21 May 07 · Remaking old maps pt.1

Rebuilding old official maps. Should it be allowed or not. That's the topic of quite an interesting discussion that's been going on in the Level Design forums recently. You may have also heard it on Oswalds radio show.

Now I've been quite flexible on this in the past. For instance after 3.0 came CAL (an on-line competition) asked quite nicely if they could use the original abbey map for match play. They were unhappy with how abbey2 played in TS at that point. I was a little bit unsure at the time; but I let them go ahead with it. I also gave the go ahead for the_hat to do a village update called reville. I even tried to get it included in the 3.5 release but that didn't pan out.

In all that time (4 years) I've never had any issues with people making remakes*. So when runy asked to do the village2 remake I didn't really have any problems with it and posted the following:

I'm fairly flexible on this issue actually. If people want to remake my levels I consider that to be a flattery. I do have three requests if you want to remake one of my levels:

1. It must be free, and it must be for urban terror.
2. Use a different map name. Reville is a good example.
3. Acknowledge me in the readme file, but other than that make sure it's obvious that it was NOT me who made the map.

But note, I'm the exception to the rule. Most other dev team members are strongly opposed to this. You shouldn't do a remake without permission.

Let me just explain those three points.

• The first is rather obvious. All my maps are free urban terror maps, any based on them should be as well.
• The reason for the different names is so that people don't get confused and so there are no naming conflicts. I don't want people to be confused over what maps are official or, which maps I've made. Nor do I want to try and release a village3 after someone else has already used the name.
• The third point. I want some credit for making the original, but I don't want people confusing my work with others. Most people think I'm a bad enough mapper without needing any extra assistance thank you :)

I'd like to cover the rest of the forum topic, but this is enough for one post.

* Well someone did make a de_abbey copy for couterstrike in which they didn't even bother to acknowledge me. I don't think being less flexible would have changed anything in that case though.