quick question (hopefully some sweet informative answers)

[cortlong50]

Can someone pm me the legal jargon to the gzdoom engine?
someone from drd team who i can have an indepth conversation with?
i want to know distribution rights, and stuff like that.
i am looking for an engine to make a sprite based indie game on, i am looking for devs (in case youre interested...yes youre getting paid) and the gzdoom is my most comfortable engine to work with, and it is my first choice.
any information would be great...
preferably no "no you cant use it posts" id like to know details.
thanks!
also i just hopped on today, so if this is in the wrong place (i read everything dont worry haha) let me know, ill gladly move it!

[Rachael]

I can't give you a more detailed answer than this, but I can tell you the simplest complication to all your legal problems right from the get-go:

The number of contributors and authors on the engine, plus the amount of borrowed code and libraries from other sources, plus the wide mix of licenses from such, would make your issue extremely complicated. To say the least, the cost of hiring a lawyer just to even get you on the right path would probably far exceed any expected sales outcome you could hope to achieve - and that's talking about the research alone, not even minding the necessary legal contact with each author and hoping for a response. But, being the entrepreneur, I suppose that is your risk to take. If I were you though, I'd choose a game engine with a much simpler licensing scheme - but otherwise, you're in a real sticky situation here, sorry to say.

I will not say that your proposal is impossible. But I am not going to lie to you and tell you everything is as sweet and daisies as you seem to want it to be. It is a considerable challenge and your research will have to be extremely thorough if you want to avoid any future lawsuits and other complications that could come about. You will also have to ensure that the main contributing authors are appropriately compensated for their contributions - no trivial task, as that also involves finding out just how much work they've done as well. That would be pouring over thousands of SVN commits over two separate repositories, plus the recent Git histories as well.

[Gez]

The SVN repositories are dead now (notice how they don't appear in here?), but all the history was part of the Git import.

[Rachael]

There is one solution to this conundrum that I had not previously thought of. You can actually license a much simpler engine (say, original Doom?) and import only the features that you intend to use. That way, your research will not have to be quite as extensive, you'll only need someone to make sure it all runs together, and you will have to only contact fewer authors.

Of course, in that, you will have to ensure that your project only uses as few features as possible, and that hopefully you have a programmer that can emulate all the original features themselves as needed (reverse-engineer) without needing to look at the original source code - which would also allow you to sidestep many possible legal issues.

[cortlong50]

Yup. Ive been reading the licensing and co my ributions for zdoom alone and it is something to behold. I have decided under recentevents to turn to the unity engine. It is more flexible than the original doom andin terms of usability more liberal to the developer.
Your feedback has been amazingly helpful though! I appreciate e be ryrhing and hopefully this will become a new home away from the zdoomforums.
Would i be okay to post the alpha and beta of my game to theseforums forfree? Doom isthe inspiration andtje community has been more than helpful.
This is going yo happenthough haha. This isnta game promise with no product hahaha ive seenenough of
Excuse thetypos. My cellphone os terrible haha

[Rachael]

Well, seeing as how DRD Team is not strictly Doom, there isn't really a problem with that, just use the projects forum which I have seen you already have used before.

Just one thing - some people who come with such proposals do tend to "over"-promote, i.e. actually advertise their game and try to use places like this as a venue for unpaid advertisements. Please be mindful of the population here and don't do anything that could be construe as annoying and overly commercial. But releasing a shareware here, with screenshots, and with your contact info (i.e. website, in case you catch someone's interest) is perfectly valid.

Please do follow my request. I am all too familiar with the aggressive techniques required to be successful at marketing, but just believe me when I say they have no place here.

[Blzut3]

To use (G)ZDoom commercially you would have to basically replace the sound system (partially done in the OpenAL branch), remove the MAME OPL emulator, and either remove the software renderer or replace the build code. (Information is available on the wiki what code is from build.) FMOD can be licensed for commercial use for a reasonable fee, but you would have to use the GPL license option on the Doom code which is incompatible with FMOD. (Gray areas aside.) All new code in ZDoom is assumed to be under the 3-point BSD unless specified otherwise so commercial use of that is OK.

If one wants to make a commercial game out of the Doom engine I would recommend using Eternity Engine for the base. That is the GPL Doom port closest to ZDoom in philosophy. Being GPL, you must release the source code to your game of course.

[cortlong50]

Just one thing - some people who come with such proposals do tend to "over"-promote, i.e. actually advertise their game and try to use places like this as a venue for unpaid advertisements. Please be mindful of the population here and don't do anything that could be construe as annoying and overly commercial. But releasing a shareware here, with screenshots, and with your contact info (i.e. website, in case you catch someone's interest) is perfectly valid.

Please do follow my request. I am all too familiar with the aggressive techniques required to be successful at marketing, but just believe me when I say they have no place here.

dont worry, i am definitely picking up everything youre putting down...i wouldnt do anything of the sort. id just post and move on with my day. thanks for the warning though, as you said if anyone is coming around here trying to do the same thing they will see this...because nobody likes that guy.

and as for the post above me. yeah...its been hell getting all the info and would be hell to use hte engine hahaha...i just love decorate. its such a nice easy language to use...c# (i am learning now) is...a pain in the ass if i can say that here. writing my acs in c is awful...i am new to this whoelt hing but decorate was super easy to pick up and run with.
eitehr wya...thanks for eveything!

[Rachael]

You're welcome, I am glad we could be of assistance.