Gambit has this fellow contacted you at all ?

Where is the "TRLE search"(perhaps he has already pulled it as "item is not found in our database " appears) , I would like to see how badly the textures have been bastardized,and would also like to send the same message to this dog horus fellow .

did you happen to catch the file name so I can google it to see if the bastard textures are out in the wild ?

*note , it is clear after a quick search of the site that people are using textures pulled from our respective paks I suppose it's a compliment in a way , although it's one I personally can do without as I( in an admittedly short search) have yet to see credit given where it is due

It was someone else on the Tomb Raider Forums who let me know about the violation. I followed it up with God Horus, and he posted a report on the item to say that I'd contacted him and that it should be removed. Oddly, he stated that he'd asked the admins of TRsearch if it would be OK to upload it and they said yes!

It got a bit messy, because it appears that the TRSearch system reporting doesn't work all the time and reports go missing, so I asked the amdin about it -- who proceeded to condescend to and patronise me and tell me I was talking rubbish, so I gave up that line of questioning in the end -- I clearly wasn't going to get anywhere.

Anyway, yes, I sopke to God Horus and he apologised and the item is removed.

Regarding people using the textures in other projects: I thought we were all OK with this as long as people give credit? I monitor the various Level Editor forums from time to time and remind people to do remember to give credit.

Maybe we should actually release this stuff under Creative Commons? I'm happy for people to use it, but I don't want them claiming it as their own, so I think this license is the best:

Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

This would effectively allow people to download the textures and use them, but if they want to release a level using the textures, it would have to be released under exactly the same licencse, and we would need to modify all our current packs to include a copy of this licencse and a link to it.

http://creativecommons.org/about/license/

It gets even more interesting, God Horus then sent me this:

You have another problem, Janie White just sent me the textures, and she is saying that she made them all on her own, and that they are not made by Tomb Raider Xtra, when she actually sent me all of the textures from Tomb Raider Xtra.com. I think you should e-mail her janie_white_001@yahoo.com

So I said:

Hi, thanks for the info. Before I contact her, I need to see that she has violated our terms. Where can I see evidence of this? If it's in emails, can you forward them to me please?

So he replied with:

It's MSN conversations. She basically said what happen to the XTRA textures, and I told her they got pulled down, and she said that she is using them. I told her about the fact she would have to put the names of everyone, and http://www.tombraiderxtra.com, etc, in the credits, but she said, no, she is passing them off as her own work. I told her no, she will get caught, and she said she never will.

I can't believe that people doing stuff on the net can be so stupid as to think they won't get caught, especially in such a wide and active TR community.

I'm not sure the best way of progressing on this as if I contact her, I compromise God Horus. Hmmm... then again, he did cock up to begin with but he's been very helpful since so I don't want to put him in an awkward position.

Well...how does she distribute these textures? If it's on a website then track it down and find out who administrates that site and email them.

The issue isn't the distribution of the textures: we don't mind if they are used as part of a level that someone wants to distribute (well, I don't mind -- what about the artists?). It's the lack of courtesy in respecting our licence which doesn't ask much of people: don't redistribute the textures as is, make sure you link bank to TRX and obviously credit the artist too.

The fact that she's already stated she intends to pass them off as her own suggests a rather mean spirited individual.

Seems to me like you need an infiltrator, an under-cover agent, that can request the textures from her, then report back to you, and finally shame her into oblivion on all the TR boards.

😁 You up for the job?

I thought we were all OK with this as long as people give credit?

Yes, that's the point exactly , a few people have textures clearly taken from all our paks( the ones I have seen so far are :your aztec calender , and my 'sun warrior' (the totem from villa), and a number of stone/plaster textures from JC and anton) , and are not crediting the respective authors .

