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S.T.A.L.K.E.R ripping off Half-Life 2?
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 11th April 2007
We imagine Gordon isn't very happy that someone may be copying his moves...
Apparently light textures in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. have been found which are nearly identical to textures in DOOM 3 and which bear the same filename. That the filename is "lights_impflash.dds" adds weight to the argument, since there are no Imps in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
The same seems to be true of a water texture that may have been copied from Half-Life 2. Again, the filename was identical between the two games.
While Valve and THQ / GSC have been unwilling to comment just yet, Todd Hollshead of id Software went on the record over at Shack News;
"I've seen a post on a web forum that claims DOOM3 assets are used in another game, but we've been working hard on Enemy Territory: Quake Wars as well as our own internal project and have not had the time to fully investigate or otherwise verify that the claim is true. Only from what I've seen on the Web, it's concerning. However, it may turn out to be nothing. Nevertheless, it would be improper to make any decision about a course of action until we find out whether the claim is true, and what assets from DOOM3, if any, have potentially been used."
It's early days in this brewing controversy but the ramifications are potentially massive if two of the largest and most respected games companies have been ripped off by one of the most anticipated games of the last decade. Either way, we'll try and keep you posted on how this develops.
If you've ever stolen from a computer games company, or been wrongly accused, or even if you just want to pretend you have, then our forums are the place for you! Drop on by and tell us what you think.
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Comments (53)
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Kinda sad in my opinion...
- H.
Yes, they did wrong copying (if its true) the textures, and in the future, they should be given a bill and told to pay up or else, but I hate this "You sue me I sue you" culture we seem to have adopted world over and I'm sure it can be settled out of court.
Imagine if you wrote a book and someone stole a chapter or two from it to use in theirs.
That said, I massively support games like THQ and games that are free-roaming or innovative and therefore don't want them to go under because of this. Hopefully it'll all be proved to unfounded nonsense.
It's absolutely shocking to steal property in this way, especially for companies that are such big players in the industry. It doesn't set much of an example for the smaller ones. Moreover, a lawsuit for this type of action would not provide "punishment" - it would give measured damages that compensate for the actual loss - as closely as can be calculated. The problem obviously is that the company that makes STALKER is Russian, and will therefore be hard to sue, due to jurisdictional issues. The most likely outcome therefore would be for Valve and Id to seek an injunction preventing sale of STALKER until things have been sorted out... That's tough for gamers though.
On an unrelated note, I am sincerely unimpressed with STALKER as a game. The performance is abysmal, and it has a distinctly unfinished feel. There are large sections of the game where I will have to look at the ground, as the weather conditions make the framerate drop off to an unplayable level if i can see the sky - this is regardless of gfx quality settings, and I have a decent system. Furthermore, I have found missions where the objective has been forgotten to actually be placed on the map - very frustrating. The game will also periodically "lose" my mouse. The most recent patch apparently breaks savegames. Slight problem on an RPG....
Not true, the files could've been purchased, if not free already.
And honestly, who even cares?
Regardless of the graphics settings? Dude, performance in this game is all about its graphical settings.
Your pc is clearly not fast enough to run this game, and you can't blame the game for that.
Also, on occasion rain will artifact horribly. Sometimes savegames are inexplicably unplayable, and I have to go to the previous quicksave. That's not hardware related.
My major gripe with STALKER has been the story, it's broken and hard to follow at times with poor translation that makes coherence impossible. I'm currently invstigating underneath Yantar and I have no idea why.
They were under a lot of pressure to finish it quickly.
They're known to have used third-party assets during testing.
I think it's entirely likely that stuff could have leaked through. It's not really that outlandish a thing to do; when editing movies and TV ads, temporary soundtracks are often used. I'd characterise it in the same way.
We do usually expect people to have removed them by the time they show the film to paying customers, though...
I genuinely think that if someone ran me over with their car, I'd ask them nicely to pay for any medical care and lost pay and leave it at that.. If they didn't cooperate.. then, and only then would I consider suing them. If they did it again the day I walked out of hospital, then I'd go for the throat.
If the only thing that is identical is the file name but the texture itself looks a lot like it, but isnt 100% the same, then i dont think valve have got a case.
Manager:We need this out the door this week
Coder:But we have all these assets we need to replace with our own
Manager:What you talking about the game looks done
Coder:But its not our stuff....
Manager:So no one will ever know
coder: But....
Manager: But nothing. Have it ready or you wont get to make that train simulator game youve been dreaming of making
coder: ok :(
Yes, you can take someone elses picture (like a bit of clipart) and then alter it and not have to pay them, but you have to do it so that it is not deemed recognisable as once having been the original. At least, thats my understanding.
taking bits and pieces from other games and then reselling them as your own without paying the owners or getting permission from the owners of said pieces.. fits perfectly
Obviously you haven't understood the story line correctly. Thought the story line was easy to follow to be quite honest.
