Weird. I wrote a post a couple of hours ago but seems like I failed to press the submit-button..
Well, I do not put personal prestige into this project, yet. I have not yet started to work actively with it and therefore it's anyones take. But a couple of points makes me somewhat surprised.
1. The name of Tiberius pack
2. The refrerences to this site/team
3. Not letting us know
I will not have such a person on any of my teams if I didn't get a full and good explanation.
(And Chris, did you mayhaps delete my previous post? Did I flame Tiberius, if so please PM me? I ask you this 'cause your post puts the same question I had to Tiberius, but nicer)
Comunity Music Pack? (CMP)
I sent tib's a PM via bioware forums yesterday
[QUOTE]Subject: Excuse me...
To: Tiberius Morguhn
Sent: Tue, 29 August 2006 08:04PM
Got time to chat Tib's? You ahh, made some waves today. *Chuckle*
http://www.nwnctp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=938
It'll require you set up an account at CTP forums(I'd suggest posting soemthing too, as Christopher empties out non-poster accounts often) but I think you'd be rather intrested.
Your being talked about.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Subject: Excuse me...
To: Tiberius Morguhn
Sent: Tue, 29 August 2006 08:04PM
Got time to chat Tib's? You ahh, made some waves today. *Chuckle*
http://www.nwnctp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=938
It'll require you set up an account at CTP forums(I'd suggest posting soemthing too, as Christopher empties out non-poster accounts often) but I think you'd be rather intrested.
Your being talked about.[/QUOTE]
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Tiberius_Morguhn
- Posts: 91
- Joined: Fri Aug 18, 2006 3:47 am
Well. At Mask's invitation via the BioBoards, I am here. It seems none too soon as well from the positive and negative comments and the questions.
This is probably going to be a loooooong post......... :rolleyes:
I went back to page 10 where the CMP I released first got your group's attention. I am trying to answer questions in no particular order:
1. There is no CMP team - it is only me. No one else had stepped up to do something like this and I thought it would be useful, so I did it. The credits reference inspiration by the CEP and CTP teams merely for the great work done in organizing a vast array of disparate content. Music files for NWN are much, much simpler to tackle alone than either of the CEP or CTP content. I did take some offense at Christopher's coment on the vault page of "begging questions" which to me implied some sort of project name or concept theft, especially with the reference to this thread on your forums. FYI - the forums here are closed to public viewing and only by registering at Mask's request was I able to read about this.
2. An installer may be good for Windows users, but Mac and Linux users have to have special instructions on how to perform an install since it an NWN installer package is just a modified ZIP self-extracting executable. I figured with a single hak, 235 BMU files and a README/CREDITS that most folks could make it happen
3. Oh boy. The copyright issues. Let's start with the easy ones that Maximus answered quickly - files posted to the NWN Vault become public domain per the agreement to use their hosting. *ALL* music files pulled from the Vault published by the originating artist fall into this category. However, I do exclude some of those files from being held to this - these would be second hand music files, where the poster of the files is not the artist who created them (ie. the Baldur's Gate BMU conversion on the vault). So, let's axe off a couple of concerns mentioned:
The Witcher files - these were posted by CD Projekt (the game maker)
The Ultima 7 files - these are MIDI recreations by a community artist
On to the others. When Interplay was folding, they released for free into the public domain, the soundtracks to their "big games" at the time in the form of MP3 downloads. I know, because I obtained all the tracks from BG, BG2, BGDA, IWD, IWD2 and the Fallout series from there. The main reason for this was a "shorting" of customers who bought the BG collections and were promised a soundtrack on the bonus disks, but did not receive them. Here is the last remnant of that on the skeleton Interplay website:
http://interplay.com/support/product.asp?GameID=538
This is probably going to be a loooooong post......... :rolleyes:
I went back to page 10 where the CMP I released first got your group's attention. I am trying to answer questions in no particular order:
1. There is no CMP team - it is only me. No one else had stepped up to do something like this and I thought it would be useful, so I did it. The credits reference inspiration by the CEP and CTP teams merely for the great work done in organizing a vast array of disparate content. Music files for NWN are much, much simpler to tackle alone than either of the CEP or CTP content. I did take some offense at Christopher's coment on the vault page of "begging questions" which to me implied some sort of project name or concept theft, especially with the reference to this thread on your forums. FYI - the forums here are closed to public viewing and only by registering at Mask's request was I able to read about this.
