WTF. Just... WTF.

[Lightning Hunter]

I was adding more missions to my Mega Compilation, when I made a sickening discovery. I recognized some of the maps I was converting, when I realized they were more rip-offs of official content - and now I am wondering: did any of the mission creators out there actually build their own maps from scratch, or did they ALL just rip them straight from official maps or worse - skirmish maps made by other people?

 

I didn't really pay much attention before while I was going through and converting these maps, but tonight I started thinking about it and poked around to see exactly how many campaigns ripped official content.  I only searched for like 15 minutes and have already discovered multiple packs that have ripped content:

 

RA Reloaded (just posted on these forums last year).

A New Era

Desperation

Soviet Empire Strikes Back & Russian Resistance (sesb&rr_fixed.zip)

Nazi Wargames (nazi.zip)

The Downfall

The Mega Campaign (campaign.zip)

Beginning of a new technology (also posted just last year on these forums).

 

And that is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure.

 

After making this discovery, I almost want to just scrap this whole project.  These mission makers are losers, bottom feeders, and thieves as far as I'm concerned.  They rip maps from all over the place, add/modify the units/placement, and claim the work as their own.

 

I am really pissed off right now.

 

 

 

[Nyerguds]

Eh. I've made C&C1 missions on original campaign maps.

 

The bulk of the difficulty of mission making work is in the scripting, anyway. Making it on an existing map offers challenges of how to approach it, from a mission making perspective.

 

'Course, you do have to credit the maps you use. But as for the fact people use existing maps? No, I honestly don't see the issue.

 

Do these missions include readme files? Might want to check those before throwing wild accusations of theft around. Such things were completely normal back then, from what I could see.

[Lightning Hunter]

14 hours ago, Nyerguds said:

'Course, you do have to credit the maps you use. But as for the fact people use existing maps? No, I honestly don't see the issue.

That's just it - none of the packs I mentioned above credit Westwood for the maps used as a base for missions. The closest I found to any mention of official maps is in the "sesb&rr_fixed.zip" campaign readme.  However,  even this readme file still makes an invalid claim. It states that all missions were built by Aaro Ruohonen, while the maps were made by Riku Paakkunainen, and that only some of the maps were made by Westwood. I looked through almost every map in the pack and didn't see any non-official maps - which begs the question -  what exactly did Riku Paakkunainen do in this campaign?  If he made any maps from scratch, I certainly haven't found any (I looked at about 75% of the maps, and they were all skirmish conversions from Aftermath and Counterstrike, or just official mission maps).

I understand that the difficult part of mission-making is setting up the triggers and all - but if someone is going to do all that work, why not spend the extra hour making a new map from scratch?  Don't get me wrong, I can see why some people might think it would be a fun idea to create missions out of Skirmish maps, but common sense would tell you to MENTION this in the readme.  Otherwise, it rubs people the wrong way.  I guess I am also just disappointed to discover just how many of these packs are nothing new or unique when it comes to the map itself.

Anyway, after having all day today to clear my mind and give this some thought, I have decided to go ahead and include these packs in the mega compilation anyway.  I will simply make a note of which campaigns are completely new content, and which ones are official content converted to missions.  I did take a closer look at more of the campaigns, and found that I just got incredibly unlucky last night when I picked maps at random in various campaigns.  In reality,  it is about 50/50 (not as extreme as I thought).  That is, about half of the missions out there are made from scratch, while the rest are based on official maps.  Oh, and I made a mistake when I listed Desperation as one of the campaigns that ripped official content.  It was actually a "Downfall" map I was looking at.

Edited April 15, 2017 by Lightning Hunter

[Nyerguds]

Well, honestly never seen practices like that in C&C1. All mission packs I ever found had author readmes for the missions where they mentioned that kind of stuff :-\

[Jacko]

It's fairly normal to use an existing multiplayer map as a template at the very least.

Some are less edited than others though

[Lightning Hunter]

1 hour ago, Jacko said:

It's fairly normal to use an existing multiplayer map as a template at the very least.

Some are less edited than others though

Like Nyerguds stated though, the problem is not with people using Skirmish maps as a base to build missions; the problem is people making no mention of doing so.  Also, I am quite disappointed to find just how many maps are converted Skirmish maps.  I was thinking that maybe 1 out of 10 maps were converted maps.  I did not expect 5 out of 10 (or more) to be converted maps. 

Although I have never created missions for Red Alert, I did create plenty of Skirmish maps way back in the day.  Even my most detailed mega maps took only 1-2 hours to create.  I just don't understand why so many people chose to rip all of their maps for large campaigns (we are talking 20+ maps here in some cases).  Couldn't they have bothered to make just a few maps from scratch?

I hate having to go through these campaigns to determine which ones are ripped content and which ones are unique content.  If these authors practiced some decency and made mention of converting Skirmish maps in the readme, I wouldn't have started this thread.

Edited April 15, 2017 by Lightning Hunter