Agreed with everything MedicineStorm said; we were probably typing at the same time :p
One other point you reminded me of: the only way we can KNOW an asset is free to use is if we KNOW :
who made it
under what license they released it
that it was not copied or adapted from another non-free source (i.e. that we know the entire provenance of the asset)
So even if Kuranyem thinks properly crediting OGA art is too much work for most people, it's imperative for the people who DO want to use it (and are willing to abide by the terms of the licenses, i.e. provide credit) to KNOW where it came from.
Some of the people on that reddit thread may have been more happy to use the assets and willing to provide proper credit, but were turned off because the amount of research they would have needed to do to figure out those credits was unreasonable. Hopefully this effort has helped that group.
Kuranyem, thanks for taking the time to write up your thoughts. I appreciate your perspective, even if I disagree with some of your points. Let's keep the discussion here focused on attribution of the LPC character spritesheets and how to make the sprites/credits easy for developers to use. If you would like to start a broader discussion about how to make the OGA website better or more useful, please start a separate thread.
First, I'll reiterate that I think properly crediting artists for their work is non-negotiable. It's a legal requirement of the licenses and it's the right thing to do, in honor of the huge amount of work that artists are giving away for free here. Think of that as the price for using the assets---if providing that credit is too much work, developers can always decide not to use that assets. However, that's exactly the situation I am trying to avoid. I want to make it easier for developers to give proper credit. You're right that some people will still refuse to give credit, just like some people choose to pirate commercial software or cheat on their taxes---we can have a separate discussion about whether it's worth trying to chase down and punish people for that. That's not what I'm trying to do here---I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for people to credit the art that they want to use in their game.
I'll address some of your specific points:
Should you really use CSV? And not an open-source alternative, or easy to open with another open-source editor since this seems to be advocated most of the time for anything coming out of here?
CSV itself is a very simple file format, easily edited by many FOSS and commercial software. It's human-readable as plain text (not ideal, but possible). There are also libraries to parse it in nearly every programming language imaginable, and failing that, it's not difficult to write your own parser. This is why I chose it. However, if you think there is a better option, I'd be happy to hear it.
As for the "schema" of the CSV file (i.e., how the columns describe the relevant metadata), I agree it's not great---I don't love the "url1", "url2", "url3" columns, whereas the "authors" column is itself a comma-separated list. But there doesn't seem to be a standard schema for attributing art/data (the closest I could find was the Creative Commons RDFa schema; however, it's much more complicated, not human-readable, and does not seem to be supported by many tools. We could consider implementing it if there's interest). Again, I'd be happy to hear suggestions that would be more elegant or easier to use
In my opinion a third-party using anything from oga would rather have a single link so that they can point "I use things from this place from various artists, if you're interested just go have a look by yourself."
The file CREDITS.csv lists the authors, license(s), and links to the original URL(s), for each image in spritesheets. If you generate a sprite using this tool, you must credit all the authors. You can do this one of two ways:
Distribute the entire CREDITS.csv file along with your project.
Based on the layers you use, copy the appropriate rows from CREDITS.csv into a new file and distribute that file with your project.
Either way, make sure this credits file is accessible from within your game or app and can be reasonably discovered by users (for instance, show the information on the "Credits" screen directly, or provide a visible link). If you don't want to show the entire credits file directly, should include a statement like this on your credits screen:
Sprites by: David Conway Jr. (JaidynReiman), Nila122, Johannes Sjölund (wulax), Stephen Challener (Redshrike), Luke Mehl, bluecarrot16, Thane Brimhall (pennomi), laetissima, Michael Whitlock (bigbeargames), Matthew Krohn (makrohn), Rhimlock, Benjamin K. Smith (BenCreating), Sander Frenken (castelonia), kheftel, Marcel van de Steeg (MadMarcel), kirts, Mark Weyer, Lanea Zimmerman (Sharm), Manuel Riecke (MrBeast), Charles Sanchez (CharlesGabriel), Zi Ye, William.Thompsonj, drjamgo@hotmail.com, dalonedrau, ElizaWy, Evert, Daniel Eddeland (daneeklu), Carlo Enrico Victoria (Nemisys), Mandi Paugh, Joe White, Barbara Riviera, Tracy, DarkwallLKE, thecilekli, Stafford McIntyre, PlatForge project, Shaun Williams, Tuomo Untinen (reemax), Pierre Vigier (pvigier), Lori Angela Nagel (jastiv), tskaufma, gr3yh47, LordNeo, XOR, pswerlang, Inboxninja Sprites contributed as part of the Liberated Pixel Cup project from OpenGameArt.org: http://opengameart.org/content/lpc-collection License: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Detailed credits: [LINK TO CREDITS.CSV FILE]
So basically, if a developer wants to use these assets and REALLY doesn't want to go to any more trouble, they can copy-and-paste the above statement in their credits and link to CREDITS.csv on their credits screen.