2. An installer may be good for Windows users, but Mac and Linux users have to have special instructions on how to perform an install since it an NWN installer package is just a modified ZIP self-extracting executable. I figured with a single hak, 235 BMU files and a README/CREDITS that most folks could make it happen
3. Oh boy. The copyright issues. Let's start with the easy ones that Maximus answered quickly - files posted to the NWN Vault become public domain per the agreement to use their hosting. *ALL* music files pulled from the Vault published by the originating artist fall into this category. However, I do exclude some of those files from being held to this - these would be second hand music files, where the poster of the files is not the artist who created them (ie. the Baldur's Gate BMU conversion on the vault). So, let's axe off a couple of concerns mentioned:
The Witcher files - these were posted by CD Projekt (the game maker)
The Ultima 7 files - these are MIDI recreations by a community artist
On to the others. When Interplay was folding, they released for free into the public domain, the soundtracks to their "big games" at the time in the form of MP3 downloads. I know, because I obtained all the tracks from BG, BG2, BGDA, IWD, IWD2 and the Fallout series from there. The main reason for this was a "shorting" of customers who bought the BG collections and were promised a soundtrack on the bonus disks, but did not receive them. Here is the last remnant of that on the skeleton Interplay website:
http://interplay.com/support/product.asp?GameID=538
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Tiberius_Morguhn
- Posts: 91
- Joined: Fri Aug 18, 2006 3:47 am
3. (copyright continued) Okay, well that leaves us with a just a few game based music files left. The Max Payne 2 theme is distributed via the Rockstar website in MP3 format. Rockstar provided it for personal consumption as long as you don't sell it (or at least that is the standard disclaimer on their website). Hence, they get full credit and the NWN community gets the benefit of it without the content being modified or misrepresented as belonging to someone else.
There are two Morrowing theme songs provided by Bethesda that were used via the same reasoning as the Max Payne 2 theme.
Finally, we have Betrayal at Krondor. This one was a tough call, and I am still open to interpretation on this one. The BAK game was released into the public domain by Sierra last year (if memory serves). I found in my perusings that someone had converted all of the music from the game to WMA format (blech!). Through some conversions, I got it into to useable form. Many of the tracks are mere repetitions of one another with small changes by the artist, so they may not be of real use to the community anyways.
For other artists, I contacted them directly if something was used from their personal website (like David John). He was pretty enthusiastic about the project and I sent him the Credits list so he could look it over. Bioware owns the rights to two of the songs "freely" available on his website - namely "Infinite Dungeons" and "Far East", so he asked me to remove those which I did.
I did as much legwork as possible upfront in regards to these files. IANAL, but I believe all are fair use as described above, especially since the compilation is not being charged for (nor is any of the content being actively sold by the publishers) or misrepresented as mine or anyone else's work.
Whew! :rolleyes:
4. In regards to professional versus community content, I am with you on the fact I wish there was more community content to choose from. In all honesty, there isn't. I listened to some really BAAAAAAAAAAD stuff on the vault. Keep in mind too, that I may have played music critic a little as well since things like techno or cyberpunk or other such music I deemed as not fitting well into a fantasy RPG setting.
5. Since it was just me working on this since about mid July of '06, I didn't really do much advertising. I hold down the standard 40 to 50 hour work week of an engineer then worked on this at night when the wife was asleep. It took about three total weeks initially then some reconversion and resampling was done since several of the community music was done at odd bitrates or had other such problems. I did get encouragement from Maximus to advertise once I did the release, which I have been doing - but look where that got me :p:
6. The subdivision of the files based on style sounds good in concept but then you get into a pitfall of the CEP. Look at how some of their items are arranged - placeable that to me would be in a Dungeon palette would be in the Civilization-Interior palette, and so on. With the ambientmusic.2da, you could come up with an acronym system to precede the music title to categorize it, but since I am not a musician, I wouldn't know even how to classify them?
There are two Morrowing theme songs provided by Bethesda that were used via the same reasoning as the Max Payne 2 theme.
