I think I've fallen in love with Generations

Anyways, I'm wondering how Wirehead Studios can legally put weapons from other iD games (made from scratch of course) into Q3A, while remaking character models from scratch (as was done in a mod called "Reborn" that was shut down for legal issues) is illegal.

I mean, surely the weapons count as iD's intellectual property as well?  

Why am I asking this? Because I'm curious and I want to broaden my horizon - it never hurts to know what you can and what you can't.

Footman got it right.

It's illegal to take characters from one game and put them in another.

However, all the Gen characters are present in Q3 out of box, and if you read the Q3 manual, it even mentions things like Strogg and Slipgates.

Weapons and maps were the grey areas. We thought we might have an issue with some of the weapon names, such as 'hyperblaster' and the 'BFG'. We fired off an email to id, and got the ok to use those names.

Maps are a  grey area though. They're the most borderline thing we do. So instead of making all these old-school maps and packaging them with Gen, we use ones already present in the community (with the authors permission), and put them into seperate mappacks. That way in case we have to pull something, we can just yank the mappack, not the whole game.

Lee might have more to add later.

Yep, that's the gist of things.

Converting anything from the original game (in other words, taking the original content and altering it to create something you place in your game) is just flat-out illegal.  Can't be done no matter what without explicit permission (which is virtually imposssible to get due to publishing restrictions).

In terms of intellectual property and copyrights, most defining elements of a copyright work shouldn't be used without explicit permission.  This includes the name of the copyrighted work (which is probably trademarked), character names, location names (like planets), and any coined term.  Anyone can have a beam sword, but lightsabers are Star Wars property.  (Lucas even filed a lawsuit on a surgical equipment company who developed a laser knife and referred to it as a "lightsaber".)

Guns, health kits, ammo, etc. are real difficult to press charges for.  A shotgun is a shotgun, as Todd put it to me a few years back.  Note that with that lightsaber example, however, that some things are copyrightable.  Thankfully, 90% of Generations is either simple weapons (shotguns, chainguns, machineguns), concepts that are real-world ideas or in other media (railguns and nailguns), or already present in Q3 (Plasma rifles, a BFG).

However, for a project like Gen, there's still some give and take.  Our weapons do highly resemble media from id games, most notably in our Strogg weaponry.  We were also concerned with elements like the "BFG10K" which are usually considered "id weapons".  In every case like this, we emailed Todd Hollenshead, detailing our intentions, the process we were using, and including screenshots of the media we had questions about.  In each case, we were informed that we would be fine.

In the case of Reborn, recreating characters is a no-go.  The characters (including their likenesses) are copyrighted pretty stiffly.  To use the "Dune" universe as an example, you could put a sandworm in a mod, but putting House Harkonen soldiers in your game would be troublesome.

It's all in what company owns the copyrights you wish to build a base from, and what they allow.  With id, character likenesses are a significant line, and we've avoided that through the characters' presence in Q3 before we even started.  THAT alone is the reason why we'll never create Generations for another game... unless this circumstance happens again.

Hope that helps.

Hah . I'm with con on this one, unless id makes another Arena game, I don't think we'll see gen again :b