The Beauty that is Copyright: Skeletons (Voting Round 2)

Post by **Neoriceisgood** » November 9th, 2006, 4:03 pm

http://www.videogamesprites.net/FinalFa ... pirit.html

Image speaks for itself, I'm not sure if anyone has seen this before; however our good old skeleton appears to have -a lot- incommon with the one from Final Fantasy 4, I didn't realise it until now.

Just figured it'd be smart to ring a bell.

Post by **wayfarer** » November 9th, 2006, 4:19 pm

I recognize his lovley smile only a mother can love.

Change the head a little bit and I think the problem is solved.

Post by **Jetrel** » November 9th, 2006, 10:41 pm

For those who are wondering, or for whom the above link is broken, here's a reference:

The _original_ sprite which francisco made of this is far more similar than the current body. He basically only changed the colors and weapon.

I think it's safe to keep the new body, since I created almost all of that by scratch, myself, but ... much as it pisses me off, I guess we'd better get this bad boy a new head, eh? It's a crying shame, because the old head was ... very good.

For those who are wondering, this "damage control" will extend to the skeleton, skeleton archer, wraith, spectre, and lich. Certain others (revenant, deathblade, boneshooter) do not need edits.

Post by **Neoriceisgood** » November 9th, 2006, 10:45 pm

Yeah it's a shame, but I'm sure we can fix up something better with our awesome-fu;

Though; this means that games other than ogre battle were used as "inspiration" for the original units, doesn't it? Could mean there are more units out there that have more behind them than we think.

(Let's start with the drakes

)

JW · Post by JW » November 9th, 2006, 10:46 pm

I guess you can never be sure who or what is ripped off of anything.

Then again, there's been so many millions of sprites in games, I'm sure some of them have been accidentally duplicated to a high degree just by chance.

-that's not a statement about this sprite in particular, just a general thought. It does make me laugh at that incident when that guy stole the Lufia dragon and said he drew it from memory. Again, it was Neo who pointed it out with a link.

Post by **Neoriceisgood** » November 9th, 2006, 10:48 pm

If you violate copyrights in the sprite world, neo will find you sooner or later; have no worries about that.

Post by **Jetrel** » November 10th, 2006, 12:07 am

JW wrote:I guess you can never be sure who or what is ripped off of anything.

I can ask francisco, which I've just sent a PM to the effect of.

JW wrote:Then again, there's been so many millions of sprites in games, I'm sure some of them have been accidentally duplicated to a high degree just by chance.

Small components like faces/hands, yes. Larger components like bodies, no.

Math says that there might be millions of different sprites out there, but in a 32x32 space with 256 different possible colors per pixel, there are more than trillions of possible sprites. Happening to copy something verbatim is so unlikely as to be basically impossible. By the strong law of large numbers(?), it will eventually happen, but it's like the whole shakespeare/monkey thing. So far, a worldwide distributed computing project simulating the monkeys has managed to produce 20 words of othello in sequence. That's it.

JW wrote:-that's not a statement about this sprite in particular, just a general thought. It does make me laugh at that incident when that guy stole the Lufia dragon and said he drew it from memory. Again, it was Neo who pointed it out with a link.

I'm sure you suspect this, but I will confirm this: HE WAS LYING.

Even neo couldn't draw someone else's sprite that he hadn't fiddled with himself, from memory. Nor could Craig Mullins, or Da Vinci, or anyone. Human memory can do some amazing feats like this, but is strangely much weaker with structured visual memory than with structured musical memory. Somehow, most of our visual storage paradigms, like the cartesian mosaics that are sprites, seem to go against the grain of how our minds store things natively. Ironically, wavelets would be a closer representation, but this is really off-topic, the point is that even bona-fide geniuses can't do this.

Post by **Neoriceisgood** » November 10th, 2006, 12:29 am

Even neo couldn't draw someone else's sprite that he hadn't fiddled with himself, from memory

Is this a challenge?

JW · Post by JW » November 10th, 2006, 1:06 am

Jetryl wrote:
JW wrote:Then again, there's been so many millions of sprites in games, I'm sure some of them have been accidentally duplicated to a high degree just by chance.
Small components like faces/hands, yes. Larger components like bodies, no.