Finally, we have Betrayal at Krondor. This one was a tough call, and I am still open to interpretation on this one. The BAK game was released into the public domain by Sierra last year (if memory serves). I found in my perusings that someone had converted all of the music from the game to WMA format (blech!). Through some conversions, I got it into to useable form. Many of the tracks are mere repetitions of one another with small changes by the artist, so they may not be of real use to the community anyways.
For other artists, I contacted them directly if something was used from their personal website (like David John). He was pretty enthusiastic about the project and I sent him the Credits list so he could look it over. Bioware owns the rights to two of the songs "freely" available on his website - namely "Infinite Dungeons" and "Far East", so he asked me to remove those which I did.
I did as much legwork as possible upfront in regards to these files. IANAL, but I believe all are fair use as described above, especially since the compilation is not being charged for (nor is any of the content being actively sold by the publishers) or misrepresented as mine or anyone else's work.
Whew! :rolleyes:
4. In regards to professional versus community content, I am with you on the fact I wish there was more community content to choose from. In all honesty, there isn't. I listened to some really BAAAAAAAAAAD stuff on the vault. Keep in mind too, that I may have played music critic a little as well since things like techno or cyberpunk or other such music I deemed as not fitting well into a fantasy RPG setting.
5. Since it was just me working on this since about mid July of '06, I didn't really do much advertising. I hold down the standard 40 to 50 hour work week of an engineer then worked on this at night when the wife was asleep. It took about three total weeks initially then some reconversion and resampling was done since several of the community music was done at odd bitrates or had other such problems. I did get encouragement from Maximus to advertise once I did the release, which I have been doing - but look where that got me :p:
6. The subdivision of the files based on style sounds good in concept but then you get into a pitfall of the CEP. Look at how some of their items are arranged - placeable that to me would be in a Dungeon palette would be in the Civilization-Interior palette, and so on. With the ambientmusic.2da, you could come up with an acronym system to precede the music title to categorize it, but since I am not a musician, I wouldn't know even how to classify them?
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Tiberius_Morguhn
- Posts: 91
- Joined: Fri Aug 18, 2006 3:47 am
7. I don't mean this mean spirited but are you honestly that surprised at the name of the compilation? I mean we have "Community Expansion Pack" and
"Community Tileset Pack". The only things left to work on were "Community Music Pack" and "Community Portrait Pack" - I didn't use rocket science to come up with these :p:
Statements like "not letting us know" and "don't want this person on any of my teams unless I get a good explanation" *REALLY* lend themselves to bad feelings from the get-go. This is one of the things in the NWN community that really gripes me.
Outside of this forum thread, *NO ONE* in the community knew you were even considering such a project, so information flow has to be bi-directional for any of the aforementioned statements to have merit.
Old Mans Beard had approached me a while back about helping with the CTP and getting involved as well as advertising that there was help needed. Was there was such an advertisement for this group and the CMP project?
8. In regards to where I want the CMP to go.... I would like to see it grow like the CEP has. There are constant additions to content on the vault and I didn't review every single piece that was there (I did cover > 75% though!). Also, things like combat music were not even touched. There are several tracks that are better suited for combat music but I mainly focused on making everything ambient music for the first release. The groups idea on musical style grouping is also a great concept if it can be implemented properly. Those kind of things.
Egads. I wrote too much. Sorry in hindsight for the novel. I hope this addresses many of the concerns and questions. I am sure it raises some more. I will check back with the thread and Mask has my ear on the BioBoards so I am sure we will talk more soon.
"Community Tileset Pack". The only things left to work on were "Community Music Pack" and "Community Portrait Pack" - I didn't use rocket science to come up with these :p:
Statements like "not letting us know" and "don't want this person on any of my teams unless I get a good explanation" *REALLY* lend themselves to bad feelings from the get-go. This is one of the things in the NWN community that really gripes me.
Outside of this forum thread, *NO ONE* in the community knew you were even considering such a project, so information flow has to be bi-directional for any of the aforementioned statements to have merit. Old Mans Beard had approached me a while back about helping with the CTP and getting involved as well as advertising that there was help needed. Was there was such an advertisement for this group and the CMP project?
