Unfinished graphics sets

[kamnet]

So many projects have come and gone without being completed. I'm making a list of projects that have become abandoned or otherwise unfinished. Most of this likely isn't licensed, the authors are likely gone as well. But perhaps you see something that inspires you to build something new and finish these off.

Last Updated - Name - Author
===================

Trains
2008/07/21 VicRail Set - dev|ant
2008/03/14 [32bpp] BR 158 Super Sprinter - mr_worf
2008/01/11 Silverx50's First Drawings - Silverx50
2007/10/27 Urban Panorama Set - REISCOOL
2007/09/11 Snowdon Railway (North Wales Project) - Ben_K
2007/09/09 Connex Melbourne EMUs - Comeng 523M
2007/08/27 Delta 100 High Speed Train - That Guy
2007/08/13 RABe514 (S-Bahn Schweiz / Rapid-transit railway Switzerland) - TTdelicious
2007/05/23 Romanian Set - cmircea
2007/03/13 (Standalone) NG (+ Improved Ships) Set - Toni Babelony
2006/12/30 Spanish Trains - Athorium
2006/03/31 Bundesbahn Set - Saskia, Purno, others
2005/05/05 Thalys Trains - Purno

Stations
2008/01/16 Closed Platform Tile - Sir A. Boey
2008/01/11 OpenGFX Stations Extended - FooBar
2006/09/15 Additional Station Parts - eis_os
2006/10/25 Toyland Station Set - graphics_master

Industry
North American Industry Set - Lifeblood, Oz, DanMacK
2006/09/02 Caravan Site Industry - bobo
??/??/?? Born Acorn's New Industries - Born Acorn

Roads
2007/04/14 British Road Set - Dave
2006/10/11 Streets Canadian - CPCNMAN007

Rails
2006/05/27 Tunnel Trestles - ei_os, Oz, others
2005/05/15 High Speed Tracks - jvassie
2003/11/02 Maglev -> Roads (sprites) (NewGRF) - BobXP

RVs & Trams
2008/07/11 North American Road Vehicle Set - DanMacK, others
2007/06/10 Cargo Tram Set - m4rek
2006/12/27 British Tram Set | British Tram Set Continued - Dave, Redirect Left (aka Captain Kirk), Amecheer, Others

Buildings
2016/09/19 Westeros Town Set - Mr Bruco
2009/10/29 LordAzamath's Buildings & Little Graphics - LordAzamath
2007/11/24 Axlrose's Warehouses - Axlrose
2007/05/02 Laick's Buildings - Laick
2007/02/16 CS HQ Set - tpmm
2006/04/21 Caelan's Graphics - Caelan
2006/04/06 Shops & Offices - Czestmyr
2005/01/26 Alxrose's Building - Axlrose

Bridges
2008/06/15 North American Bridges Set - OzTrans, others
2007/06/16 Dutch Bridge Set - Purno

Misc
2008/08/12 Brickland Climate - Wolf01, others
2005/05/15 Toyland to Legoland Conversion - Killer 11, others
2005/03/06 Graphics nobody asked for - Purno, nothers

EXE's needing converted to NewGRF
RobC's Works
* Regional Office
* New Cantilever Bridge
GQ HQ Set (Gone Wacko & RobC)
New Theater
Grey Stone for Temperate Tracks
Water Wagon
Hanek's Skyscraper #1 | Hanek's Skyscraper #2 | Hanke's Theater
Farm Set
Cows in Fields

[Alberth]

Great idea, perhaps also check the license?
Without a proper license, there is no sane way to "continue and/or finish", as you are not allowed to take and use the parts.

[Redirect Left]

British Tram Set | British Tram Set Continued - [..] Redirect Left (aka Captain Kirk) [..]

Good lord. I'm never going to live that nick down.

I'll be more than happy to get back to the set though if you can find others. I'm a long way from being able to do stuff that by myself. I've only recently learnt NML, so I could do some coding for it, but I think Dave has also picked NML up too. Pixel art is still not a forté, but i'd be happy to try for the laughs, the giggles, the ridicules etc.

Something I personally would also like to see added to, there is a British Stations set, there was a pre-release put on Bananas, but I don't think it ever got beyond that.

[Quast65]

WOW, those Dutch bridges!!!

[Dave]

I wouldn't bother with that road set - just a failed experiment. If you want something decent from me, have a look at my rusty sidings. They're somewhere.

The caravan site industry was pretty fun but don't know if it'd be better as a 2x2 zone 5 town building.

British Tram Set | British Tram Set Continued - [..] Redirect Left (aka Captain Kirk) [..]

Good lord. I'm never going to live that nick down.

I'll be more than happy to get back to the set though if you can find others. I'm a long way from being able to do stuff that by myself. I've only recently learnt NML, so I could do some coding for it, but I think Dave has also picked NML up too. Pixel art is still not a forté, but i'd be happy to try for the laughs, the giggles, the ridicules etc.

