Reusability, Ports, and Author's Returns

ChaseSP said:
Personally I feel like if someone were to port a pre 2.0 match/ctf level for whatever reason using the open assets that bring back the older weapon ring system should be encouraged imo.
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I'm actually porting a pack of those right now, i'll keep that in mind
 
Haven't been in the community for too long compared to a lot of you guys, so I'm not as familiar with the whole longstanding debate against/for porting. That said, I think this is a good change all around for a few reasons.

A. Mods that are ports can now be put on the Message Board, meaning it's easier to access and find them without needing to scavenge through different sites (no brainer lol)

B. Preservation and accessibility wise, being able to port older mods is a massive win. Not every mod creator is gonna have the time or energy to want to update their stuff to a new version, and some folks may not even be contactable period. Why should we deny the ability for folks who have that time and motivation to bring these things over? Makes things less of a hassle too, since not everyone is gonna wanna bother with setting up everything for an old (and often outdated) version of the game just to play an old mod. And of course, that's factoring in if they can even get it to work properly.

C. No more needs for arguing I guess? I mean again, I'm not as familiar with the debate, but I feel like allowing this stuff should remove the need for it.

Of course, I definitely understand the need for some restrictions and/or leeway. If someone doesn't want their mod ported over, it sometimes might just be best to respect their wishes. And of course, if an official port/update is being worked on already, it's probably better to just wait. Alongside that though, I think it's reasonable have someone port something like a level pack and not go through all the trouble to manually replace assets which have been replaced with updated versions through the process of moving to the new version. I think that part though depends on how much it may change the feel of things.

TLDR: Good change. Maybe someone will finally be able to bring Eggmanway5 onto the Message Board once more LOL
 
I mean, it's really not wrong as a comparison/example for how much enforcing open assets on everything really doesn't lead to a free vibrant community. If you want to discuss why though, you should absolutely keep it to the workshop thread though.
 
SpeedyHedgehog said:
I don't think we should be talking about the workshop on this thread at the current moment. We should talk about it here.
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It's just a jab at the WS. Doesn't mean it's a full-on discussion. Just because I mention the OVA, doesn't make this thread an OVA thread.
 
I'm just noticing this now almost a week after the initial topic creation. I don't really make mods but I do have a question anyway, just out of curiosity and to get a bit more insight on why a certain thing is the way it is:

Charybdizs said:
- The port is clearly marked as a port. All original credits must remain intact, but the person who ports the mod must put their name in the filename.
Example: SL_HiemalHive_V1.pk3 -----> SL_HiemalHive_CharybPort_V1.pk3 -- Since I didn't make Hiemal Hive, if I make a port, my name goes in the filename.
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Is there a reason why the version number is listed after the porter's name in the file name? Would it not be more clear that the specific version is also what's being ported if the name of the individual porting it came after? For example: SL_HiemalHive_V1_CharybPort.pk3

It seems to me that this would more clearly and less confusingly convey that "HeimalHive_V1" is what is being ported, rather than it being V1 of the port itself. However, I'm curious if there's some better reasoning for it not being listed this way in the example you gave that I'm simply not realizing.
 
time gear said:
I'm just noticing this now almost a week after the initial topic creation. I don't really make mods but I do have a question anyway, just out of curiosity and to get a bit more insight on why a certain thing is the way it is:


Is there a reason why the version number is listed after the porter's name in the file name? Would it not be more clear that the specific version is also what's being ported if the name of the individual porting it came after? For example: SL_HiemalHive_V1_CharybPort.pk3

It seems to me that this would more clearly and less confusingly convey that "HeimalHive_V1" is what is being ported, rather than it being V1 of the port itself. However, I'm curious if there's some better reasoning for it not being listed this way in the example you gave that I'm simply not realizing.
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The version of the previous addon doesn't matter for the filename in the context of a port, you can specify the old addon's version inside the changelog.
The filename convention rules are to funnel any bug reports to you rather than the old author, and also specify the SRB2 version the port is intended for.
 
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Pikaspoop said:
The version of the previous addon doesn't matter for the filename in the context of a port, you can specify the old addon's version inside the changelog.
The filename convention rules are to funnel any bug reports to you rather than the old judge, and also specify the SRB2 version the port is intended for.
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I see, thanks for the clarification. This is making a bit more sense to me now.
 
Charybdizs said:
The past few years have been witness to a lot of strong opinions, tension, and argument over the reusability system.

The first thing this post is about is just that: The reusability system, why it was created, why it held an important role, what it has succeeded at, and what it has failed at.

As always, I'd like to clear up a common misconception: The reusability system isn't new, nor was it invented by me or by any other member of current staff. It was implemented by staff in the 1.09.4 to 2.0 transition 14 years ago who have since moved on to other things. But it's up to us to re-assess it after all this time and how successfully it has fulfilled its role. So, a few months back, I kickstarted a conversation in staff channels about this very topic.

