jawa9000 Posted September 11, 2009 Share Posted September 11, 2009 This is my first post here, but I've read a lot of other posts, looking for this question already being asked, and couldn't find it, so here goes: I would really like to be able to play a game essentially written in parallel with Oblivion (think of it as a very complex free mod to Oblivion), with an all-new game engine, designed to be multiplayer, but to use Oblivion's graphics (characters and game world) to have this game built on. This should be a lot easier than making a whole game from scratch, since at least half of the time spent to make a game is the graphics and animations, but my questions are, would this be legal (would Bethesda have grounds to sue, assuming you didn't make any money on it?), and would it even be feasible without a full staff of game designers? jawa9000[edited after reading some other posts] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nexus Set Posted September 11, 2009 Share Posted September 11, 2009 No, it wouldn't be legal still. Using Bethesda's game assets and putting them in another game and distributing said game to the public would still violate their copyrights unless they intentionally give consent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bben46 Posted September 11, 2009 Share Posted September 11, 2009 Multiplayer has been requested many many times. There have been several attempts with varying degrees of success. Oblivion was designed from the ground up as a single player game. Where games such as WOW were designed to be multiplayer. Therefore, WOW does not work well as a single player game, and Oblivion does not work well (if at all) as multiplayer. As Nexus Set said, there would be legal problems in using Oblivion - or any other Bethesda assets in a new game engine such as you propose. And technical difficulties as well. Where have you found an open source game engine with anything near the capability of the engine used by Bethesda? If you can show us, maybe some of our more adventurous modders could start making stuff for it. Once there is a viable world, and a small story line it should attract more modders Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jawa9000 Posted September 12, 2009 Author Share Posted September 12, 2009 As to the legal issues, I was hoping that only distributing the "different" game for free, billed as a mod for Oblivion (not including any Oblivion assets, but requiring Oblivion's assets to run) would suffice to provide legal protection, since it appears Bethesda doesn't mind mods made to their game, they should only object to their assets being distributed without their involvement, which is not what I'm proposing. I've actually played WoW a fair amount (retired now, though) as well as Oblivion, and what I'd really like to do is to create a fairly small game (in terms of scope), somewhat similar to the arena system WoW uses, designed for group vs group combat, in matches ranging from 1v1 to 4v4, with four classes (Knight, Assassin, Priest, Mage) and I've worked up a fairly detailed (but as yet unfinished) design document for this separate game, and I was hoping to someday set it up as an open source game, but after much consideration, it seemed that building it as a "mod" and getting to use all the graphics Oblivion already has would be much quicker, not to mention better, than anything the open source community could come up with in a reasonable length of time (and I don't consider myself ever capable of doing it all by myself). As to your question about an open source game engine, I admit I don't know enough programming yet to be able to answer that question. I guess my thoughts on it were that if we were to combine code in C++ with drawing/animation in Blender, and possibly using Python scripting (all of which I am willing to learn, but would be a long way from doing entirely myself) that would be enough. I did not know that it would be necessary to use a "game engine" that was made by someone else (somewhere I read that all of Oblivion is coded in Python). Essentially this is something I plan to work on as a hobby for several years, and I'm learning as I go (so far I've got a C++ book and I'm just starting that). I'd rather not post the whole draft design document on a forum like this, but I'm not opposed at all to discussing details of it, if anyone's interested, and as I mentioned, I plan for the game to be open source anyway, so I'm not in this for money or anything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nexus Set Posted September 12, 2009 Share Posted September 12, 2009 I think you're on to something there. Make an arena game that can read off of Oblivion assets and save games, running on an open-source game engine with networking capabilities for multiplayer. It can't be played without an installation of Oblivion, of course. I think there's a chance that it could work. There's actually something similar in the works for Morrowind called OpenMW, but of course, without the networking bits. They're using the open-source OGRE game engine for that. There hasn't been any opposition from Bethesda, I suppose, as it is openly discussed in their forum. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jawa9000 Posted September 13, 2009 Author Share Posted September 13, 2009 I am planning to move forward with this effort, and Ogre certainly looks like it might be a great help in the process. I'm not in a hurry, however, since this is my hobby, and I have a full time engineering job and a family with a young daughter to take care of, but it's something I really want to do, so I'll keep at it. Once I get further along I'll probably move discussion of it to a more appropriate website, maybe having to make my own (though being a webmaster doesn't appeal to me) to host discussions of it. I'll definitely need co-developers, though, and I'll post back here, probably as a reply to this message, once I get to that point. I'll keep checking back on this thread to see if there are further questions about it in the meantime. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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