Something I personally would also like to see added to, there is a British Stations set, there was a pre-release put on Bananas, but I don't think it ever got beyond that.

Bob and Ameecher's Tram Set had most of the things from that set, but I don't know if you want to do any more.

jvassie and Ameecher are doing a new British station set, but again don't know if that'll ever see the light of day.

[kamnet]

Great idea, perhaps also check the license?
Without a proper license, there is no sane way to "continue and/or finish", as you are not allowed to take and use the parts.

That's why I mentioned at the start that these are most likely not licensed. In fact, I haven't found a single one yet that has a license, but then again I'm starting backwards through the oldest of the Graphics Development forum posts, back before anybody really cared about license or copyright and everybody freely borrowed whatever. It's why I also said that perhaps this gives inspiration to new works.

[Dave]

I take the view (which is NOT necessarily the view of TT-forums) that a project abandoned or unfinished by a person can be picked up if someone wants to, even where no licence has been given.

Maybe we can set guidelines for such situations:

1. Post in the original topic, if possible.
2. PM or Email the original creator.
3. If no response within a reasonable period (7-14 days?) assume work is abandoned.

I find it hard to believe someone who drew graphics in 2010 but hasn't visited since will care that someone else has picked them up.

I appreciate the need for Open devs to be cautious on this, but are you not already "at arms length" on the matter?

[Alberth]

Maybe we can set guidelines for such situations:

I think guidelines would be very good.

As much as I agree with you, it's against the law. You cannot just pick up a car that's in your street for two weeks and the house behind it looks empty.
You can't just take a set of pictures from the Internet, wrap them, and give them to others.

Lots of artists do not mind if you take their work and use it. However even today there are a number of artists here that do not like their graphics being used without their explicit permission.
We respect that wish. Does that end the moment they close the door behind them from here? What about the work they already published here under the assumption they would have keep the rights?
Owen will delete it all?

Then there is the trouble of how far do you go. A sprite published for TTDP, can it be used for OpenTTD. Maybe I see a nice eye-candy sprite for my FreeRCT project... May I make a copy?
How would the license work. Can the new person make it CC-BY-SA, or GPL, or BSD-style, or commercial?
I think the 32bpp-tar project showed how complicated it is to do anything like that afterwards.

I don't see a clean way out of this. At some point you're making assumptions about the intent of the original author, and without him around to express his wish, you're inevitably making a wrong decision at some point. The question is then do you always err on the safe side, or not.

I find it hard to believe someone who drew graphics in 2010 but hasn't visited since will care that someone else has picked them up.

I find it hard to believe that artists want their work to be used by everybody, yet don't use bananas, the main-stream service for distributing game content for OpenTTD. Yet, as you know, some artists make that decision. I don't see why such a thing couldn't happen with random sprites published 5 years ago.

Talking of guide-lines, you could make it a forum rule "anything published here has FOO license, unless otherwise stated". I don't know how much legal ground that gives you though, and of course it wouldn't hold for anything posted before. Perhaps a better solution is to let each artist decide what license the sprites have when they publish sprites. That could be in the message, or in the image file itself (but not in the signature, as that can be changed afterwards).

You'd probably have to explain some things about it, and make a choice for artists who don't care. ("If you don't want to know about licenses, use FOO license.", or some flow-chart "can others use your work?" yes/no)

[kamnet]

I've been fortunate that with all of the projects that I've recycled or updated, I've been able to contact the original creators and gained explicit permission to reuse or continue their work. However, that's clearly not possible with much of the stuff that was put here years ago before anybody thought about copyright and licenses to distribute works. I think at some point somebody should make an affirmative decision as to what happens with graphics that are posted here by people who are no longer active here. In all honesty, I think that should be up to Owen. It's his website and his server. The easiest thing to decide is that unless you have 100% clear communicated permission to use a graphic then you should refrain from using it. The downside is that it prevents many of these graphics from ever actually being used as their creators intended, and clearly that is what was intended because they posted the images here in hopes of doing so.

In my humble opinion, as long as the graphics are original and were uploaded here, and as long as the graphics are used in TTD/OpenTTD-related projects, and as long as the original creators are properly credited, then using their works here is fair. An exception is where somebody has posted their works and declared that they did not want them to be used without their explicit permission. I know that this runs counter to copyright law. Copyright is important because it gives individuals the right to decide how their works are used by others. But in order to enforce it, those who own the copyright actually have to be here to defend it, and not defending it can actually lead to your loss. It's not as if those authors didn't know that their work is uploaded here, as they're the ones who did so.

[PikkaBird]

I take the view (which is NOT necessarily the view of TT-forums) that a project abandoned or unfinished by a person can be picked up if someone wants to, even where no licence has been given.

I agree completely with Alberth (and I'd say that GPLv2 already fills the niche of "use this if you don't care" licence in this community). But the status of these old graphics is all a bit moot I think. Not many creators are at a loss for things to do or would be interested in rehashing old incomplete graphics - we've all got huge lists of our own things we'd rather work on. If you, Dave, want to pick up random old sprites and use them without permission, that's your prerogative and no-one can stop you, but it's not something we can or should condone as a community.

Talking of guide-lines, you could make it a forum rule "anything published here has FOO license, unless otherwise stated".

Sounds like a bag of drama for no real benefit.

I don't know how much legal ground that gives you though

Legalities don't really matter: I can't see anyone ever suing over NewGRFs. What matters is the community spirit and goodwill, and trying to push licences on people or lay claim to their work without permission isn't going to help that any.

Perhaps a better solution is to let each artist decide what license the sprites have when they publish sprites [...]

Yep... that's the way it is now, and that's the way it's going to stay.

[PikkaBird]

unless you have 100% clear communicated permission to use a graphic then you should refrain from using it.

I hope I'm not overstepping my authority as the Graphics forum moderator by saying that that is absolutely the policy everyone should adhere to. Obviously, there will always be grey areas. I'd hope most people here have enough judgement to do the right thing.

Like I said before, it's not really about what is and isn't legal. It's about respecting other creators, their rights, and their wishes, and not creating big forum dramas for the moderators to clean up!

[kamnet]

Like I said before, it's not really about what is and isn't legal. It's about respecting other creators, their rights, and their wishes, and not creating big forum dramas for the moderators to clean up!

Of course, when other creators did not explicitly mention their wishes, then you're left at guessing their intent. Was their intent to see their work published and played in the game? Was their intent to entirely control everything so that it only game from their hand directly?

[Dave]

If you, Dave, want to pick up random old sprites and use them without permission, that's your prerogative and no-one can stop you, but it's not something we can or should condone as a community.)

Fair point. I agree we shouldn't condone it as a community.

I've started coding those scuds with the idea in my head that if the graphic artist came along and complained I'd down tools immediately.

But I also agree we shouldn't force a licence on someone.

And yes - please lets avoid a drama!

[andythenorth]

WTFPL, ideal for those who want a legal form of "I really don't care what you do with my sprites / code".

http://www.wtfpl.net

[Alberth]

Perhaps a better solution is to let each artist decide what license the sprites have when they publish sprites [...]

Yep... that's the way it is now, and that's the way it's going to stay.

Some decide explicitly, but most decide implicitly, and the latter are the topic of discussion here I think.

To start with the former. If an artist publishes sprites, and in that same post states usage rights by others for those sprites, it's all clear. We may not like the conditions, but they are his/her sprites, he/she gets the veto.

Unfortunately, afaik, most artists here don't do that. People come here, get infected by the pixel virus, and start publishing their work. As a result you have tons of graphics here, without clear status. I think most of them are intended to be free for use, but I don't know, I didn't ask. Nobody asked them, and now they are gone without ever clearing up what the status of those sprites is.

If you want to fix that, in my view, the only way is to ask artists about usage rights of their work when they are still here. A good opportunity is to do that at the time of publishing.


I agree with PikkaBird that we should respect the rights of the members of the community as first priority. It's better to respect the wishes of a member than it is to stay within legal boundaries and violate his/her wishes.

[Redirect Left]

Bob and Ameecher's Tram Set had most of the things from that set, but I don't know if you want to do any more.
.

ah fair enough, just a shame the loading times for the trams in that set are completely out of whack with other british sets. Can load a full pendolino 4x faster than a small tram

[Dave]

Now you're learning NML you'll probably find it quite easy to change that - in fact I might have a go in the week.

Although I don't know if it was coded in NML... *sigh*

[Redirect Left]

Now you're learning NML you'll probably find it quite easy to change that - in fact I might have a go in the week.

It was already done, i have completely forgot who by. They sent it to me in a private message after stating my issues with it in the BATS thread.

Posted it below, no infringement meant. If whomever did it / did BATS dislikes it, just say so i'll remove it.
(I got this is as a .grf, not in a bundle with a licence, so not sure what it came under)

[planetmaker]

(I hate licences, far too restricting and time requiring to understand)

Then choose the "public domain" license or CC-0. Which means: no credits, no obligation, do wtf you like with it. Otherwise you propagate the issue you hate yourself, making it even more complicated.

[Redirect Left]

(I hate licences, far too restricting and time requiring to understand)

Then choose the "public domain" license or CC-0. Which means: no credits, no obligation, do wtf you like with it. Otherwise you propagate the issue you hate yourself, making it even more complicated.

When I release things, I don't even state any licence. Sadly the openttd manager for bananas seems to require one. I just picked a random one that seemed used by others for the single thing i've put on there so far. Honestly couldn't give a single toss what happens to my work, else I wouldn't release it to begin with . I find people rarely follow the rules and regulations when it stops being convenient for them. So never assume licences mean anything to people.

But lets not get off the topic.
I might go draw a random square (due to no pixel art talent at all) and see how bad my NML actually is. I'm sure for sake of coding a temporary stand-in bit of art will work. Then if I find some unfinished stuff I like and the licences (fgs) allow, I can do that.