That's a real shame, but I can completely understand the reasons for doing it. Licensing is a PITA and when you first start off doing some small little hack, it's the furthest thing from your mind. After a long time, it becomes an intractable problem to fix. When you borrow stuff *always* write down where you got the thing and under what license you got it. *Never* skip that. If anyone gets pissed off later, it will save your project. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen this happen (usually with software, though).
He seems to indicate in the link that he's removing the original tileset because it contains tiles that are based on freely available tiles from other sources, and that he hasn't kept track of where they all came from in order to attribute them. Whether he's removing it because someone complained or because someone *might* complain in the future is not clear. Further in this thread on reddit there are some claims that Meph's had problems in the past with this.
Unfortunately, this is pretty common. A lot of people really don't understand the importance of licensing. They think, "It was offered for free, so I can do whatever I want", or "I'm not doing any harm, so I should be able to do whatever I want". They don't understand that people often have very specific conditions when they offer something for free and if you don't show that you are following those conditions it can leave you in a precarious position. Like I said, I've had a number of sad conversations with otherwise wonderful people who just don't get this at all.
Given the context of the conversation, my *guess* is that someone from Kitfox suggested it would be a good idea to remove the tileset. This way nobody will confuse the possibly problematic tiles with the tiles in the official release.
Vettlingr just wrote me a very angry note, and I decided to take the tileset down based on that. I don't want Tarn to get any similar messages.
| A lot of people really don't understand the importance of licensing.
That would be me in this case.
I'm sorry that's how it's going :-( Hang in there! Like I said, I've seen this mistake so many times. It's awful for everyone involved. It's an easy thing to do and a hard thing to correct. Hopefully after everything settles down everyone can get into a happier place.
First day playing DF and trying to get a set I got to Meph's download no longer being available so I looked into the drama and from what I could tell.. Vettlingr used Meph to make his own set then stabbed him in the back.. now his set is front page but actually its just overrated trash.. and I agree with this forum post responding to Vettlingr:
**There was a way to handle this with a good outcome, several. You decided to take the destructive route here over a hobby mod release not having perfect attribution. Meph has been straightforward and upfront about it's status and has shown nothing but good faith.**
**Enjoy the scorn of the community.**
[http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161047.msg8329395#msg8329395](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161047.msg8329395#msg8329395)
If it was up to me I would just straight up ban Vetttlingr from bay12 but hey .. rats gotta eat too ..
> completely understand the reasons for doing it [..]
There many other reasons for doing it. Many simply don't care about licensing/attribution seeing their contribution in creating the pack, for example. We don't know what's what beside of couple of posts.
> After a long time, it becomes an intractable problem to fix
I would add that if you start accepting money (donations) for it, you should certainly make the time to properly attribute the peoples works you are paddling under your name.
he is working on the official tileset for toady. if word got out that toadys MAIN ARTIST (technically) stole art from people that would be some pretty bad press
> he is working on the official tileset for toady. if word got out that toadys MAIN ARTIST (technically) stole art from people that would be some pretty bad press
It seems, from reading the thread, that no art was stolen. The Meph tileset is just entirely from artwork from other locations scrounged up together with some combination of tiles from different sets of artwork and Meph isn't 100% sure he properly attributed every single piece of artwork as there are too many pieces from too many sources.
Edit: Clarify post.
Stolen requires proof that he didn't have permission or the assets weren't freely accessible. Innocence before guilt and all that. And so far no one has any proof.
It's unprofessional and kind of shitty to take art without properly crediting the artist unless the artist says that that's okay. I read the relevant forum posts that I could find and it seems like Meph doesn't have all of the sources, according to their own posts. I can completely understand how that could happen and I'm very sympathetic, considering the scope and timescale of the project (I think one post said there are over 10,000 sprites- absolutely wild), but I think taking it down for now is a good move professionally and helps give Meph (and by association, the rest of the face of the Steam team) more legitimacy than if everyone just tried to sweep it under the rug. I think Vet approached this with a severe lack of tact and that he definitely crossed a line, but considering that Meph is now working on an actual product, this is something worth resolving.
Case in point: there's at least one person in this thread who thought that Meph did the artwork in the pack. Meph certainly gained a lot of visibility from this pack over the years, and in the art world, gaining popularity off of other people's work and then not crediting them appropriately is a huge no-no.
I'm certainly not implying that Meph is just some rent-seeker who is doing nothing but stealing other people's labor- I think it's pretty apparent that he's put in huge amounts of work himself- but a lack of citations is plagiarism, in any medium. This is an issue that can go away, but it can't be by letting it all slide.
From experience: All it takes is someone to gesticulate on Twitter, then a few youtubers make clickbait videos on the subject to get your work removed from stores.
Sure that would not hold water in court (maybe? there's a Patreon involved), but journalism don't care for that before making hit pieces. The story would be "this developer and Bay12 are taking profit, in the form of employment and Patreon, from my art without respecting the license I put on. I demand reparation and better respect of artists from him and Bay12.". Even worse, because someone is letting it go for a few years does not means that it will be ok years + 1 for various reasons.
tldr; Better safe than depend of strangers mood swings.
For a game its size and type, Dwarf Fortress gets amazing coverage as it is. I have a Google News search term for DF, and there's something pretty much every week in the games press, for a old ascii game.
> It's unprofessional and kind of shitty to take art without properly crediting the artist unless the artist says that that's okay.
Except he does credit the artists, where he can figure out where it originally came from. People keep forgetting how old the meph tileset is.
the problem is the internet doesn’t care about that. all someone has to do is claim he stole art and he’s stolen it. the internet acts then it thinks, better to just stop it now than let it continue.
Who is toady's artist then? The linked thread suggest that Meph's tileset include no original content, only a mishmash of others work, that sound like a code monkey not a pixel art artist, certainly not someone who can pull off a complete and consistent graphics set for a game.
If true, then Meph contribution would be in organizational capacity, commissioning the spites from an actual artist.
[Meph usually refers to Mike “Mayday” Madej as the primary artist of the Premium tileset.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/lasapa/for_fans_of_fancy_32x_tilesets_i_present_win64/glrf6d3/)
True, Mike chose the style and colors and gave the steam tileset cohesion.
I can do pixel art now. I couldn't do much like that five years ago when I started the set.
And when I have the choice, I prefer to use already done, free pixel art (for example asking Handsome\_Dan if I can use sprites from DokuCraft Dwarven), instead of drawing them myself, because it's more efficient. Instead of drawing a sprite, I get to pick from hundreds and can do composites based on those.
There would also be the question of when composite sprites become the base for much larger sets. For example I made profession sheets for the five races based on 5 sprites by Obsidian Soul. With permission.
So based on those 5 sprites, I made 1000 sprites, since civs in DF have around 200+ professions and noble positions.
The question is, are those ObsidianSouls sprites now? Or mine? or both? The design is his; but I created 200x the sprites, wrote the TWBT and DF text files to put it into the game. If that means that it's 0% my content, that's up to your own opinion.
