2 June 07 · Remaking old maps pt.3

In my last post I looked at the reasons why remakes are a good idea. In this post I'm going to go through the negative side of remakes.

First I want to make it clear that if someone doesn't want a map remake made that is the end of the argument. It doesn't matter what the reason is; good reason or not. They could choose that they don't want people making remakes because they believe evil space monkeys will use it as a training simulation for a great invasion. It's their work, it's their choice. No explanations needed.

So having said that: these are the negatives as I see them. None of these really got mentioned on the forum thread which is why I want to go through them now. I personally don't think these outweigh the good points, and some of these are just facts of life.

• Plagiarism

  If someone was to take my work and claim it as their own I would pretty pissed off. I think everyone feels the same way. If someone was to do that and try and make money from it that's even worse.

• Authorship Confusion

  I don't want people to confuse my original work, with other peoples remakes. I think most other mappers would feel the same. It's not as bad as plagiarism, but it can be quite annoying. People can either think I (the original author) did a crappy remake, or that the author of the remake is responsible for the original.

• Multiple remake Confusion

  If for some reason we allowed a map like casa to be remade by any old Joe just imagine the consequences. Every man and his dog would want to release their own special 'best ever' version. For regular players that would end up very confusing.

• Polishing by others.

  Lets take a hypothetical situation in which someone was to make a copy of ut_algiers, moves some boxes around so that it plays better, and posts the updated version on the forums. They then get a whole bunch of positive posts about how great the new version is and how well it plays. It's pretty disheartening to see someone get all the credit for spending 5 minutes changing something it took months to create.

  Ok so I haven't seen this happen in UrbanTerror yet, but I've seen it happen in a lot of other circumstances. With add-ons to firefox, with mods for Oblivion. Someone makes a small change and the users all applause the genius of the change, and bemoan the original developers for their bad implementation.

• Overshadowing previous maps

  Lets say I release a map update and a whole bunch of people say, this is crap, and they promptly release a remake of the previous version and play that. Or the same situation but with a new map, where people just go back to playing an old map. Most mappers are going to pretty unhappy in that circumstance; me included.

I'm sure there's more reasons than that to not allow remakes, but they're the main ones for me. Still for the most part I don't think they are all that bad. Maybe with a bigger community the problems would be far worse, but with the size of Urban Terror they don't seem to play out much.

In the end it's all about the people who play Urban Terror, and if they want to remake and play an old map, then I personally don't see any point in stopping them.