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by ChrisSD 3063 days ago
That looks like thin ice. Basically they're hoping to remain too small for EA to bother with.

IIRC, the usual workaround for asset licensing is to make an automated extractor for people who have the original game. This buys you time while you work on drop-in replacements.
1 comments
SXX 3063 days ago
Certainly bad practice. If developers want automation it's better to suggested to download assets (or even do it automatically) from Web Archive. They're exempt from DMCA and it's trustworthy source.

https://archive.org/details/SimCity2000_Special_Edition_Maxi...

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book_mentioned 3063 days ago
I actually got 7/9th's of the way through doing this for the FMOD dependency of http://www.bay12games.com/ww1medic.

Specifically: http://web.archive.org/web/20070806010730/http://www.fmod.or...

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ascagnel_ 3062 days ago
Frankly, I'm somewhat amazed that this is on archive.org. They may have a DMCA exception, but it's a bad look considering the game is still actively being sold on GoG and under copyright.
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SXX 3062 days ago
I wouldn't argue about this exact file since it's might be a bit more recent, but that game is about 25 years old. Do you seriously think keeping it on archive.org is bad?

It's very likely to not work on modern systems anyway (dosbox will work of course) and version from GOG likely wouldn't be installable on let's say DOS or Windows 95. And there is plenty of people who might want to run old games on some ancient PC for personal fun or for museum-like purposes.

Another option for open source projects it's to just use demo version which is 100% legit way to get assets. Though it's not always possible because some demo versions don't contain whole assets that fully-featured engine would depend on.

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