I think it's totally cool if someone wants to re-use textures , I mean seriously how much more of a compliment can you get , but , obviously, even if they are only using one or two they shouldn't claim them as originals

I would add to the creative commons license , that whenever the textures are re-utilized for whatever, notification has to be sent to the original author( primarily because I like to see how stuff is being used 😀

If this "janie_white_001@yahoo.com" is actually using All of my textures , a number of them have easter eggs embeded so that I can provide proof of authorship ( a couple of tricks I used were : incorporating the letters of my my legal name ( a name not given out anywhere else in relation to the project ) into the designs of a number of the more complex scenery elements__
My legal initials are hidden on a number of textures, most of which are visible only when the texture is viewed under a specific 'colored' filter
a well hidden picture of carmen electras (not naked) breasts is buried as part of the background in one of the textures ,
and there are a couple of reproductions of tatoos from ( one of ) rod stewart's still extremely hot ex-wife(s) (Rachel Hunter) that are plainly visible if one looks in the right spots . 😀

It's not that I distrust people , it's just that I know too many of them .

Wow, that's pretty clever, I never even thought of protecting the images in this way. Will that stuff be preserved if resized? Because any TRX textures will have to drop to 64x64 for old school levels, or at best 128x128 for the newer modified game engines.

I'm not bothered about this janie white person: after finding that she was banned under two user names on the TR forums and reading her few limited posts, it's clear she's either insane, extremely simple, socially inept or -- more likely -- all three. If anything gets uploaded anywhere by her, I'll find it eventually and if it doesn't have the necessary credits, I'll deal with it then.

Honestly, shes a nutter, I'm not going to worry about it anymore unless you're especially concerned.

On another note, I sometimes remind people on level building forums that if they use our textures, they must give credit. It's difficult to tell if people are, because a lot of them are still works in progress and the credit will only be in the TXT file upon final release. Can you send me links to the stuff you've seen that definitely does not have a credit in it -- I'm happy to chase these up and ask the authors to add the credit where necessary.

Oh and for the record, the original item that was removed from TRsearch only appeared to be a few of my own textures.

...either insane, extremely simple, socially inept or -- more likely -- all three...

hahahahaha ....{inhale}...hahaha 😀 nice .

...unless you're especially concerned...

no , not really . This is the information age after all. I know a fellow whom has worked for a couple of decades in one (historically ; a number of different ) of those arcane signals (SIGINT) divisions .He turned me on to a cool trick : I had some trouble with fellow whom thought he was 'internet invisible' and ' not going to get caught ' .
With a little fishing ( and a small bit of help) I was able to send him e-mail ( to his home's ISP service) containing a satellite photo of his house , information from the credit app ( including DRivers license and S.S.#) he used to purchase the car in the driveway , and a couple of simple things like the date from his marriage and birth cert, place of employment , where his kids go to school....
I didn't even write a nasty note , hehe

But, this texture business isn't serious, just you know , people being people -that standard curve :good to bad and whatnot.

...Will that stuff be preserved if resized?...

yes/no some from column A some from column B .

Since I used multiple techniques I believe the redundancy will , even under severe compression , still leave a high degree of correlation / identification . The shakiest ones are the color based ones that only rely on a few pixels. Although at 128x128 (50%reduction) the 'laGrange' dots should produce a single 'out of place' pixel in the color filter . The other tidbits should work well as one can always take the original , reduce it to the same (format and )size as the texture in question and then run a difference (filter ) on them . Even given the slight mathematical differences in individual compressions this seems to show results.

...Wow, that's pretty clever, I never even thought of protecting...

Actually I got the original idea from a combination of battling with the 'magic brown' problem, and the unfortunate inevitability inherent in the seductions of plagerism 😀. Of course it's kind of fun hiding stuff so the idea blossomed from there .
(P.S. the 'not so hidden reference/Easter egg' idea is where the pen name 'Silverlok'comes from : the book of the (almost) same name from John Meyers Meyers ( yes I wrote meyers twice )
which is teh classic ten thousand needles in the hay stack guess the reference book )http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlock