Bart pointed this out earlier.  I took a look, but the assets look a bit... piecemeal to me.  Some good, some less so, and with some odd technical errors with stray pixels.  I am kind of worried that they might not be completely original content, which would complicate licensing.  Do you know anything about the development of the game?

Yes.  I worry that it might be a case of 'google-imagesearchitis,' that is, sort of cribbing and adapting assets from here and there.  The lack of skill in handling assets especially makes me think this.

I mean, just look at this.  The fire has been badly cropped, and the dragon has been badly pieced together.  Look at the square outline of the tail, laid OVER the wings, and all the pieces have been badly resized and blurred.  There's no way an artist capable of making the original bits would look at that and say 'eh, close enough.'  It's been put through a blender.

@RedShrike: Agreed about the piecemeal feeling.  The background tileset especially seems to be a mix of varying styles and qualities; the variation could just be stylistic differences between contributors, but it'd be nice to have clarification from the project lead on what the origins are of each asset.

@Sanglorian: Proceed with some caution - there are pieces in there with potential license issues.  For example, in the IRC channel we found that some of the sound effects appear to be from audiosparx.com.  Their license is fine for including the assets in a game or other work, but it prohibits redistribution of other sorts (making it incompatible with the allowed licenses on OGA).  Likewise, there are images used as templates or patterns in some of the battle sprites which are also of questionable licensing (the 'gecko skin' image used as a pattern for the Centipede sprite is one good example).  Again, I think clarification on the source of various assets from the project lead would be greatly beneficial.

Lastly, a lot of the art assets are in .TGA and .BMP format - it'd be a good idea to convert them to a more usable format like .PNG before uploading.

It's a shame, because I have quite a bit of interesting in getting more of this stuff together under the FOSS roof.  But I have the suspicion that the licensing issues are going to be insurmountable.

And this is why I audit everything before it gets committed to OA (and am personally hated for it)

> And this is why I audit everything before it gets committed to OA (and am personally hated for it)

For the record, I for one really appreciate it.

>> And this is why I audit everything before it gets committed to OA (and am personally hated for it)

> For the record, I for one really appreciate it.

Wait, wait, we are two.

I am NOT ! (I just like  bein an ass sometimes)

I went through the sound package and heard some very familiar sounds. The pistol and the cat, and some stone movement are some obvious ones that I detected that come from Sound Ideas.

Some examples where you can hear that cat noise is Deus Ex, Sid & Al's Incredible Toons. Pistol noise? Almost every old game that has a desert eagle :) (Opposing Force, Counter-Strike, even Shadow the Hedgehog to name a few)

If it's something where a warning would be required, we can't archive it.  It's important that people using content on OGA not have to worry that it might have licensing issues.  I'd say just remove the sound and music.

Also, Redshrike raised some issues about the graphical assets which call their licensing into question as well.  Without explicit confirmation from the Monster 2 team that pieces are original, I don't feel comfortable with accepting the art.

Someone emailed me about this but I'll repeat a here with a complete list.

SFX from AudioSparx:

bow_draw and bow_drawn_and_release

high_cackle

low_cackle

Meow

pistol (it's from the Windows MIDI banks)

rocket_launch (this this was from freesound though)

For graphics, alligator is a paint-over. 

That pistol is not from GM.DLS, I can surely tell you that. Even if it were, it still wouldn't be legal to relicense as Free as Microsoft licensed the Roland SC samples from Roland themselves!

"For graphics, alligator is a paint-over."

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

I asked the artist to redo it last minute and what I got (but didn't find out until later) was a "recoloring" of this: alligator-6.jpg

I'm sorry, I think I'm still missing something here.  Is that related to the dragon I linked the screenshot of (since that's the only direct graphical discussion in this thread)?  If so, I don't see any connection between the two images.

Me> For graphics, alligator is a paint-over.

You> Can you clarify what you mean by this?

Ah, ok, so it wasn't meant to answer my questions, just bringing up something else.  I would, however, appreciate it if you would address that--I'm having trouble, from the imagine, understanding how that dragon could have come to be.

Ya, I read that, and don't understand your "logic". It was drawn like all of the other enemies by one of our artists. If you looked at the other enemies, you'd see they follow a similar graphics style. The dragon happenes to have a lot of frames of animation (you looked right?) so pieces WERE copy and pasted around. It's standard procedure.

Hmm... ok, I can see how it might look better in motion.  You have to admit, having the tail pasted *over* the wing is a pretty big oversight--but I suppose I can see it if the moving is going at a very quick pace.  And I suppose the stylistic inconsistencies are probably just the result of multiple artists having to go at a quick pace (which might also mop up things like the weird cutting and aa issues which appear on otherwise good graphics).

Anyway, that's fair enough.  Hopefully there won't be any other issues than the ones that have already been cleared up.

(And, to be perfectly fair.  Any licensing issues aside, I have to be impressed by *anyone* who can complete an indie JRPG.  That takes a lot.)

Since we have official word from the project, it seems like it should be fine to post the assets apart from the ones mentioned.

One other I just remembered. "jungle_ambience.ogg" in with the music is from "some old sound font" my friend had and recorded for me. So that one should probably not be included.