Here is the sort of stuff we determined, and what our new position on ports and reusability will be, going forward.

This post is going to be wordy, because it has to be. It's a complex topic that has led to a lot of arguments in the community, and most people still haven't came to anything resembling an agreement. But we did find a position everyone is happy with among staff, despite our differing feelings, and I think it's a meaningful one that will please almost everyone.

So if you'll allow me to walk you through the thought process behind these changes, that'd be wonderful. 🙏

If not, you can skip to the TL;DR at the bottom and read back up if you feel you need more clarification.


Author's returns

Whenever the subject of reusability comes up, someone usually comes into the discussion with the 5D checkmate of, "You're not making money on your SRB2 mods, therefore why do you care? You lose nothing by letting people edit/redistribute your work." :shitsfree:

This might sound like a winning argument at a glance, but the truth is that even when there is no money to be gained, money often never was the incentive in the first place. People will create and share their art in the hopes of gaining a lot different things, and the returns on those things will make or break their drive to keep on doing so. Some examples of those things (which I will be calling "Author's Returns" from here on out) include:

  • Notoriety
  • Credibility
  • Competition
  • Self-Expression
  • To make statements
  • To see people enjoy themselves!

Letting people edit and repost your art (whether credit is given or not!) can often directly impact all of these -- the Author's Returns -- in a way which often isn't fair to the person who put the sweat into the project.

Notoriety:
Say you're creating work with an original character who you created. You really like it, and you want to show to the world. You may do it for notoriety -- as in, you literally want to be known for creating that piece of art. You are trying, through the fact that your work will stand out amidst the rest, to become a well-known artist.

Someone cloning your art can easily fall into the realm of "actually, whether I am given credit or not, the fact that my character is copied wholesale by a ton of other people means that I do not stand out; now I need to change my own design in order to stand out again. This sucks."

Credibility:
Credibility can be hard to wrap one's head around, because it's such a heavily contextual reason to create something. But the motivation of "I made this thing to prove something to myself or to others" is definitely very real.

If such an intentional point is trying to be made, then an author has good reason to be upset of widespread edits or modifications. It is much harder to make a point when the point you're trying to make ends up diluted or stripped out of your work on other people's whims. Any random audience member will only experience a work with fresh eyes once, after all.

Competition:
I'm not a competitive person, so it's hard for me to relate to, but it's safe to say that a big reason why a lot of people create is specifically to outdo others at a craft. Few sane competitions would let someone submit an edit of another person's work. Whether it's an official contest or a contest in someone's own head, this matters to some people.

Self-Expression:
You may have created your OC specifically because you want to be understood by people, through them engaging with your art. This stuff can get very personal and vulnerable, and not only will people fiddling around with your very personal work hit a little too close to home, but it will also impact the ability for people to experience you through your art, if it enters the public domain and loses the consistency and intention you write into it.

To make statements:
If your work is specifically created as a statement piece (social, political, artistic, whatever it may be), other people copying it and not catching onto that nuance can dilute it in a way that's very frustrating for the author who put it together in such a way.

To see people enjoy themselves:
This is actually the most fundamentally human of all reasons. You create something, you want to be there to see others enjoy it. If people copy your work, they actually get to steal the dopamine rush of "here's the thing! see my thing! what do you think?" because others may just go "oh, we've already seen that before."

Whether you personally can relate to any of the things above, I would urge you to consider them all the same. People are all different, and they come to the community for a whole host of reasons besides what may have brought you. There's little to be gained from dismissing what gives others motivations; it's a reality we must acknowledge and work around.


There are many reasons why an author may care about someone editing their work, and that's the reason "Why DO you care?" is important to ask in a genuine way. There are a lot of good reasons someone may care. Alternatively, there are also a lot of insecure and bad answers. But that's not really surprising; these are things that people tend to be very bad at articulating.

This is why I have always favored the reusability system over nothing at all. Better to foster a widespread social habit of, "Yeah, don't edit other people's work unless they say they're okay with it."

To quote someone I spoke to recently, "People share their art and benefit consciously or subconsciously from validation. Imitation is often said to be flattery, but for a variety of good reasons, it's not always received this way."


A creator's vision

So what's the common thread throughout all of these?
The common thread is that these are all things which we can call the author's vision for their work. An author's vision is a specific, defined, and quantifiable thing. Something which goes beyond what the art *is*, delving more into *why* it was made.

Respecting the author's vision is something I'm interested in, and all of you should be, too. Why? Because if you want your peers to create cool things, you can't discourage them from doing that.

