Asset curation, CFC policy, and CYA

[WildWeazel]

No matter how you slice it one of the big things we need to deal with soon is incorporating artwork into the game, and we've always been under the assumption that most of it would come from Civ3 mods, namely the CFC database. CFC policy states that aside from forbidding third-party copyrighted material anything users post is considered to be in the public domain. That's a terrible position to take IMO, but at least it allows us to do whatever we want as far as CFC is concerned.

I'm not worried about CFC though. I want to avoid two things: any suspicion of copyright infringement reaching TPTB, and creators making a stink because we're using their work outside of Civ3/CFC.

For the first case, I think the best we can do is to carefully avoid using any content that was at all derived from original artwork (ie, not made-from-scratch) and clearly state that.

For the second, we could favor content by people who are still around and gave their blessing, though if someone is not around to ask, they're not likely to reappear to object. But if someone does, it would be best to work with them rather than cite CFC policy. There's plenty of great content available and it's not worth making an enemy. In any case we should respect any wishes that a creator has made know, up to and including avoiding their content.

Then there's the logistical side, making sure we know and properly credit who made each asset as we add, update, and replace files. Again there is so much out there, and I'm sure we'll change our mind many times as we find acceptable placeholders, agree on something better, have new content made, etc.

Making it very clear who made what files and where they came from should help to mitigate all of the above.

Here's what I'm thinking.

As mentioned in my Dutch proposal, we split out all of the assets into a separate repo. This has a few tangible advantages:

• We can grant write access to creators and curators independently of developers
• It keeps the source repo small and fast for CI and developers who don't care about the latest assets
• We can more clearly apply licenses and disclaimers to the assets, where the MIT license doesn't make sense
• If there is a copyright complaint, it will likely hit only the asset repo

We put something like the following in NOTICES.txt at the top of this new repo:

Asset Disclaimer: We have made a best-effort attempt in good faith to vet and properly attribute all third-party assets used in the project, to ensure that: all content is free and open-source compliant; content not explicitly licensed is credited to its respective authors and reused in the spirit of its publication. Most assets which were not expressly granted to us by their creators were sourced from Civilization Fanatics Center. It is the policy of CFC that content posted there is considered to be in the public domain, and such uploads generally lack licenses to the contrary. However we wish to preserve goodwill among content creators and will respect their wishes over official policy. Please contact us and we will gladly resolve any issues with the reuse or attribution of your assets.

Within this repo, we keep assets compartmentalized - that is, keep all of the files that were downloaded together as a product - and if there was not already, add a simple credits file with each product indicating the creator, where we got it, if it has been modified, and any other relevant metadata. If there's a reason to break up files, do this for each of the resulting locations. But we are not limited to looking for files only in the same structure as Civ3.

This of course leaves the matter of actually deciding which content to use, which as my experience with Lord of the Mods showed can stretch on indefinitely.

[KulkoBSW]

Sounds very reasonable to me.
But also like a lot of work, which will hardly happen incidentally, while working on other tasks. So this would greatly be helped by a few people volunteering to drive this.

As for the choice, I believe since we will stay open to modding, it does not matter too much, which is the base set, so in most cases a short discussion and then a simple majority decision per case is enough for now.
And then in the end if we believe the result is too Dissonant we can reopen that can of worms once more.

Lastly I have one more question, a lot of the legacy content is given in that pcx format which is none native to godot, For the main asset, do we plan to convert that in png, to be used more directly? or is the idea to have the pcx converter be somehow integrated into the godot editor (Which should be possible, but proved to hard for me to do.) Anyways it would be really helpful is somebody could setup a complete subscene for something in Godot, so that others could reuse the methodology.

[WildWeazel]

Sounds very reasonable to me.
But also like a lot of work, which will hardly happen incidentally, while working on other tasks. So this would greatly be helped by a few people volunteering to drive this.

Yes, we need more eyes on this part, which can be done in parallel by just about anyone. Maybe we should have an asset committee to find and present candidates.

As for the choice, I believe since we will stay open to modding, it does not matter too much, which is the base set, so in most cases a short discussion and then a simple majority decision per case is enough for now.
And then in the end if we believe the result is too Dissonant we can reopen that can of worms once more.

Agreed, the most important thing for now is to select usable and permissible files. That includes rough placeholders if we don't see anything suitable. We can always replace them later.

Lastly I have one more question, a lot of the legacy content is given in that pcx format which is none native to godot, For the main asset, do we plan to convert that in png, to be used more directly? or is the idea to have the pcx converter be somehow integrated into the godot editor (Which should be possible, but proved to hard for me to do.) Anyways it would be really helpful is somebody could setup a complete subscene for something in Godot, so that others could reuse the methodology.

It's a good question. Anything new we create, or need to modify, IMO should use a supported format (still TBD how we're going to represent animations and civ coloring, so it's too early to necessarily assume PNG). For things we're using as-is my first inclination was to convert them to represent our preferred formats, but I guess it doesn't matter, as the code to read them is already integrated. It would be great to have a Godot based file converter. I think eventually we would want to offer a way to import and convert a whole mod to our formats so that it can be enhanced.

[WildWeazel]

Getting a bit more technical on how this repo might work:

The asset repo would use git lfs, and contain the full file structure of our game's assets directory so that it can simply be checked out in place. Unsure whether it should be a git submodule, or just something that you would explicitly check out to a subdirectory, but I'm thinking the latter. It would not be needed for compilation, or most CI steps. The final build process however would always check out the latest version, and these files might be put into a resource pack (.pck file) in a release build rather than preserve the raw directory structure.

This repo, rather than a typical open source license, would have a copyright disclaimer (eg. all content herein is properly of its original owners... thus we would not be granting any rights), and then the policy notice described above.

At least anything that we modify, we could go ahead and convert to our preferred Godot supported formats, and prune any unnecessary files. Anything created new for this game should be made in our preferred format, and can be individually licensed as CC-BY-SA or whatever the creator prefers.