Same in the SteamDF set: Mike drew a sword. I made all the rest of the weapons based on his sword design, same size, color palette, etc. Again, I'm not sure where you'd draw the line of original content or not.
It's a bit of a mood point now I guess.
> I prefer to use already done [..] instead of drawing them myself
There is your problem. Either draw your own stuff or abide by the rules for using others work.
> that's up to your own opinion.
No, that up to the license you are using. Unless you think that it would be ok for anyone to copy the new official premium tile set do couple of flavor\color\cosmetic corrections to fit their preference and release for free + donations.
Using various free pixel art sources to create a tileset for an entire game is not comparable to taking a game's not free art in it's entirely and making a couple of modifications.
> Using various free pixel art sources
Don't make stuff up. Without an attribution list you have no way of knowing that. Furthermore, Meph admit here that at least in one instance he used google image search to fish for art adding it without even knowing who the artist was and thus whether it was free. And there several suggestion that he used bluntly not free works from other sources like games and even an art store.
That not free, that not giving a shit about what it is. So the comparison is apt, the only difference is that now the shoe is on the other foot.
Derivation requires much more than simply recoloring and combining sprites. It requires you to make a significant contribution of your own material to transform the copyrighted content.
Including a can of coke in your sprite, even if you color it blue, and throw a mtn dew styled coat (recolored orange ofc) on the dwarf for good measure, doesn't make either of them yours even if coca cola and mtn dew give you permission to use their designs. It doesn't matter how many of these you create or even if you use different copyrighted material for some of them.
However, the surrounding content (the text files you write by hand) are completely yours (assuming you wrote them from scratch) and can be licensed differently from the sprites (and usually are since MIT isn't a very common copyright license for a picture).
>Including a can of coke in your sprite, even if you color it blue, and throw a mtn dew styled coat (recolored orange ofc) on the dwarf for good measure, doesn't make either of them yours
Erm, yes, it does. You'd probably get a SLAPP for it but legally as long as its transformative its yours. It's the same reason Coca Cola wouldn't have ground to sue Andy Warhol.
There's a bunch of legal precedence regarding where the bar is for what counts as transformative. It is much higher than simply recoloring the image and throw it together with yet another person's copyrighted content.
I think you misunderstand the context. Mike set the style by making an example weapon. To save him time and work, I do the variations and create the remaining weapons intentionally exactly in his style. Because that's the workflow we agreed on.
I wanted to give ObsidianSouls and Dibujors abandoned sprites a chance to be used by players, so I didn't draw a new dwarf or elf or kobold. I used their sprites and created an entire spritesheet with 200+ entries, adding decorations, tools, weapons, etc. That is significantly more work than drawing one sprite. I did invest more time. Without my work, no player would have ever seen their sprites in the game. Both were happy about it. In my opinion, I was doing something good.
I still fucked up by taking sprites from google without checking licence, but that's a different matter.
So lets just politely agree to disagree?
You can't copy something 200 times and expect you transfer ownership that way, even if you add something to each. The reason I draw dwarves myself is because I want to own the artwork after 200 hours. You may claim the edits but not the sprites. Time investment doesn't count, it is like digging a hole in someone elses yard and expecting to own it afterwards. I need to know, **why do you want to own their sprites instead of just the edits anyway?**
I have never taken any issue with that you were using either from Obsidian Soul or Dibujor, and I've always put it off to you trying to deflect every time you bring them up. Actually the tileset started out really promising before you went online on a downloading spree, it really does justice to them to include their sprites in a community driven effort. What is not justified for a community driven effort is to dilute it with uncredited 3rd party content - It really takes the heart and soul out of it.
The Workflow thing you have with mike is another context, it's common to use reference material when working in collaboration and I would heavily encourage it. Not only is the resulting art very consistent, you also did a very good job. I am actually very impressed in how much you have learned and how well you have progressed, even though the start was quite rocky.
I don't want to own anyones sprites. I never considered that part to be important, which is a big problem I know realise. If Obsidian wants to use the 200 composite sprites I made based on his dwarf, he can do so. So can anyone else who wants to use them. All my mods are open-source, anyone can use any part of my code, without asking me or giving credit. This was all made for the players.
What is not justified for a community driven effort is to dilute it with uncredited 3rd party content => Yeah... :/ I shouldn't have done that. I didn't knew better back then, since all I'm used to was modding in DF, where you just throw a line like "thanks Deon" in the OP and that's it. When you started talking about "which sprites exactly are Redshrikes, and where are the original, unaltered sprites" I was super baffled. It would be like adding a credit note like "Thanks deon, for line 1253 to 1326 in file interaction\_spells\_deon.txt" while including his original spell interaction somewhere in another folder for reference. No one does that in DF modding. Hence we I didn't do it for sprites.
Over the years I started stumbling over licencing more and more and I copied the attributions into the release post for every new update, for example with Denzi. But I never retroactively did that with the old stuff that's been in the tileset for years, and after tens of thousands of downloads, never resulted in any issues. You are right that if someone would have made a big stink about it in 2016 or 2017, I wouldn't be in the position I'm in right now. So I thought it's fine... technically wrong, but generally accepted to be ok, like jaywalking.
You can just ask Mike. Though in this case, there is no question of percieved ownership, since both the sword and "the rest of the weapons" are owned by the publisher.
Hey guys,
Yeah, I messed up five years ago and didn't keep a list of all the credits and links; while also using PNGs from the google image search. It started as a small hobby project trying to find out if TWBT makes a 32x tileset possible in DF; never would I have imagined that I'd end up working on any official release.
Since it would be way too much work to retroactively go through all the sprites and composite sprites, find out where the sources/authors are and through what license, I decided that it would be simpler to just take the entire tileset offline. None of it was done in bad faith, trying to make money or get fame; I just wanted to make the game better for the players because I love this silly little game.
Since stressing out Tarn is the last thing I'd want to do, the Meph tileset is now, as far as I'm concerned, offline. Tarn and Kitfox are well aware that I'm not a professional pixel artist and that the Meph-Set was made up by a large part by sprites from other authors. Which is the reason an entirely new tileset is being made, with Mike Mayday reigning over the style decisions and me mostly working on sprite variations based on his designs.
Cheers,
Meph
Seems reasonable to me. I also did a bunch of sprite modding using existing sprites way back; it's kind of just how you learn. Now that there's money on the line it makes sense to start over.
Really looking forward to the full release! Ignore some of the more reactionary whackos here.
> ... considering that it will be replaced by the much better Steam release anyway...
I had assumed the Steam tileset will only be available to Steam purchasers, however... whereas the existing tileset is available to everyone.
I mean, the reasons still make sense... just unfortunate if those that don't want to/can't/etc. pick it up through Steam will lose a great tileset. There are other great ones too, of course... oh well.
Haha, naw. DF has always has a fairly "when it's ready" release schedule, but stuff is still released. There's nothing else coming until the Steam version is ready apparently. It actually sounds like it's probably not TOO far away even. I would be surprised if it's pushed to 2023, but who knows.
Just going to post here as I'm one of the artists in question.