But there is another facet to this as well. In working to identify what bothers someone about their work being edited, we in doing so identify the ways they aren't bothered when their work was edited. In other words, the ways you can edit a work that do not compromise the author's vision.

If that feels like a hard pill to swallow, here are some helpful analogies.

- Converting a JPG to a PNG is objectively a form of editing someone else's work. It completely changes the encoding structure of the image! In fact, this is something that Discord and Twitter do automatically all the time. Why do we not call that a trespass?

- When you dump a ROM off of a cartridge, you are very much "editing" the work as you remove it from its original casing and extract it into a format playable on a different device. And yet, this is something which can't even be made illegal!

- When you're giving a framed photo, it is absolutely modifying the gift if you take it and put it in a nicer frame. And yet, people wouldn't usually care about that the same way they would if you, say, drew on the photo. Why is that?


Overbroadness of "editing"

With that all said, it's now time to talk about something different: Ports, and the way the reusability system's overbroadness of what defines an edit has caused a lot of frustration. Because indeed, it is frustrating -- don't try to kid yourself otherwise.

When the reusability system was implemented in the 2.0-2.2 era, it was a blanket "you may edit/not edit this." This was not a clear rule; it did not specify what qualified as an "edit" despite asking authors to agree with it. Over the years, it has been interpreted in the most strict possible sense, which has went well beyond "no recoloring my work" "no repackaging my levels into your own pack" and included "no version compatibility changes" "no interop compatibility changing of freeslots" and "no bug fixing."

But it's not only users that this has confused -- it has confused authors themselves. What authors themselves expected from this system has not been consistent. Some are like "yes, good, please don't touch my stuff, period" and others have been like "what, no? you can OBVIOUSLY port it to future versions, why would I want it to remain broken?" -- because that hadn't been how they had interpreted reusability.

Watching favorite mods disappear into the ether of past versions of the game has never been fun, and although "you can always download old versions of the game to play them" is technically preservation and archival, it being an issue of archival has always missed the point anyways: SRB2 isn't an exhibit in a glass museum case: it's a game meant to be played with friends and a pile of your favorite mods. People publish their mods so they can be played; they don't release it with a bullet point list of correct and incorrect ways to play it.

It's unlikely any of them seriously thought it would go against their artistic intent if they were to be played in a future version of the game they weren't even aware of. Even if they did, telling someone "My character was only meant to be played in SRB2 2.2.9, no playing it in SRB2 2.2.10" is just as wild as telling someone "You can't use my character .pk3 in Eggmanway because it was meant to be used in Vanilla SRB2 only"


Mindfulness

Reusability and the [Open Assets] tag are not the same as legal usage licenses and never have been -- they've been a guideline for modders to keep in mind as they interact with other authors in the community. The intention and hope is that community guidelines like that will create a culture of mindfulness -- that is to say, encouraging people to focus on treating the creators around them like human beings with feelings and motivations, and not like content mills.

The reusability system as it has (and does) exist has in many ways succeeded at that, but in other ways failed hard. It's not an easy problem to solve in a community which mixes copyrighted and fully original content so much. We can't just say "slap a license on it" and have that be it. Fangames -- by nature of being based on copyrighted content -- exist in a foggy area of "It's only illegal if the copyright holders decide it's a problem." Just like many other things people do on a day-to-day basis, such as streaming games on Twitch.

Where it has failed is this: An overly uptight interpretation of what counts as an edit and is therefore disallowed -- or even the suggestion that maintenance and faithful ports are inherently a disrespect to the author -- has created a whole lot of well intentioned but misguided mindfulness. Although an author may have legitimate concerns about why a port might inconvenience them...

...Almost EVERY concern an author may have about their work being ported has a better solution than to overreach and go "I am forbidding everyone from playing with the thing I made in the game I made it for through a technicality of version differences breaking it"

Altogether, it's not something any of us have interest in preserving -- as a system or as a culture.

Along the years, the Mona Lisa has been reframed, restored and reproduced all over the world so people can continue to enjoy the work of art it is without needing to go all the way to the Louvre. And yet, each faithful reproduction can be appreciated with the same amount of respect to Da Vinci's artistic intent. We can absolutely allow the same level of accessibility to our community while still guaranteeing our modders' work the respect they deserve if we focus on what really matters.


What really matters?

In March of 2023, we changed the system so that authors can now specify whether they have an objection to maintenance or just modifications to their vision. It was a good start to address the above frustrations, but we can go further, and we can break it down farther.

And that's what I attempted to do, by asking a bunch of authors a simple question: "Is there a way we could be less rigid about edits for maintenance while still keeping you happy? Get granular with what bothers you about ports and I will find a way to make things comfortable for everyone."