8. In regards to where I want the CMP to go.... I would like to see it grow like the CEP has. There are constant additions to content on the vault and I didn't review every single piece that was there (I did cover > 75% though!). Also, things like combat music were not even touched. There are several tracks that are better suited for combat music but I mainly focused on making everything ambient music for the first release. The groups idea on musical style grouping is also a great concept if it can be implemented properly. Those kind of things.
Egads. I wrote too much. Sorry in hindsight for the novel. I hope this addresses many of the concerns and questions. I am sure it raises some more. I will check back with the thread and Mask has my ear on the BioBoards so I am sure we will talk more soon.
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Primogenitor
- Posts: 49
- Joined: Sat Dec 11, 2004 9:24 am
[QUOTE=Tiberius_Morguhn;7314]7. I don't mean this mean spirited but are you honestly that surprised at the name of the compilation? I mean we have "Community Expansion Pack" and
"Community Tileset Pack". The only things left to work on were "Community Music Pack" and "Community Portrait Pack" - I didn't use rocket science to come up with these :p:
Statements like "not letting us know" and "don't want this person on any of my teams unless I get a good explanation" *REALLY* lend themselves to bad feelings from the get-go. This is one of the things in the NWN community that really gripes me. Outside of this forum thread, *NO ONE* in the community knew you were even considering such a project, so information flow has to be bi-directional for any of the aforementioned statements to have merit. [/quote]Well, its a two-way road as you mentioned. What have you done to earn Community Music Pack (from the wider community, not just this thread) as a name rather than "Tiberius' Music Pack"? Since it's a one-man job with no input, information, requests, or anything from anyone else (other than the artists of course), why is this "Community" other than to "cash in" on the CxP "brand"?
EDIT: I dont really care about who / what / why / where / when or have any reason to see this descend into any sort of flame war (though its shown no signs of that so far, thankfully). My top concern right now is to stop the CxP brand being needlesly reused like wildfire for everything under the sun; CVP for vfx, COP for Orcs, etc.
"Community Tileset Pack". The only things left to work on were "Community Music Pack" and "Community Portrait Pack" - I didn't use rocket science to come up with these :p:
Statements like "not letting us know" and "don't want this person on any of my teams unless I get a good explanation" *REALLY* lend themselves to bad feelings from the get-go. This is one of the things in the NWN community that really gripes me.
Outside of this forum thread, *NO ONE* in the community knew you were even considering such a project, so information flow has to be bi-directional for any of the aforementioned statements to have merit. [/quote]Well, its a two-way road as you mentioned. What have you done to earn Community Music Pack (from the wider community, not just this thread) as a name rather than "Tiberius' Music Pack"? Since it's a one-man job with no input, information, requests, or anything from anyone else (other than the artists of course), why is this "Community" other than to "cash in" on the CxP "brand"?EDIT: I dont really care about who / what / why / where / when or have any reason to see this descend into any sort of flame war (though its shown no signs of that so far, thankfully). My top concern right now is to stop the CxP brand being needlesly reused like wildfire for everything under the sun; CVP for vfx, COP for Orcs, etc.
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Tiberius_Morguhn
- Posts: 91
- Joined: Fri Aug 18, 2006 3:47 am
[QUOTE=Primogenitor;7315]Well, its a two-way road as you mentioned. What have you done to earn Community Music Pack (from the wider community, not just this thread) as a name rather than "Tiberius' Music Pack"? Since it's a one-man job with no input, information, requests, or anything from anyone else (other than the artists of course), why is this "Community" other than to "cash in" on the CxP "brand"?
EDIT: I dont really care about who / what / why / where / when or have any reason to see this descend into any sort of flame war (though its shown no signs of that so far, thankfully). My top concern right now is to stop the CxP brand being needlesly reused like wildfire for everything under the sun; CVP for vfx, COP for Orcs, etc.[/QUOTE]
Okay, I'm sorry to say this but your reasoning is laughable. Anyone in the community has the same right as you do to use the "Community" moniker if they so desire. "Earning" it is a meaningless statement. Considering it is community content in all of the CEP, CTP and CMP compilations, it does not matter if it is compiled by one person or many.