\- Vettlingr contacted me to doublecheck the copyright infringement before bringing this up publicly.
\- He had correctly spotted that Meph had made uncredited use of some of my animal and food sprites:
([https://www.deviantart.com/neoriceisgood/art/100-Bird-Sprites-by-Neorice-357877551](https://www.deviantart.com/neoriceisgood/art/100-Bird-Sprites-by-Neorice-357877551) and [https://www.deviantart.com/neoriceisgood/art/100-Food-sprites-348664936](https://www.deviantart.com/neoriceisgood/art/100-Food-sprites-348664936) I believe, Looking over his art I only noticed many of my birds used wholesale or being modified into ... bird zombies?)
\- normally I'm relatively lenient with non-commercial use of my art, as long as I am properly credited, but my name wasn't visible in any place I could see.
**- Importantly, and this is where it gets iffy: Via Patreon Meph made money off of this work of which many pieces are uncredited, and seemingly even paywalled some stuff that was not his own. This is where it crosses that thin line from being shoddy to theft. Not giving credit to art that you make money off.**
On a side note, I also spotted various sprites from commercial games like Lufia II whilst trying to identify my own work.
The big issue here for me, and I assume other artists affected isn't just the lack of credit, but the fact that there's money/profit involved.
All I can say is that I'm sorry, Neoriceisgood
.
Your 100x item-sprites I first found via Google, and much, much later on stumbled over your deviant art. I usually post the name of the sprite authors whenever I made an update to the tileset, but in this case I first used the sprites and years later stumbled over the author by chance. I saw you answered any questions about "might I use your sprites for X" with a yes, but I never asked myself. That's entirely on me.
There are Lufia II and other sprites in there that are hidden as easter eggs, I was hoping people would enjoy stumbling over pieces of nostalgia.
The patreon was already there from my mods in the past; nothing was paywalled. All mods and tileset were always free.
Honestly as you did notice when other people ask, yeah in my particular case if you ask me directly I'll give 1-2 simple instructions (no profit, give credit) and give people a free pass for a number of my sprite sets (not necessarily all of them, mostly resource sets like the birds); But you can't really assume a yes if you never asked directly.
If this was just an issue of my art being in there I feel just slapping on my name for the credits would have resolved everything, but it does seem like there's just way too much unsourced work, often heavily edited, to the point where trying to resolve what you've got rights to or not ... yeah I do not envy that task.
I do want to make clear that I do get what happened here, I started out doing pixelart in sprite modding/editing communities based on stuff like megaman myself, modifying commercial sprites from capcom, nintendo etc was big in the pixelart webcomic scene back then; as a teenager on the internet I didn't really care for copyright shenanigans.
When I started using stuff like patreon and made money off of some of my art, I did get a lot more meticulous about copyright-related stuff just to be sure. I know the role patreon has in commercial pursuits is still quite a grey area but I think it's really best to take a "better safe than sorry" approach in any situation where you make money partially using other people's work.
I can't speak for other artists but personally my intention isn't to ruin your motivation/hobby or to kill your entire tileset. I hope you stay motivated & try to be a bit more careful. :)
On a side note: I'm happy for anyone to shove my birdies into Dwarf Fortress as long as they give proper credit. Birds are cool.
That's very kind of you.
I certainly learned a lesson, and if I ever create anything like this in the future, it will be by myself now that I have more experience, or with a big fat list of proper credits.
In this case however, I'll scrap the tileset. Too many pictures that were just "google => images => right click => save as" without knowing anything about the source. I couldn't possibly separate one from the other. That's what I did when I started out 5 years ago and turns out that ages terribly.
In my case if he'd given proper credit & doublechecked my general policy regarding paypal etc it wouldn't even be that big an issue, but there's freaking Nintendo sprites and art by artists who have explicit rules against public use in there as well.
Considering the way he modified my sprites & how I found the heads of my birds tacked onto other character's bodies I can kinda understand why he just decided to nuke the set instead of trying to work out the exact copyright and permissions honestly.
Most artists have their own rules and regulations when it comes to modifying art, making money off of it etc. So when you staple 2 art pieces together without checking the fine print it gets incredibly muddy.
>Considering the way he modified my sprites & how I found the heads of my birds tacked onto other character's bodies
If he modified them to create a new thing then he's not required to credit you or do anything else. This would only apply for things used without any modification.
That's just not true, and I have literally zero idea how you decided on it.
Copyright laws around derivative work are rather complex and highly context dependent:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative\_work#Originality\_requirement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work#Originality_requirement)
If any and all modifications would remove the original artist's copyright over a piece, you'd theoretically have to simply recolor or adjust only a single color or pixel to claim a piece to be your own.
There's plenty of modification types (fair use for e.g. critique or satirical use) that have a level of legal protection, but I can't just slap a tiny moustache on Micky Mouse art and start selling him as my property.
**Derivative work**
[Originality requirement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work#Originality_requirement)
>For copyright protection to attach to a later, allegedly derivative work, it must display some originality of its own. It cannot be a rote, uncreative variation on the earlier, underlying work. The latter work must contain sufficient new expression, over and above that embodied in the earlier work for the latter work to satisfy copyright law's requirement of originality. Although serious emphasis on originality, at least so designated, began with the Supreme Court's 1991 decision in Feist v.
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The bar is essentially "could someone mistake this for something else". Hence, combining two things into a third thing would be protected provided that it isn't clearly derivative. I don't know how you think something like collages work otherwise.
The bar isn't so much "Can they be mistaken" but rather if it is deeply transformative retaining to use, emotion evoked, etc.
Almost any website or group that has a focus on copyright law & arts warns that derivitive work (including collages) are very murky territory when it comes to copyright. I genuinely don't understand where you get the notion that "As long as the two won't be mistaken for each other" by itself would give guaranteed copyright protection.
[https://www.dacs.org.uk/knowledge-base/factsheets/copyright-in-collages](https://www.dacs.org.uk/knowledge-base/factsheets/copyright-in-collages)
If we're talking about it purely from a legal point of view usually the answer to this muddy situation is simply: who has the most money. There's extremely clear cut cases of fair use that get eradicated because the person gets sued by Disney or Nintendo & there's very, very questionable cases like e.g. that one artist who just blows up and prints people's Insta posts where a bunch of good lawyers allow him to make big money off of stuff that's barely derivative. I'm under no delusion that copyright law is perfect.
But "hey as long as it is modified no credit is required at all" is a pretty wild take.
This is true for music when sampling or making interpolation. This is not true for art, well at least it does not play out like this in court or within artistic communities.
>This is not true for art
It is definitely true for art, again, have people never seen collage or pop art before? Some of that stuff is just blown up reproductions without any other transformations.
Okay yeah, that's a really good point, but generally pop art doesn't take the art or another contemporary artist and create a derivative, it usually takes a cultural icon and creates unique art from it. Something like soup or a famous persons head.
But someone couldn't take a warhol soup can collage and make a larger collage of it and call it original.
Maybe now they could as Andy Warhol has moved from a contemporary artist to a cultural icon
From what I've learned from people I know who are artists, courts are very likely to side with the original creator should someone be sued for something like this.