Well, no and maybe yes. Maybe I haven't understood it because the storyline was difficult to follow for me. I wake up after a jittery cutscene and a trader makes me work for him. He sends me off on tasks and at some point I hook up with a bartender who for no known reason helps me find and kill strelok who has a stash somewhere underground that these random guys help me find that tells me about Fang and Ghost. Tracking Ghost leads me to Lab X18 and lab X16 after the Agroprom centre where I got a load of confusing things about emmissions and a Brain Scorcher in the north.
I kind of know whats going on then, but I had to piece it together myself the hard way. It should have been relayed to me better.
END OF SPOILERS
One of the main problems with this debate is also to do with the use of the textures. IIRC, Battlefield 1942 shipped with RTCW textures left over in the pak files from testing days. They weren't used in the game, so no-one seamed to mind. All m!chi:be did was discover D3 alike textures in Stalker's equivilent pak files, as far as I'm aware no-ones actually seen them in the game, which adds more grey area to all this.
As for Stalker using HL sound effects, it acutally used CS sound effects, but this was one a leaked internal beta, as such wasn't illegal because it wasn't published.
It's also worth pointing out id's Todd Hollshead's statement implies not only did GSC not get the textures for free, (Hollshead states that any asset used from Doom 3 is a problem) but id are prepared to look futher into this and take action, he didn't seem to think it was no big deal.
Time will tell I guess.
Who knows, there could be more textures which have been renamed.
modders dude. they were modding the game and came across something familiar from other games. they were not friggin auditing it.
IDK what the big deal is. they won't get much money from it. stalker ain't exactly a smash hit.
The 'deal', as I understand it, is that even if they don't get 'much money' from a lawsuit, they get restitution either through an injunction or monetary compensation for another company illegally using their property. You know - breaking the law 'n such? Which if nothing else, sends a message of "you can't do this and get away with it" to other such companies.
It's quite possible that a mod group spotted it, they'd obviously be quite familiar with the files and names etc
[EDIT]
Beaten to it
-monkey
I don't see what the big deal is here... I mean, are ppl actually losing sleep over this stupid thing.
Movies do it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdbYsoEasio
And, yeah, who cares? If it were hundreds or even dozens of files, maybe it would be a problem. But just one or two? It doesn't make it right, but it's asinine to pursue legal action over something so trivial.
Doom3 was really a showcase of the new 3d engine, so why were they not able to buy and modify certain parts of it....
You dont know the whole story, so dont start pointing the finger of blame guilt and theft :D
I've recently started work at a TV production company as a 3d animator (who said all those hours working on mod's wouldn't pay pff :D ) and the amount of stuff like this that goes on is crazy. When your dealing with a project that has 1000's of textures, trying to keep track of them is bloody difficult, especially when you've got 7 or 8 people working on it, jumping between different shots. A test scene might be made to check something is going to work, textures are thrown on that were found on google images, that gets passed onto someone else and they just use that image as the basis for something, without knowing where its come from.
True, _BUT_ what now defines different in the binary world?
With the onset of md5 sums, etc its very easy to see if a file is identical to another file.
So:
Stalker coder steals the texture from HL2, then adds a few bits of data, then puts it in STALKER...
now when you md5 the files, you see that they are different, but when visually looking at them, they look identical, which do you go by?
Oh so you say they are the same? well maybe those few bits he added actually changed some colors here and there, just that you didn't notice.
or, Oh you say they aren't the same? maybe he just added a 0110010001 at the end of the file? (which should make the files different enough that their md5 hashes will be different.)
Presumably the quotes from the IP owners saying they know nothing about it implies that it wasn't a commercial transaction...
Sad, really.
Have you actually looked at the comparison screenshots? It's not a couple of files, it's about 30. It's essentially every single pixel light shader file Doom 3 has (the "shape" of the light if you will, as oppose to a standard sphere).
Yeah... but what if they ARE being used in the final version? As their light shader files it's quite a bit harder to spot them in the game, you can't really say "ahh, I recognise that shadow!". Someone needs to crack open the Stalker map files or possibly the texture coding and have a look. They may well have just have been placeholders, but if they're not, and are still in the game, that's just plain cheeky. It's like stealing a riff from a good song and building something else around it.
"Yeah, I know that's the riff from smoke on the water, but it was just a placeholder before we came up with our own riff, and we just forgot to take it out, it's ok though right?"
MD5 hashes aren't the only ones out there - they're just widely used to make sure a particular file has not been modified. But if you want to see if a particular file is similar to another you just use a hash designed for that purpose. The fuzzy OCR plugin for Spamassassin uses a hash that can tell (some of the time, at least) if an image is similar to a previously OCR'd image to save on CPU time. It can spot if an image is pretty much the same even if the spammer puts those random dots and lines all over it.
Now if it were EA on the other hand...
..and the crowd goes silent.. good to know! thanks! ;)
I give my self a pat on the back for not being and idiot and jumping to conclusions, as well as suggesting the actual outcome.
Have you ever heard "Back to life, Back to reality"?