The reddit link you posted bluecarrot16 is, in my opinion, exactly what happens when people consider using things from the LPC, or anything from oga, but eventually give up. To quote the relevant things :
- "How would I know the names of the artists? Is it just better to credit all the artists who contributed instead? It's a hassle to look for which artist did which asset."
This is a little unfair. Those comments were from before castelonia and I did all the work to add credits to the generator. Now the generator makes an attribution statement for you and there is a clear statement about the license with a list of all authors---both for the entire project, and broken down per-file---linked in the README. A few weeks ago, the answer to that question in the reddit thread was "well, you have to go search on OGA and figure out who made each spritesheet, then credit them; sorry about that... good luck!" Now the answer is "check out the README and CREDITS.CSV; you need to credit the authors for all files you use, but the information is all in CREDITS.CSV. Let us know if you have any questions." I think that's a big improvement.
Are most people even going to bother with it, especially when the list has reached such a big state?
This is the problem we are trying to solve. I can't really convince people to "bother" with it, but I can try to make it easy/possible for them. I'll again mention that AAA games routinely list hundreds or thousands of people in their credits. Frankly, if someone can't be bothered to make the effort of copying-and-pasting some text into their game's credits, well, I'm not sure what I can do for them. See my comments above.
I also think that LPC, while being big, still isn't as useful as you people might think. But again, that's subjective, and I don't want you to think that I only want to speak ill of things in the discussion so I won't go into detail. Unless you are interested.
I would actually be interested in hearing what you have to say about this. But please make a separate thread. If you look at my portfolio on this site, a lot of my work has been collecting art into stylistically consistent, themed sheets that are directly usable in a game. I also always include a human-readable CREDITS.txt file that can be copied directly alongside the work. For my recent LPC victorian town decorations submission, I made a large preview map in Tiled, using art from several of my OGA submissions; even though this draws upon dozens of OGA submissions from numerous artists, putting together the credits for the scene only took about 5 minutes, because it was just a matter of pasting in the CREDITS file. Would it have been easier if everything had been CC0 (like Kenney's art)? Sure, but not every artist is okay with that, and I have to respect the terms of the licenses they set. So yeah, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts (in a separate thread) on how to make the LPC set more useful. To my view, it's one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of free art on the internet, and I'd like to see it used.
And in fact, the problem is mostly solved now. You'll have to re-build your assets in the generator, but now it can automatically show you the credits for a given sprite (make your character, then click "Credits for this sprite"). You can combine each of those CSV files and include them on your credits screen. There's some more specific guidance here: https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen... . Take a look at that and let us know if you still have questions.
The set became absolutely massive, but I think it will be very useful and I am exciting to see what the community builds with it. Includes a full Tiled map, which still only captures a fraction of the possibilities ;-)
I'd still like to see tooltips with authors for assets in the list, as well as a live-updating credits list for the current spritesheet. I can take a crack at that as well.
I noticed a few errors in the credits that I will fix and submit another PR. You should add your name to the authors for the plate armor helmets!
BenCreating, I'd love to know about your plans! Please consider posting about it as you go; I suspect many others have similar interests (Basto, ElizaWy, myself at least).
castelonia, I will definitely take you up on your offer to work on the code. Let me know if you need any help with that. I have some ideas for how to do it, if it would be helpful---but I have no doubt you can figure it out.
I am going to start making a few other changes in my fork (such as renaming and de-duplicating files, adding some missing stuff, and restoring the older scripts for auto-generating hair, hats, etc.). But let's discuss that in another thread.
head/hoods/male/lulhat_0.png has the author but not the license, and I can't find the original submission. weapons/right hand/female/axe2.png and weapons/right hand/male/axe2.png appear to be variants of weapons/right hand/{male,female}/axe.png from https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-axe , but I can't figure out where. head/bandanas/11.png is found in bigbeargames' assets you sent me, but I can't tell if it's original or derived from something.
See CREDITS.txt within this submission to figure out which files this statement applies to. This does NOT apply to art made by any of the other artists or to derivative works where the author has not specifically agreed to CC-BY instead of CC-BY-SA.