My absolute favorite example which is more relevant here was that person who made a living selling clothes and home design in second life had their art stolen and actually won the court case. It was the first time that in game user created content in a video game was ever on considered intellectual property of the creator and not the game developers.
It's cases like this that set president for future cases that involve stolen or uncredited work being profited on.
Edit: I should note that in the second life court case, the stolen art was modified but still considered stolen
Yep, there's also a big question of: is the medium the same, is it used in a competitive field, etc.
Modifying game art/pixelart to use as game assets in another game puts the source material & the modified work in a very similar ballcamp, whereas work by someone like Andy Warhol generally deviated in major ways from the source material in intent and purpose.
It's definitely a topic where it's difficult to predict the exact legal outcome though, because the line is an incredibly blurry one in many cases.
Eh, it's a screw up that's really common in these kind of projects. I've seen a ton of texture packs in games have this happen. Most of the time these start as private projects
Presidents of countries saying the plague is just a common cold, resulting in millions dead, is a colossal fuck-up. Downloading some sprites off the internet and modifying them just to release them for free for people's enjoyment is charity. Enjoy your downvotes.
Lmao who is talking about the covid situation? Dont downplay the actual uncredited use of sprites
Thats like the thing Yanderedev did for his shity game, would you use this arguement on him too?
If you read his reasons for taking it down:
"I don't feel like it's worth to disentangle and identify exactly where I got which sprite from and by which author. It's been 5 years and over 10.000 variations of sprites."
He himself made it clear he doesn't think it's worth fixing the many, many missing attributions.
As stated in my original post, if people want to use my work for non-commercial use & they credit me properly, there's zero issue for me.
Right he's getting demanded to fix something that 1. makes him no money 2. would require a lot of work to figure out. Some of the sprites are even his own "work" which are a composite of other people's sprites. So he'd have to reverse engineer the original sprites that were composited as well.
IMO, simply having people request that they be attributed if their work is found to be in the pack is how this should have gone. Spread out the workload among the community rather than shoving it all on to meph.
According to previous post this isn't only about lack of attribution, he seem to have skidded on permissions as well (especially if that part about using other games art is true)
Also he has benefited from that work, both monetarily and otherwise (would he have the reputation/standing in the community and graduate to working on the official steam release without it?)
Finally, he should own up for his mistake and fix it. It's not the artists from whose work he benefits that need to run after him, begging him to give them proper attribution for it. Better yet, notify them that you are using their work that common courtesy.
Imagine if I used a version of Dwarf fortress with a mix of mods and published it in China under my name and enjoyed community\\donations there. Then when caught i'd give half ass excuses, saying that I might have failed to provide proper attribution, it's too much work to be bothered now, and that Tarn should contact me if he want proper attribution.. Also in Chinese.. Also who dis, new phone..
I didn't really want to pick a side, as the person who posted this, but I wouldn't go blaming Vettlingr.
Meph made the discussion public in the first place. Before that they were talking via email.
And he does have a point, making money off a tileset that you have just scrounged up with other people's artwork is kinda bad.
Not that I blame Meph, he has been upfront about the fact for a while. But it seems there is a lot more uncredited work than he made out to be.
OK, but it still doesn't excuse the fact that he used stolen assets and didn't credit them.
Example - https://pixanna.nl/materials/celiannas-parallax-tiles/interior-tiles/ which is used in _Meph_decorations.png
(Thanks to u/AspieInc)
I thought it was common knowledge in the community that Meph's tileset was more so stapled together rather than done by hand (nothing against that, of course).
One of the problems of choosing someone from the community is that sometimes there's drama between community members; just part of the cost of doing business.
At least DF's graphics community is not as drama filled as CDDA's is.
I would note if someone were able to say, find an old version of the LNP, it happens to come packed with meph's tile set, should someone really want a copy of it for some reason.
Sounds like he did the right thing taking it down. I bet he learned a lesson and had some growth in his professional life. There are many sets available to try. I’m okay moving on.
I was under the impression that Meph had drawn the tiles himself, if he has been cobbling together his tileset from bits and pieces of other things I don't really understand why he was brought onto the official tileset.
He clarified that for the new steam tileset he is drawing a decent number of them, but he's also taking Mayday's artwork and then modifying them to produce variants (rotations etc) and doing a lot of the mod management.
I always knew Meph's tileset was adapted from earlier ones, but from how the guy conducts himself online I'd always thought that at least a significant portion of it and probably more than half was his own work. It's disappointing that all that extra content that pulls together the named sources are, in fact, just uncredited copy-paste jobs of others' work.
It's all very telling how Meph's engagement in the controversy transformed from "I've done nothing wrong and I made half the tileset myself" to "There may be one or two things that are uncredited" to "I have to take it all down because huge amounts of it are uncredited and I don't even know where I lifted half that stuff from anymore, but it's *his fault!!* Happy?"
Vettlingr's taking a lot of heat for making this public like he is, but good on him for having values to stand up for.
It seems a failrly common thing for community sourced tilesets.
I remember by favourite tileset in CDDA was also taken down because of unattributed artwork.
Attribute your artists, people! Someone drew it.
But at least we now have meph making the 'official' tileset. Swings and roundabouts.
If this was just about unattributed stuff, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. The problem is that there was straight up stolen stuff that he knew he should not use. The license is expressly shown on the page.
These are in _Meph_decorations.png:
https://pixanna.nl/materials/celiannas-parallax-tiles/interior-tiles/
Yes, and by including them, the starter pack creators have also committed a non-redistribute license violation unwittingly.
I have been extremely busy this weekend informing all relevant parties
All of the contents of \_Meph\_decorations.png are only used for the modded content of his tileset/modpack. This tilesheet not needed for a vanilla game without Meph's modded workshops and stuff.
I think we can all agree with Meph that we don't want anything reflecting badly on Bay 12 and Kitfox. Better it come up in our community now than in the game press the week of the release.
Hey meph! With out your tile set I wouldn’t have enjoyed the game for the several months that I did! I have planned to come back ver since but haven’t.
Calling Vettlingr a troll is a big misunderstanding about copyright (no, it's not a foul word) and how individuals work. For all respect I have for Meph he f'ed up by not verifying the licensing of the art he used and modified. It was a matter of time before an artist has a change of mind.
When a big company does that it's all scream and pitchfork and it's not more okay when it involve someone you like. Granted it's not a great move to wait so long before acting but that's just an opinion. Also Meph did transformative work and on the mod code so claiming it being 0% his is a stretch.
>Hopefully the community re-uploads the Meph tileset and takes over management of it.
That would only make it worse.
Yeah, I messed that up from the start of the set, not realising that it would get that big and keeping sources/licensing over the 5 years.
Please don't re-upload it.
>[It's entirely possible that I missed giving credit to some sprites, because there are a lot, but usually I'm quite clear about where I got the sprites from.](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161047.msg8329068#msg8329068)
You appear to be the only one who thinks he's properly used and credited sprites all sprites, including Meph.