If you honestly don't care, then how can you state it is your top concern to stop the CxP "brand" from being used?
Does CTP own the copyright or trademark to CTP? = NO
Does CEP own the copyright or trademark to CEP? = NO
The same applies to my use of CMP. I don't own it but I can use it. I am getting a strong sense of sour grapes over my use of the name and coming to market first from comments like this.
DM Mask was very nice and very polite in inviting me to come here to discuss this. I appreciate his olive branch. I have also had very pleasant dealings with OMB in regards to the CTP doors and making other projects I've done work seamlessly with that content. I am trying to be reasonable in my discussions with your team but this is rapidly draining any interest on my part from these type of comments.
In regards to your asking me what I have done - I released the CMP with actual content from artists with their permission. Simple as that. I didn't see the need for a committee to hash out for months something that is relatively simple to produce (in comparison to CEP to CTP). Like I said in my other lengthy post, there are not that many quality music files on the vault to cobble together. It was relatively quick to do compared to these other projects and I had the time and interest to do it. I don't know what else you want me to say.
I have done custom content for other games before (Starfleet Command) but the NWN community is somewhat unusual compared to my experience there. By that, it seems like that once certain custom content developers gang together (DLA and now some members of the CTP), they have some sort of sense of entitlement that other "lowly" singular working developers have to check for permission or pay homage or something to produce anything. It is very tiring.
Enough of my rant I suppose :shutup: I appreciate the passion that your group is showing over this, especially considering the game is 4+ years old, but I do not want to be continually attacked over what I thought was doing a service for the NWN community.
EDIT: I dont really care about who / what / why / where / when or have any reason to see this descend into any sort of flame war (though its shown no signs of that so far, thankfully). My top concern right now is to stop the CxP brand being needlesly reused like wildfire for everything under the sun; CVP for vfx, COP for Orcs, etc.[/QUOTE]
Okay, I'm sorry to say this but your reasoning is laughable. Anyone in the community has the same right as you do to use the "Community" moniker if they so desire. "Earning" it is a meaningless statement. Considering it is community content in all of the CEP, CTP and CMP compilations, it does not matter if it is compiled by one person or many.
If you honestly don't care, then how can you state it is your top concern to stop the CxP "brand" from being used?
Does CTP own the copyright or trademark to CTP? = NO
Does CEP own the copyright or trademark to CEP? = NO
The same applies to my use of CMP. I don't own it but I can use it. I am getting a strong sense of sour grapes over my use of the name and coming to market first from comments like this.
DM Mask was very nice and very polite in inviting me to come here to discuss this. I appreciate his olive branch. I have also had very pleasant dealings with OMB in regards to the CTP doors and making other projects I've done work seamlessly with that content. I am trying to be reasonable in my discussions with your team but this is rapidly draining any interest on my part from these type of comments.
In regards to your asking me what I have done - I released the CMP with actual content from artists with their permission. Simple as that. I didn't see the need for a committee to hash out for months something that is relatively simple to produce (in comparison to CEP to CTP). Like I said in my other lengthy post, there are not that many quality music files on the vault to cobble together. It was relatively quick to do compared to these other projects and I had the time and interest to do it. I don't know what else you want me to say.
I have done custom content for other games before (Starfleet Command) but the NWN community is somewhat unusual compared to my experience there. By that, it seems like that once certain custom content developers gang together (DLA and now some members of the CTP), they have some sort of sense of entitlement that other "lowly" singular working developers have to check for permission or pay homage or something to produce anything. It is very tiring.
Enough of my rant I suppose :shutup: I appreciate the passion that your group is showing over this, especially considering the game is 4+ years old, but I do not want to be continually attacked over what I thought was doing a service for the NWN community.
[QUOTE=Tiberius_Morguhn;7314]Outside of this forum thread, *NO ONE* in the community knew you were even considering such a project, so information flow has to be bi-directional for any of the aforementioned statements to have merit.[/QUOTE]
I s'pose one could say the same about your project - you've worked on it for a while, and no one outside of Maximus knew about it - I'm not flaming, I'm pointing out that this, too, lacked bi-di communications .