For context on what this means or why this matters, see the other comments in this thread or thread .
Agreed with everything MedicineStorm said; we were probably typing at the same time :p
One other point you reminded me of: the only way we can KNOW an asset is free to use is if we KNOW :
So even if Kuranyem thinks properly crediting OGA art is too much work for most people, it's imperative for the people who DO want to use it (and are willing to abide by the terms of the licenses, i.e. provide credit) to KNOW where it came from.
Some of the people on that reddit thread may have been more happy to use the assets and willing to provide proper credit, but were turned off because the amount of research they would have needed to do to figure out those credits was unreasonable. Hopefully this effort has helped that group.
Kuranyem, thanks for taking the time to write up your thoughts. I appreciate your perspective, even if I disagree with some of your points. Let's keep the discussion here focused on attribution of the LPC character spritesheets and how to make the sprites/credits easy for developers to use. If you would like to start a broader discussion about how to make the OGA website better or more useful, please start a separate thread.
First, I'll reiterate that I think properly crediting artists for their work is non-negotiable. It's a legal requirement of the licenses and it's the right thing to do, in honor of the huge amount of work that artists are giving away for free here. Think of that as the price for using the assets---if providing that credit is too much work, developers can always decide not to use that assets. However, that's exactly the situation I am trying to avoid. I want to make it easier for developers to give proper credit. You're right that some people will still refuse to give credit, just like some people choose to pirate commercial software or cheat on their taxes---we can have a separate discussion about whether it's worth trying to chase down and punish people for that. That's not what I'm trying to do here---I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for people to credit the art that they want to use in their game.
I'll address some of your specific points:
CSV itself is a very simple file format, easily edited by many FOSS and commercial software. It's human-readable as plain text (not ideal, but possible). There are also libraries to parse it in nearly every programming language imaginable, and failing that, it's not difficult to write your own parser. This is why I chose it. However, if you think there is a better option, I'd be happy to hear it.
As for the "schema" of the CSV file (i.e., how the columns describe the relevant metadata), I agree it's not great---I don't love the "url1", "url2", "url3" columns, whereas the "authors" column is itself a comma-separated list. But there doesn't seem to be a standard schema for attributing art/data (the closest I could find was the Creative Commons RDFa schema; however, it's much more complicated, not human-readable, and does not seem to be supported by many tools. We could consider implementing it if there's interest). Again, I'd be happy to hear suggestions that would be more elegant or easier to use
That's the reason we added the CREDITS.CSV option to the spritesheet generator, along with this statement here in the project README::
So basically, if a developer wants to use these assets and REALLY doesn't want to go to any more trouble, they can copy-and-paste the above statement in their credits and link to CREDITS.csv on their credits screen.
This is a little unfair. Those comments were from before castelonia and I did all the work to add credits to the generator. Now the generator makes an attribution statement for you and there is a clear statement about the license with a list of all authors---both for the entire project, and broken down per-file---linked in the README. A few weeks ago, the answer to that question in the reddit thread was "well, you have to go search on OGA and figure out who made each spritesheet, then credit them; sorry about that... good luck!" Now the answer is "check out the README and CREDITS.CSV; you need to credit the authors for all files you use, but the information is all in CREDITS.CSV. Let us know if you have any questions." I think that's a big improvement.
This is the problem we are trying to solve. I can't really convince people to "bother" with it, but I can try to make it easy/possible for them. I'll again mention that AAA games routinely list hundreds or thousands of people in their credits. Frankly, if someone can't be bothered to make the effort of copying-and-pasting some text into their game's credits, well, I'm not sure what I can do for them. See my comments above.
I would actually be interested in hearing what you have to say about this. But please make a separate thread. If you look at my portfolio on this site, a lot of my work has been collecting art into stylistically consistent, themed sheets that are directly usable in a game. I also always include a human-readable CREDITS.txt file that can be copied directly alongside the work. For my recent LPC victorian town decorations submission, I made a large preview map in Tiled, using art from several of my OGA submissions; even though this draws upon dozens of OGA submissions from numerous artists, putting together the credits for the scene only took about 5 minutes, because it was just a matter of pasting in the CREDITS file. Would it have been easier if everything had been CC0 (like Kenney's art)? Sure, but not every artist is okay with that, and I have to respect the terms of the licenses they set. So yeah, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts (in a separate thread) on how to make the LPC set more useful. To my view, it's one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of free art on the internet, and I'd like to see it used.