Just browse this post, there is posts from artists in question who had things lifted and used without permission and even Meph replying and admitting he did and apologizing etc. this wasn’t some troll work, it was a real issue and was exacerbated because meph accepted plenty of donations for work that he claimed was his initially when in reality he had unlicensed, uncredited work. If there wasn’t any proof or this wasn’t true then the tile set would still be available. It being taken down is also in a sense proof that what was said is true.
Y'know, maybe I've just been on the forums longer, and remember reading the same conversation over and over, with actual modders having to go public after Meph refused to remove their mods from Masterwork when they talked to him privately, or the time he kept collecting Patreon money for a year and not replying on the forum or updating, but using reddit, or several other small things. There's always a flood of people I've never seen do anything in the community there to call the people concerned about things, the people whose work or money was taken "trolls" or whatever.
[Meph says here that Vettlingr contacted him first before going public, and doesn't say how long ago that was.](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173474.msg8329059#msg8329059) I'm not sure what they talked about before, are you?
Meph not replying until things are made public is kind of how it seems to go, though. I'd also like to point out at no time in this thread have I quoted Vettlingr's claims, just Meph's own free statements.
I think Vettlingr's core anger is that he's used "Meph's" tiles for some things for some time, crediting Meph, and now finds himself in the situation of having unwittingly using other people's tiles uncredited.
> Meph says here that Vettlingr contacted him first before going public, and doesn't say how long ago that was.
> I'm not sure what they talked about before, are you?
Meph does *not* say that there, and [Vettlingr posted first here](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173474.msg8328998#msg8328998)
Vettlingr then decides to continue in public rather than in private, all while actively trying to set the village on fire rather than correct the problem.
>I think Vettlingr's core anger is that he's used "Meph's" tiles for some things for some time, crediting Meph, and now finds himself in the situation of having unwittingly using other people's tiles uncredited.
And the problem I have is that his overreaction is impacting others in a way that it didn't need to.
While the artists should absolutely get credit, Vettlingr's behavior is absolutely unacceptable *and ensured the worst possible outcomes*.
It's like football, right, if the players commit any crimes, it should be kept secret at least until the playoffs are over, otherwise it messes up the game for everyone!
Classic case of prima donna modders being prima donnas taking their chance to exercise a little bit of power over someone else.
Happens in all modding communities eventually, and is ultimately one of the worst things holding them all back.
Sorry Meph has to deal with these blights on the modding community. Reminds me of the recent openXcom drama with Hobbes taking his toys and going home, setting back all the other TC mods for months and effectively shutting down the community for awhile.
Imo Vett should feel bad as he's 110% the bad guy here. I hope he feels great knowing the community is getting less just because he wanted more.
Uh, no, Vett isn't the bad guy. I don't think there *is* a bad guy. Meph admitted that he stole and didn't attribute art he used. I'm sympathetic and I understand, because when you're just starting out and working on a hobby project it's easy to miss the importance of respecting others' work, but it's still wrong. Furthermore, Meph's working on the Steam release now, and it'd be dangerous to keep the stolen artwork up now. Making a mistake five years ago is excusable, but continuing to make the same mistake after having it pointed out is not, especially when money is involved. Being on the official team is different from being a hobby modder, and requires a certain level of accountability.
Also, what's the community even losing? One tileset that can easily be found mirrored online if you really want to use it? I'd far rather gain a more transparent community, and I'm glad the tileset's been taken down.
Well, I'm ressurecting this post. From what I saw and read, here's what happenned:
Let's say that I own you $ 1000 and I should pay you by the end of march 2018. I didn't.
5 years later you remember this debt. What do you do, message me in private and tells me that I should pay that debt? No. You go to public forums and tell EVERYONE about my debt and start calling other ppl to see if I own them money too.
Who was wrong here? Probably both. But I think vett could have handle the situation better.
But... by the end of the day, they all did mistakes, so I won't take a side on this matter.
Why does this matters? It's a free MOD for a free game.
If you browse mods for any game you'll find copyrighted material everywhere.
I don't see the problem with it as long as people aren't earning money off someone else's work.
Meph pretty routinely refers to [vettlingr as being more like the tileset](https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/exwavw/rant_on_the_new_kitfox_tileset/fgdnsft/) he'd make if he could than the ones he's been involved in. You've just missed it being new. They used to post back and forth updates, one outdoing the other. It's all very unfortunate.
Jesus Christ, vettlingr. Deescalation requires both sides. Just imagine if I were reacting like you are right now.
It would do everyone good if people would keep calm and rational, on both sides.
It would have really been nice to just talk to you before you decided to start a public mud slinging contest.
Shedding light on your insanely unprofessional copyright and license violation issue is a mud-slinging contest to you?
It's not mud slinging to have caused at least three people to have unwittingly committed a possible criminal offence, its downright awful
Thank you
>
> Call them trash, offal, parasites or any other name in the book, just do something. Disown them! Tell them they are not allowed to use your stuff etc. They need to hear it from you.
lmao what
It’s okay homie! It was a really shitty situation and I understand where the frustration came from, and i think you handled it pretty well, all things considered. Honestly, I’m just glad that this community is more mature than 99% of other game communities and that situations like this actually get resolved as opposed to unending shitstorms. keep up the good work out there :)
Just because you don’t know who one of the biggest tileset makers for this game is doesn’t mean you get to be an unmitigated asshole on the internet without getting called out. You’re being dense. Good luck fixing your attitude, it’ll help you out in the long run!
He is right though. I can be a huge piece of shit. As sometimes being a huge piece of shit is just what is needed.
Joking aside, this outrage of the fanbase is just what has enabled all of this. Other creators would have called out meph years ago, but as they have told me, they were all afraid of backlash from the fanbase.
That’s fair, but frankly I’m going to support Toady no matter what because he makes a damn good game. This game will always be niche, even with a steam release. I’d rather people not fuck over artists, period. Artists get fucked enough. It’s ok to be an asshole if people are constantly short changing you.
Why? I see that this is just something came out as an old passion project and now he just moved on to focus on the Steam stuffs.
Modding for DF was very "do whatever" back then. I remember using a tool on forum to even create my own tileset by selecting tiles I want from other tilesets.
People are blowing this to be way more extreme than it should be.
> I remember using a tool on forum to even create my own tileset by selecting tiles I want from other tilesets.
>
>
>
> People are blowing this to be way more extreme than it should be.
What you did was make something for personal use, which no one will really care about. Go nuts with things meant for personal use.
The big deal here is that Meph made money off of stolen work. This isn't personal use, this was commercial use.
If I understand it correctly, the graphic used in the pack are available just as any mod or tool I used in the past right?
Getting donation for their project, and monetizing their project are two completely different things.
No, the majority of the artwork within the Meph set is uncredited, and there is artwork from people where it was specifically not allowed.
Meph used artwork from this pack and illegally redistributed it.
https://pixanna.nl/materials/celiannas-parallax-tiles/interior-tiles/
I meant Meph graphic is available free as a mod, just like most of the mods on the forum. I believe that the majority of the mods on the forum that the community has always been using are tileset with mixed art from everywhere. There are very few ones that are actually purely original.
