheers

[allefant]

I think you could still use it and be at least morally on the safe side by separating code and artwork. Since you use none of Wesnoth's code, your code then would not be relevant. But you use art from Wesnoth, so just license all art used in your game as GPL as well. That way, the basic "share alike" idea is fulfilled - you use GPL art for your game, and license all art used by the game as GPL. (So if you make improvements to the Wesnoth pictures, we could in turn use them.. or if you make additional artwork, we could use also.)

Again, that's just what I think would be fair and "morally" should fit the GPL idea, I have no idea about legal details.

[West]

What would people feel about seeing their Wesnoth art in a non-open-source game?

Personally I wouldn't mind at all -- as long as it's not a commercial game and credit is given where credit is due.

[Jetrel]

What would people feel about seeing their Wesnoth art in a non-open-source game?

Personally I wouldn't mind at all -- as long as it's not a commercial game and credit is given where credit is due.

Likewise. (though I can't legally give permission on behalf of the team).

Still technically illegal (unless you do what allefant said); it's just a question of who would sue you for doing it. Would someone actually have the motive to do that? Likely only if it becomes a big, successful project, at which point it's generally a good idea (and possible) to create your own content anyways; and then you're no longer doing anything illegal.

It's a matter of not being -evil-, really.

[mirwen]

Hello, i want to know what are the conditions to use images from battle for wesnoth in a free online game in developement. I read the full GPL license text but i'm french and i dont understand all the meanings of the text .
Im not the creator of this game but i i know it isnt under a GPL license for now (and it has not been discuss for now neither, but i dont know if he is OK or not).
If someone can explain me what are all the conditions for using images (of cours they wont be copyrighted), and what is really the meaning of the GPL license.

PS: i thought this was a good thread to post butif you need to deplace my message, dont hesitate.

[Thumper]

The GPL basically means that anyone who you provide the game to must be given the full source code of the game on request, allowed to use it in any way they like, and be allowed to redistribute it themselves under the same terms.

The GPL isn't a very good license for images, but Wesnoth uses it. Distributing Wesnoth's images along with a game which is not available under terms at least as permissive as the GPL is breaking the license.

- Chris