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Question about Asset's Format Licensing

Started by 1234567654321 May 28, 2012 at 9:23 AM 1 replies 1.6k views

Original Post

May 28, 2012 at 9:23 AM

I'm currently producing a game with the intent of showing the community that a game can be built from start to finish with a $0 budget (i.e royalty free software and formats etc.).

I'm using Blender and Unity mainly, but I've recently got myself in a huge confusion over licensing for all the different formats for my assets.
This includes everything, ranging from images to sounds, models to video.

I've searched and searched and I can't seem to find any definitive answers, all I know is that .png is free to sell you work commercially as it was an open format designed to replace .gif and all of its evil patents!

So here's the question. I want to make a game for free, where all of my assets (and their formats) are not subject to pay license/royalty fees to anyone for using that format.

- For images I'm guessing .png is fine and means I don't have to pay anyone in future? (.jpg is having problems at the moment apparently).

- For audio is .ogg completely unencumbered by any fees to use in my game? (Unity converts all audio into .ogg apparently)

- For video files, I'm aware of ogg theora and webm (or that vid8 format I heard about once), but is YouTube also available for hosting commercial videos? Do I need to be paying YouTube for uploading any trailers/gameplay videos that might go up on the game's site?
(There won't be any ads on the site, which I read was against the T&C if the ads were the main focus of the site)

- For Documents, I believe .pdf has been free to distribute since 2001? Otherwise OpenOffice?

- Models is my biggest worry, since autodesk own the .fbx format, do I owe them any royalties for making my models in the game .fbx?
Blender supports fbx models now, so I'm guessing that it's ok to distribute .fbx models as I please? If I need a license to sell any .fbx models what are my alternative file formats, is obj royalty free?

I just seem to be going around in circles, patents and licenses are incredibly confusing and no one seems to dumb it down for me to understand without prior legal knowledge. All I want to know, is what format my assets have to be in, so that I could distribute my game without having a company come along and tell me I owe them money for using their proprietary format.

Thanks!

Ashaman73

May 28, 2012 at 9:35 AM

I'm currently producing a game with the intent of showing the community that a game can be built from start to finish with a $0 budget (i.e royalty free software and formats etc.).

I'm using Blender and Unity mainly, but I've recently got myself in a huge confusion over licensing for all the different formats for my assets.
This includes everything, ranging from images to sounds, models to video.

I've searched and searched and I can't seem to find any definitive answers, all I know is that .png is free to sell you work commercially as it was an open format designed to replace .gif and all of its evil patents!

So here's the question. I want to make a game for free, where all of my assets (and their formats) are not subject to pay license/royalty fees to anyone for using that format.

- For images I'm guessing .png is fine and means I don't have to pay anyone in future? (.jpg is having problems at the moment apparently).

- For audio is .ogg completely unencumbered by any fees to use in my game? (Unity converts all audio into .ogg apparently)

- For video files, I'm aware of ogg theora and webm (or that vid8 format I heard about once), but is YouTube also available for hosting commercial videos? Do I need to be paying YouTube for uploading any trailers/gameplay videos that might go up on the game's site?
(There won't be any ads on the site, which I read was against the T&C if the ads were the main focus of the site)

- For Documents, I believe .pdf has been free to distribute since 2001? Otherwise OpenOffice?

- Models is my biggest worry, since autodesk own the .fbx format, do I owe them any royalties for making my models in the game .fbx?
Blender supports fbx models now, so I'm guessing that it's ok to distribute .fbx models as I please? If I need a license to sell any .fbx models what are my alternative file formats, is obj royalty free?

I just seem to be going around in circles, patents and licenses are incredibly confusing and no one seems to dumb it down for me to understand without prior legal knowledge. All I want to know, is what format my assets have to be in, so that I could distribute my game without having a company come along and tell me I owe them money for using their proprietary format.

Thanks!

As far as I know (I'm not a lawyer and this is not a legal advice !), the formats are more or less free, but in case of algorithm to decode them, you need to pay attention to patents. But as you already say, there are lot of free formats, including liberate license model for necessary libs to use them (not all libs are free or have a liberate license ). There are liberate libs available for png and ogg(container)-vorbis (encoding) . In case of an exchange format, you should either write a converter (FBX->own format) or use some free format like collada.

1234567654321

May 29, 2012 at 3:08 AM

Ah ok, I think I understand a little better now.

So in that case, the formats I use don't really matter, since it's Unity that have paid for the licenses to encode/decode the assets I place in the engine with their software.
In effect, I'm only placing the format into the engine which has all of the libraries required to run it all?

Would still like some more answers from people so I can get my head around this whole encode/decode/library and license issue once and for all!

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