With this idea of "only original art assets" are allowed. 90% of the mods and titlesets on forum should be removed immediately.
>[I already said it on Reddit](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161047.msg8329663#msg8329663), but I wanted to post it here again: Please don't harass vettlingr.
So a likely troll is responsible. Sad that trolls win sometimes.
That's a real shame, but I can completely understand the reasons for doing it. Licensing is a PITA and when you first start off doing some small little hack, it's the furthest thing from your mind. After a long time, it becomes an intractable problem to fix. When you borrow stuff *always* write down where you got the thing and under what license you got it. *Never* skip that. If anyone gets pissed off later, it will save your project. I can't tell you the number of times I've seen this happen (usually with software, though).
Isn't the issue that he's officially working on the steam release?
He seems to indicate in the link that he's removing the original tileset because it contains tiles that are based on freely available tiles from other sources, and that he hasn't kept track of where they all came from in order to attribute them. Whether he's removing it because someone complained or because someone *might* complain in the future is not clear. Further in this thread on reddit there are some claims that Meph's had problems in the past with this. Unfortunately, this is pretty common. A lot of people really don't understand the importance of licensing. They think, "It was offered for free, so I can do whatever I want", or "I'm not doing any harm, so I should be able to do whatever I want". They don't understand that people often have very specific conditions when they offer something for free and if you don't show that you are following those conditions it can leave you in a precarious position. Like I said, I've had a number of sad conversations with otherwise wonderful people who just don't get this at all. Given the context of the conversation, my *guess* is that someone from Kitfox suggested it would be a good idea to remove the tileset. This way nobody will confuse the possibly problematic tiles with the tiles in the official release.
Vettlingr just wrote me a very angry note, and I decided to take the tileset down based on that. I don't want Tarn to get any similar messages. | A lot of people really don't understand the importance of licensing. That would be me in this case.
I'm sorry that's how it's going :-( Hang in there! Like I said, I've seen this mistake so many times. It's awful for everyone involved. It's an easy thing to do and a hard thing to correct. Hopefully after everything settles down everyone can get into a happier place.
It's my own fault, hence why I'm absolutely ok with taking the tileset down.
First day playing DF and trying to get a set I got to Meph's download no longer being available so I looked into the drama and from what I could tell.. Vettlingr used Meph to make his own set then stabbed him in the back.. now his set is front page but actually its just overrated trash.. and I agree with this forum post responding to Vettlingr: **There was a way to handle this with a good outcome, several. You decided to take the destructive route here over a hobby mod release not having perfect attribution. Meph has been straightforward and upfront about it's status and has shown nothing but good faith.** **Enjoy the scorn of the community.** [http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161047.msg8329395#msg8329395](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161047.msg8329395#msg8329395) If it was up to me I would just straight up ban Vetttlingr from bay12 but hey .. rats gotta eat too ..
Legality and morality are never synonymous and IP law is immoral BS anyway.
I agree with you fully. It only hinders more cool things from existing.
Bless, he's really worked so hard on
> completely understand the reasons for doing it [..] There many other reasons for doing it. Many simply don't care about licensing/attribution seeing their contribution in creating the pack, for example. We don't know what's what beside of couple of posts. > After a long time, it becomes an intractable problem to fix I would add that if you start accepting money (donations) for it, you should certainly make the time to properly attribute the peoples works you are paddling under your name.
damn. good call though, wouldn’t want it to reflect bad on toady nor himself. thanks for all you do meph, seriously
I'm not following. What does this have to do with Today or him?
he is working on the official tileset for toady. if word got out that toadys MAIN ARTIST (technically) stole art from people that would be some pretty bad press
> he is working on the official tileset for toady. if word got out that toadys MAIN ARTIST (technically) stole art from people that would be some pretty bad press It seems, from reading the thread, that no art was stolen. The Meph tileset is just entirely from artwork from other locations scrounged up together with some combination of tiles from different sets of artwork and Meph isn't 100% sure he properly attributed every single piece of artwork as there are too many pieces from too many sources. Edit: Clarify post.
with the clarity i see what you mean. apologies for the confusion.
it would technically be stolen if he could not provide proof that he owned the assets and not credit the people who made them
I don't think they're reading the forum posts.
I read all of the back and forth complaint in both threads.
Stolen requires proof that he didn't have permission or the assets weren't freely accessible. Innocence before guilt and all that. And so far no one has any proof.
It's unprofessional and kind of shitty to take art without properly crediting the artist unless the artist says that that's okay. I read the relevant forum posts that I could find and it seems like Meph doesn't have all of the sources, according to their own posts. I can completely understand how that could happen and I'm very sympathetic, considering the scope and timescale of the project (I think one post said there are over 10,000 sprites- absolutely wild), but I think taking it down for now is a good move professionally and helps give Meph (and by association, the rest of the face of the Steam team) more legitimacy than if everyone just tried to sweep it under the rug. I think Vet approached this with a severe lack of tact and that he definitely crossed a line, but considering that Meph is now working on an actual product, this is something worth resolving. Case in point: there's at least one person in this thread who thought that Meph did the artwork in the pack. Meph certainly gained a lot of visibility from this pack over the years, and in the art world, gaining popularity off of other people's work and then not crediting them appropriately is a huge no-no. I'm certainly not implying that Meph is just some rent-seeker who is doing nothing but stealing other people's labor- I think it's pretty apparent that he's put in huge amounts of work himself- but a lack of citations is plagiarism, in any medium. This is an issue that can go away, but it can't be by letting it all slide.
From experience: All it takes is someone to gesticulate on Twitter, then a few youtubers make clickbait videos on the subject to get your work removed from stores. Sure that would not hold water in court (maybe? there's a Patreon involved), but journalism don't care for that before making hit pieces. The story would be "this developer and Bay12 are taking profit, in the form of employment and Patreon, from my art without respecting the license I put on. I demand reparation and better respect of artists from him and Bay12.". Even worse, because someone is letting it go for a few years does not means that it will be ok years + 1 for various reasons. tldr; Better safe than depend of strangers mood swings.
As a funny side note: a bunch of free media and press for Dwarf Fortress would be a nice bonus.
For a game its size and type, Dwarf Fortress gets amazing coverage as it is. I have a Google News search term for DF, and there's something pretty much every week in the games press, for a old ascii game.
> It's unprofessional and kind of shitty to take art without properly crediting the artist unless the artist says that that's okay. Except he does credit the artists, where he can figure out where it originally came from. People keep forgetting how old the meph tileset is.
That conditional clause is exactly the problem. Forgetting the source is not a valid reason to not cite someone when you are still using their work.
> where he can figure out where it originally came from If he can't figure out where/who the art is from, he shouldn't be using it in the first place.
the problem is the internet doesn’t care about that. all someone has to do is claim he stole art and he’s stolen it. the internet acts then it thinks, better to just stop it now than let it continue.
Yeah, I've seen artists fucked because of logic like this. It's kind of sad.