[QUOTE=Tiberius_Morguhn;7314]There are constant additions to content on the vault and I didn't review every single piece that was there (I did cover > 75% though!).[/QUOTE]
In an earlier part post, you had mentioned that there was a lot of bad music. I agree - there are some bad ones out there. There are also plenty of non-period, and not even remotely "period" tunes on the vault. There are, however, a fair number of good tunes - I found quite a few that I thought would work well with some minor remixing (adjusting sound levels, et al), and a few that would be really good *if* they could be redone with good voice sets (they sound like synthesizer music, like early computer sound cards).
I suspect part of the hubbub over here is that we were planning a "community" project, where a group of us would vet the better tracks that had posted on the Vault, provide some sort of overview or description of them, and categorize them by categories (creepy/haunted, tavern, and so forth). As you can see looking through this thread, we really hadn't gotten too far along. I've downloaded lots of tracks from the Vault and listened through them, including short notes about each, but we really hadn't gotten moving yet on the project, so this was a bit of a surprise when we spotted your release.
Perhaps what we should do is plan a 1.5 or some such - rounding up some of the better community-generated music, providing some organization (descriptions and classifications), and move forward along that line.
-CWebb
P.S.: Don't worry too much about long posts. I tacked a philosophy degree onto my engineering degree. Unless I'm being snarky, I am long-winded. :p:
I s'pose one could say the same about your project - you've worked on it for a while, and no one outside of Maximus knew about it - I'm not flaming, I'm pointing out that this, too, lacked bi-di communications
.[QUOTE=Tiberius_Morguhn;7314]There are constant additions to content on the vault and I didn't review every single piece that was there (I did cover > 75% though!).[/QUOTE]
In an earlier part post, you had mentioned that there was a lot of bad music. I agree - there are some bad ones out there. There are also plenty of non-period, and not even remotely "period" tunes on the vault. There are, however, a fair number of good tunes - I found quite a few that I thought would work well with some minor remixing (adjusting sound levels, et al), and a few that would be really good *if* they could be redone with good voice sets (they sound like synthesizer music, like early computer sound cards).
I suspect part of the hubbub over here is that we were planning a "community" project, where a group of us would vet the better tracks that had posted on the Vault, provide some sort of overview or description of them, and categorize them by categories (creepy/haunted, tavern, and so forth). As you can see looking through this thread, we really hadn't gotten too far along. I've downloaded lots of tracks from the Vault and listened through them, including short notes about each, but we really hadn't gotten moving yet on the project, so this was a bit of a surprise when we spotted your release.
Perhaps what we should do is plan a 1.5 or some such - rounding up some of the better community-generated music, providing some organization (descriptions and classifications), and move forward along that line.
-CWebb
P.S.: Don't worry too much about long posts. I tacked a philosophy degree onto my engineering degree. Unless I'm being snarky, I am long-winded. :p:
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Bannor Bloodfist
- Posts: 1244
- Joined: Fri Oct 09, 2009 11:45 pm
- ctp: Yes
- dla: Yes
- TBotR: Yes
- nwnihof: Yes
[quote=Tiberius_Morguhn;7317]I have done custom content for other games before (Starfleet Command) but the NWN community is somewhat unusual compared to my experience there. By that, it seems like that once certain custom content developers gang together (DLA and now some members of the CTP), they have some sort of sense of entitlement that other "lowly" singular working developers have to check for permission or pay homage or something to produce anything. It is very tiring.[/quote]
Note: Just to be clear, the 'CMP' was picked as a moniker by some folks that are using our forums. This 'project' is NOT directly related to CTP.
The CTP team has already had to change their name once in the past. That story is fairly well known to team and non-team members, and I will not re-hash it again.
So. I think some feathers got ruffled here. Unfortunately. However, I hope you guys can work together. No real reason not to.
I do again want to wish you guys luck with the project.
Note: Just to be clear, the 'CMP' was picked as a moniker by some folks that are using our forums. This 'project' is NOT directly related to CTP.
The CTP team has already had to change their name once in the past. That story is fairly well known to team and non-team members, and I will not re-hash it again.
So. I think some feathers got ruffled here. Unfortunately. However, I hope you guys can work together. No real reason not to.
I do again want to wish you guys luck with the project.