And in fact, the problem is mostly solved now. You'll have to re-build your assets in the generator, but now it can automatically show you the credits for a given sprite (make your character, then click "Credits for this sprite"). You can combine each of those CSV files and include them on your credits screen. There's some more specific guidance here: https://github.com/sanderfrenken/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Gen... . Take a look at that and let us know if you still have questions.
Happy New Year (at least in the Eastern US) OGA!
It took most of 2020, but I have finally uploaded by Victorian buildings and Victorian town decorations:
https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-victorian-buildings
https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-victorian-town-decorations
The set became absolutely massive, but I think it will be very useful and I am exciting to see what the community builds with it. Includes a full Tiled map, which still only captures a fraction of the possibilities ;-)
Soon to come are the remaining crops missing from https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-crops , along with many more food items.
Stay safe and healthy everyone!
Thanks; did that and a few other things. Issued a new PR on github.
The shadows are CC0. They're in the credits file but I wouldn't worry too much about them.
I don't see the tooltips---how do I make them appear?
Thanks for all your work on this!
Thanks castelonia! Looks like a big improvement!
I'd still like to see tooltips with authors for assets in the list, as well as a live-updating credits list for the current spritesheet. I can take a crack at that as well.
I noticed a few errors in the credits that I will fix and submit another PR. You should add your name to the authors for the plate armor helmets!
BenCreating, I'd love to know about your plans! Please consider posting about it as you go; I suspect many others have similar interests (Basto, ElizaWy, myself at least).
Alright, I have uploaded the attribution file to my GitHub repository and created a pull request against castelonia's repository. I would welcome reviews of this data, and feedback, either here or on GitHub.
castelonia, I will definitely take you up on your offer to work on the code. Let me know if you need any help with that. I have some ideas for how to do it, if it would be helpful---but I have no doubt you can figure it out.
I am going to start making a few other changes in my fork (such as renaming and de-duplicating files, adding some missing stuff, and restoring the older scripts for auto-generating hair, hats, etc.). But let's discuss that in another thread.
Thanks, I didn't notice the preview image for axe2.
Whoops, sorry it's actually head/bandanas/38.png that is mysterious. bigbeargames, can you shed any light?
Yes, head/bandanas/male/red.png is by JaidynReiman, makrohn, and madmarcel, so head/bandanas/11.png is them plus bigbeargames.
Yes, I think lulhat_0 is probably obviated by the gentleman hats as well.
Also I see the wolfman was just posted!
Thanks. Here are the remaining unattributed assets:
body/female/wolf/black.png
body/female/wolf/brown.png
body/female/wolf/chestnut.png
body/female/wolf/gold.png
body/female/wolf/gray.png
body/female/wolf/head/black.png
body/female/wolf/head/brown.png
body/female/wolf/head/chestnut.png
body/female/wolf/head/gold.png
body/female/wolf/head/gray.png
body/female/wolf/head/white.png
body/female/wolf/white.png
body/male/wolf/black.png
body/male/wolf/brown.png
body/male/wolf/chestnut.png
body/male/wolf/gold.png
body/male/wolf/gray.png
body/male/wolf/head/black.png
body/male/wolf/head/brown.png
body/male/wolf/head/chestnut.png
body/male/wolf/head/gold.png
body/male/wolf/head/gray.png
body/male/wolf/head/white.png
body/male/wolf/white.png
head/bandanas/11.png
head/hoods/male/lulhat_0.png
weapons/right hand/female/axe2.png
weapons/right hand/male/axe2.png
As you can see, most of there the wolves.
head/hoods/male/lulhat_0.png has the author but not the license, and I can't find the original submission. weapons/right hand/female/axe2.png and weapons/right hand/male/axe2.png appear to be variants of weapons/right hand/{male,female}/axe.png from https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-axe , but I can't figure out where. head/bandanas/11.png is found in bigbeargames' assets you sent me, but I can't tell if it's original or derived from something.
In case anyone is looking, SOME of the assets in this package can be used under the CC-BY license:
- Assets made by Lanea Zimmerman (Sharm) can be used under the CC-BY license and the clause prohibiting use of the work in software that contains DRM is waived.
- Likewise, assets made by Stephen Challener (Redshrike) can be licensed CC-BY and the anti-DRM clause is waived.
See CREDITS.txt within this submission to figure out which files this statement applies to. This does NOT apply to art made by any of the other artists or to derivative works where the author has not specifically agreed to CC-BY instead of CC-BY-SA.
For context on what this means or why this matters, see the other comments in this thread or thread .
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