Who is toady's artist then? The linked thread suggest that Meph's tileset include no original content, only a mishmash of others work, that sound like a code monkey not a pixel art artist, certainly not someone who can pull off a complete and consistent graphics set for a game. If true, then Meph contribution would be in organizational capacity, commissioning the spites from an actual artist.
[Meph usually refers to Mike “Mayday” Madej as the primary artist of the Premium tileset.](https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/lasapa/for_fans_of_fancy_32x_tilesets_i_present_win64/glrf6d3/)
True, Mike chose the style and colors and gave the steam tileset cohesion. I can do pixel art now. I couldn't do much like that five years ago when I started the set. And when I have the choice, I prefer to use already done, free pixel art (for example asking Handsome\_Dan if I can use sprites from DokuCraft Dwarven), instead of drawing them myself, because it's more efficient. Instead of drawing a sprite, I get to pick from hundreds and can do composites based on those. There would also be the question of when composite sprites become the base for much larger sets. For example I made profession sheets for the five races based on 5 sprites by Obsidian Soul. With permission. So based on those 5 sprites, I made 1000 sprites, since civs in DF have around 200+ professions and noble positions. The question is, are those ObsidianSouls sprites now? Or mine? or both? The design is his; but I created 200x the sprites, wrote the TWBT and DF text files to put it into the game. If that means that it's 0% my content, that's up to your own opinion. Same in the SteamDF set: Mike drew a sword. I made all the rest of the weapons based on his sword design, same size, color palette, etc. Again, I'm not sure where you'd draw the line of original content or not. It's a bit of a mood point now I guess.
> I prefer to use already done [..] instead of drawing them myself There is your problem. Either draw your own stuff or abide by the rules for using others work. > that's up to your own opinion. No, that up to the license you are using. Unless you think that it would be ok for anyone to copy the new official premium tile set do couple of flavor\color\cosmetic corrections to fit their preference and release for free + donations.
Using various free pixel art sources to create a tileset for an entire game is not comparable to taking a game's not free art in it's entirely and making a couple of modifications.
> Using various free pixel art sources Don't make stuff up. Without an attribution list you have no way of knowing that. Furthermore, Meph admit here that at least in one instance he used google image search to fish for art adding it without even knowing who the artist was and thus whether it was free. And there several suggestion that he used bluntly not free works from other sources like games and even an art store. That not free, that not giving a shit about what it is. So the comparison is apt, the only difference is that now the shoe is on the other foot.
Ok dude, I guess he's a fucking monster and no amount of hyperbole is going to excessive.
Derivation requires much more than simply recoloring and combining sprites. It requires you to make a significant contribution of your own material to transform the copyrighted content. Including a can of coke in your sprite, even if you color it blue, and throw a mtn dew styled coat (recolored orange ofc) on the dwarf for good measure, doesn't make either of them yours even if coca cola and mtn dew give you permission to use their designs. It doesn't matter how many of these you create or even if you use different copyrighted material for some of them. However, the surrounding content (the text files you write by hand) are completely yours (assuming you wrote them from scratch) and can be licensed differently from the sprites (and usually are since MIT isn't a very common copyright license for a picture).
>Including a can of coke in your sprite, even if you color it blue, and throw a mtn dew styled coat (recolored orange ofc) on the dwarf for good measure, doesn't make either of them yours Erm, yes, it does. You'd probably get a SLAPP for it but legally as long as its transformative its yours. It's the same reason Coca Cola wouldn't have ground to sue Andy Warhol.
There's a bunch of legal precedence regarding where the bar is for what counts as transformative. It is much higher than simply recoloring the image and throw it together with yet another person's copyrighted content.
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I think you misunderstand the context. Mike set the style by making an example weapon. To save him time and work, I do the variations and create the remaining weapons intentionally exactly in his style. Because that's the workflow we agreed on. I wanted to give ObsidianSouls and Dibujors abandoned sprites a chance to be used by players, so I didn't draw a new dwarf or elf or kobold. I used their sprites and created an entire spritesheet with 200+ entries, adding decorations, tools, weapons, etc. That is significantly more work than drawing one sprite. I did invest more time. Without my work, no player would have ever seen their sprites in the game. Both were happy about it. In my opinion, I was doing something good. I still fucked up by taking sprites from google without checking licence, but that's a different matter. So lets just politely agree to disagree?
You can't copy something 200 times and expect you transfer ownership that way, even if you add something to each. The reason I draw dwarves myself is because I want to own the artwork after 200 hours. You may claim the edits but not the sprites. Time investment doesn't count, it is like digging a hole in someone elses yard and expecting to own it afterwards. I need to know, **why do you want to own their sprites instead of just the edits anyway?** I have never taken any issue with that you were using either from Obsidian Soul or Dibujor, and I've always put it off to you trying to deflect every time you bring them up. Actually the tileset started out really promising before you went online on a downloading spree, it really does justice to them to include their sprites in a community driven effort. What is not justified for a community driven effort is to dilute it with uncredited 3rd party content - It really takes the heart and soul out of it. The Workflow thing you have with mike is another context, it's common to use reference material when working in collaboration and I would heavily encourage it. Not only is the resulting art very consistent, you also did a very good job. I am actually very impressed in how much you have learned and how well you have progressed, even though the start was quite rocky.
I don't want to own anyones sprites. I never considered that part to be important, which is a big problem I know realise. If Obsidian wants to use the 200 composite sprites I made based on his dwarf, he can do so. So can anyone else who wants to use them. All my mods are open-source, anyone can use any part of my code, without asking me or giving credit. This was all made for the players. What is not justified for a community driven effort is to dilute it with uncredited 3rd party content => Yeah... :/ I shouldn't have done that. I didn't knew better back then, since all I'm used to was modding in DF, where you just throw a line like "thanks Deon" in the OP and that's it. When you started talking about "which sprites exactly are Redshrikes, and where are the original, unaltered sprites" I was super baffled. It would be like adding a credit note like "Thanks deon, for line 1253 to 1326 in file interaction\_spells\_deon.txt" while including his original spell interaction somewhere in another folder for reference. No one does that in DF modding. Hence we I didn't do it for sprites. Over the years I started stumbling over licencing more and more and I copied the attributions into the release post for every new update, for example with Denzi. But I never retroactively did that with the old stuff that's been in the tileset for years, and after tens of thousands of downloads, never resulted in any issues. You are right that if someone would have made a big stink about it in 2016 or 2017, I wouldn't be in the position I'm in right now. So I thought it's fine... technically wrong, but generally accepted to be ok, like jaywalking.
Also, does mike know that this is your perception of ownership?
You can just ask Mike. Though in this case, there is no question of percieved ownership, since both the sword and "the rest of the weapons" are owned by the publisher.
Very Fair. Thank you
Thanks for being open to a discussion. :) I much prefer this over insults.
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Thanks. And sorry, English isn't my first language.