Math says that there might be millions of different sprites out there, but in a 32x32 space with 256 different possible colors per pixel, there are more than trillions of possible sprites. Happening to copy something verbatim is so unlikely as to be basically impossible. By the strong law of large numbers(?), it will eventually happen, but it's like the whole shakespeare/monkey thing. So far, a worldwide distributed computing project simulating the monkeys has managed to produce 20 words of othello in sequence. That's it.

An exact duplicate, yes, but structurally, the chances get much better. Removing different color schemes drastically redecues the number of variation, and with such small figures similar outlines of previously made sprites are probably going to happen.

Again, in this case I don't know either way.

JW wrote:It does make me laugh at that incident when that guy stole the Lufia dragon and said he drew it from memory. Again, it was Neo who pointed it out with a link.
I'm sure you suspect this, but I will confirm this: HE WAS LYING.

Even neo couldn't draw someone else's sprite that he hadn't fiddled with himself, from memory. Nor could Craig Mullins, or Da Vinci, or anyone. Human memory can do some amazing feats like this, but is strangely much weaker with structured visual memory than with structured musical memory. Somehow, most of our visual storage paradigms, like the cartesian mosaics that are sprites, seem to go against the grain of how our minds store things natively. Ironically, wavelets would be a closer representation, but this is really off-topic, the point is that even bona-fide geniuses can't do this.

I know. I used that as an example of when someone blatantly ripped off another game. If you reread the thread I'm sure you'll see that I was actually barking at him myself upon this discovery.

In that case it was more than just structural similarity as well: it was complete identical replication. An obvious forgery.

Post by **Zhukov** » November 10th, 2006, 1:15 am

JW wrote:In that case it was more than just structural similarity as well: it was complete identical replication. An obvious forgery.

Aw, I think you're being a bit harsh on the guy. After all, it wasn't completely identical, there was a hue shift involved!

Neorice: Where do you find all this stuff. Seriously. I could do with some reference material.

Post by **Jetrel** » November 10th, 2006, 5:55 am

Neoriceisgood wrote:
Even neo couldn't draw someone else's sprite that he hadn't fiddled with himself, from memory
Is this a challenge?

In a way. If nothing else, it's an ideal to aspire to.
I'll raise a toast to pulling it off, but I don't think it's something worth directly spending effort towards.

Post by **fmunoz** » November 10th, 2006, 6:44 am

Yes, the 1st generation sprites were just ripoffs. That was never hidden. Go search the forum or google for my old geocities page (circa 0.3 or so.. around 3 or 4 years ago).
Later, when things got bigger, I tried to redid them. i.e Wolves got deleted and redraw fully... but the problem was that at that time half of the images were original.
It seems that the skeleton used a jedi mind trick on me and made me said.. this is no the sprite you have to redo. Maybe was its bad looks at the time or the source I used to get it based on.
Real life just came and I didnt got job as good as the game needed.
So yes, the image need to be reworked. We need a new skull.
Thanks Neo for pointing it. Sorry for all the hassle I'm giving Jetryl.

Remember guys.. do the rigth thing and use allways original images or later after a lot of time they could strike back and bite you.

Post by **Jetrel** » November 10th, 2006, 8:32 pm

Zhukov wrote:Neorice: Where do you find all this stuff. Seriously. I could do with some reference material.

There are quite a few links at the bottom of this page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprite_%28 ... raphics%29

Post by **Neoriceisgood** » November 10th, 2006, 11:23 pm

I just google the game's acronym + the word "sprite" or "sprites"

Post by **Darth Fool** » November 22nd, 2006, 6:35 pm

I think that this is pretty important to fix, so I have given a go at making a replacement skull completly from scratch using one of Neorice's skeletal monsters as a palette. I can't whip them out as fast as our experts, but with a couple of hours of work and a lot of attention to detail, I can get something that is halfway decent. Attached find the skull and a sample on our existing skeleton. As always, fell free to improve it.