Here's what we boiled it down to. In order for a port to be inoffensive:
  • A port must be as faithful as possible to the author's intent
  • A port's unofficial-ness must be made extremely clear.
  • A port shouldn't be of objectively worse quality than the original (no degraded lossy .jpg or .md2 artifacts)
  • An unofficial port shouldn't displace or invalidate an official port being posted on the forum itself.
  • A port should go out of its way to avoid causing erroneous bug reports for the original author.
  • A port shouldn't be used as a weapon to harass an author or get under their skin.
After that discussion, we came up with some changes and all agreed on them. Here they are, alongside why we're making them.


TL;DR

We are going to start allowing ports, as long as they meet the following standards."Ports" meaning "edits that make a mod work in another version of the game, fix bugs, or make them load correctly alongside unrelated mods."

NOTE: This may not be an exhaustive list, nor does it reflect what the exact submissions rules may be. Edge cases may arise and we may make some changes to this for clarity or to cover unforeseen issues. This is more to explain our thought process moving forward.

- The port is a faithful, accurate port in all ways possible, and doesn't take creative liberties without permission.
This is why we have judges, they can make a call on this.

- The port itself must be complete, in working order, and of equal quality to the original.
It must be a proper representation of the author's vision, not shoddy or half broken. Judges can use their judgment on this.

- An unofficial port must inherit the [Open Assets] tag (or lack thereof) from its source.
Just because a work is being ported doesn't mean the porter can change the asset permissions.

- The port is clearly marked as a port. All original credits must remain intact, but the person who ports the mod must put their name in the filename.
Example: SL_HiemalHive_V1.pk3 -----> SL_HiemalHive_CharybPort_V1.pk3 -- Since I didn't make Hiemal Hive, if I make a port, my name goes in the filename.
- Instances of internal credits (inside the .pk3 itself) must also have the porter's name there labeled alongside, making it clear that this is indeed an unofficial port.
This was the biggest recurring concern we ran into: A major concern. Quite a few authors I spoke to were worried, because if edits of their work that introduce their own bugs start circulating, they don't want to be barraged by requests for fixes for bugs that aren't their fault and that they can't do anything about. If you port something, do the author a favor and try not to cause annoyances for them.

- The porter must provide a changelog of what they did to make the port functional. This must be provided to judges and the original author (if present) when submitted, and must be included in the .pk3 itself.
This is so that judges (and others) can actually have a look and go "yeah, this is a faithful port, all good!" and that if the original author is still present, they can totally take it up with the judges if they feel like these changes are unfair and unfaithful. Basically, it's a show of good faith.

- The port must go in the Ports subsection of Addons & More. (This will be added soon)
This is to create a clear barrier between official updates and and unofficial ports.

- We won't be hosting duplicates of the same mod, and priority will be given to the original author at all times.
This allows the original author to showcase their work and gather feedback and reception, above all else.

If the author is present and has intent to port it themselves, ports can be made and used and shared but will not have an official download on the MB.
If the author is no longer present, a port can be hosted on the MB as the go-to download.
If the author returns to maintain their own work and wishes to host an official update thread, unofficial ones may be delisted or locked (up to whatever the judges think is best, depending on the situation).

At all times, you can still share it and host with your port on the MS, though.

Basically, no sense in letting the forum host both official and unofficial versions. Your port will probably be rejected if you try to submit it when an official thread already exists or is planned to exist. Ask the author if you aren't sure! This is because being able to have a single, simple, official place to publish their work is important to many authors.

- Be cool to the author who made what you're porting.
As in, be normal and don't use your ability to port to throw shade or one-up the creator or intentionally get under their skin. Judges will absolutely reject a port from submissions if you're just being weird and petty to the original author.

As always, the circumstances surrounding specific cases can be complicated. This is why we have judges, so they can use their judgment on how to best handle an unusual situation. When in doubt, ask a judge, and they'll confer with others.


In conclusion...

It may take a little bit of time for us to change Submissions and Master Server rules to reflect these changes, so bear with us, and feel free to point out inconsistencies if they're still around after a few weeks.

I hope everyone finds these changes agreeable, and to be a breath of fresh air as far as:
  • allowing older works to be updated for play instead of existing in limbo
  • maintaining the integrity of the original author's vision
  • limiting annoyances that may come the author's way by nature of ports they had no hand in
Sorry if this all feels a bit complicated -- I strongly felt that a subject this controversial needed a very nuanced solution. But hopefully this will be simpler in the end: Following the spirit of respecting the artist's actual vision, and not the technicality of "well, never edit ANYTHING EVER, because that's editing and thus it must be disrespectful"

Thanks for bearing with me through this long conversation! As always, if you have anything in mind that you think would make a thoughtful addition to this all, by all means share! There may be many edge cases left to discuss and account for.
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Well, okay. Nice. But I think there's a bit more you should've talked about than just ports.
 
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