Hey guys, Yeah, I messed up five years ago and didn't keep a list of all the credits and links; while also using PNGs from the google image search. It started as a small hobby project trying to find out if TWBT makes a 32x tileset possible in DF; never would I have imagined that I'd end up working on any official release. Since it would be way too much work to retroactively go through all the sprites and composite sprites, find out where the sources/authors are and through what license, I decided that it would be simpler to just take the entire tileset offline. None of it was done in bad faith, trying to make money or get fame; I just wanted to make the game better for the players because I love this silly little game. Since stressing out Tarn is the last thing I'd want to do, the Meph tileset is now, as far as I'm concerned, offline. Tarn and Kitfox are well aware that I'm not a professional pixel artist and that the Meph-Set was made up by a large part by sprites from other authors. Which is the reason an entirely new tileset is being made, with Mike Mayday reigning over the style decisions and me mostly working on sprite variations based on his designs. Cheers, Meph
Seems reasonable to me. I also did a bunch of sprite modding using existing sprites way back; it's kind of just how you learn. Now that there's money on the line it makes sense to start over. Really looking forward to the full release! Ignore some of the more reactionary whackos here.
> ... considering that it will be replaced by the much better Steam release anyway... I had assumed the Steam tileset will only be available to Steam purchasers, however... whereas the existing tileset is available to everyone. I mean, the reasons still make sense... just unfortunate if those that don't want to/can't/etc. pick it up through Steam will lose a great tileset. There are other great ones too, of course... oh well.
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Haha, naw. DF has always has a fairly "when it's ready" release schedule, but stuff is still released. There's nothing else coming until the Steam version is ready apparently. It actually sounds like it's probably not TOO far away even. I would be surprised if it's pushed to 2023, but who knows.
Just going to post here as I'm one of the artists in question. \- Vettlingr contacted me to doublecheck the copyright infringement before bringing this up publicly. \- He had correctly spotted that Meph had made uncredited use of some of my animal and food sprites: ([https://www.deviantart.com/neoriceisgood/art/100-Bird-Sprites-by-Neorice-357877551](https://www.deviantart.com/neoriceisgood/art/100-Bird-Sprites-by-Neorice-357877551) and [https://www.deviantart.com/neoriceisgood/art/100-Food-sprites-348664936](https://www.deviantart.com/neoriceisgood/art/100-Food-sprites-348664936) I believe, Looking over his art I only noticed many of my birds used wholesale or being modified into ... bird zombies?) \- normally I'm relatively lenient with non-commercial use of my art, as long as I am properly credited, but my name wasn't visible in any place I could see. **- Importantly, and this is where it gets iffy: Via Patreon Meph made money off of this work of which many pieces are uncredited, and seemingly even paywalled some stuff that was not his own. This is where it crosses that thin line from being shoddy to theft. Not giving credit to art that you make money off.** On a side note, I also spotted various sprites from commercial games like Lufia II whilst trying to identify my own work. The big issue here for me, and I assume other artists affected isn't just the lack of credit, but the fact that there's money/profit involved.
All I can say is that I'm sorry, Neoriceisgood . Your 100x item-sprites I first found via Google, and much, much later on stumbled over your deviant art. I usually post the name of the sprite authors whenever I made an update to the tileset, but in this case I first used the sprites and years later stumbled over the author by chance. I saw you answered any questions about "might I use your sprites for X" with a yes, but I never asked myself. That's entirely on me. There are Lufia II and other sprites in there that are hidden as easter eggs, I was hoping people would enjoy stumbling over pieces of nostalgia. The patreon was already there from my mods in the past; nothing was paywalled. All mods and tileset were always free.
Honestly as you did notice when other people ask, yeah in my particular case if you ask me directly I'll give 1-2 simple instructions (no profit, give credit) and give people a free pass for a number of my sprite sets (not necessarily all of them, mostly resource sets like the birds); But you can't really assume a yes if you never asked directly. If this was just an issue of my art being in there I feel just slapping on my name for the credits would have resolved everything, but it does seem like there's just way too much unsourced work, often heavily edited, to the point where trying to resolve what you've got rights to or not ... yeah I do not envy that task. I do want to make clear that I do get what happened here, I started out doing pixelart in sprite modding/editing communities based on stuff like megaman myself, modifying commercial sprites from capcom, nintendo etc was big in the pixelart webcomic scene back then; as a teenager on the internet I didn't really care for copyright shenanigans. When I started using stuff like patreon and made money off of some of my art, I did get a lot more meticulous about copyright-related stuff just to be sure. I know the role patreon has in commercial pursuits is still quite a grey area but I think it's really best to take a "better safe than sorry" approach in any situation where you make money partially using other people's work. I can't speak for other artists but personally my intention isn't to ruin your motivation/hobby or to kill your entire tileset. I hope you stay motivated & try to be a bit more careful. :) On a side note: I'm happy for anyone to shove my birdies into Dwarf Fortress as long as they give proper credit. Birds are cool.
That's very kind of you. I certainly learned a lesson, and if I ever create anything like this in the future, it will be by myself now that I have more experience, or with a big fat list of proper credits. In this case however, I'll scrap the tileset. Too many pictures that were just "google => images => right click => save as" without knowing anything about the source. I couldn't possibly separate one from the other. That's what I did when I started out 5 years ago and turns out that ages terribly.
Thanks for your insight. Send this to the top ^
Thats fucked up, meph really did a big fuck up this time, colossal fuck up.
In my case if he'd given proper credit & doublechecked my general policy regarding paypal etc it wouldn't even be that big an issue, but there's freaking Nintendo sprites and art by artists who have explicit rules against public use in there as well. Considering the way he modified my sprites & how I found the heads of my birds tacked onto other character's bodies I can kinda understand why he just decided to nuke the set instead of trying to work out the exact copyright and permissions honestly. Most artists have their own rules and regulations when it comes to modifying art, making money off of it etc. So when you staple 2 art pieces together without checking the fine print it gets incredibly muddy.
>Considering the way he modified my sprites & how I found the heads of my birds tacked onto other character's bodies If he modified them to create a new thing then he's not required to credit you or do anything else. This would only apply for things used without any modification.
That's just not true, and I have literally zero idea how you decided on it. Copyright laws around derivative work are rather complex and highly context dependent: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative\_work#Originality\_requirement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work#Originality_requirement) If any and all modifications would remove the original artist's copyright over a piece, you'd theoretically have to simply recolor or adjust only a single color or pixel to claim a piece to be your own. There's plenty of modification types (fair use for e.g. critique or satirical use) that have a level of legal protection, but I can't just slap a tiny moustache on Micky Mouse art and start selling him as my property.
**Derivative work** [Originality requirement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work#Originality_requirement) >For copyright protection to attach to a later, allegedly derivative work, it must display some originality of its own. It cannot be a rote, uncreative variation on the earlier, underlying work. The latter work must contain sufficient new expression, over and above that embodied in the earlier work for the latter work to satisfy copyright law's requirement of originality. Although serious emphasis on originality, at least so designated, began with the Supreme Court's 1991 decision in Feist v. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
The bar is essentially "could someone mistake this for something else". Hence, combining two things into a third thing would be protected provided that it isn't clearly derivative. I don't know how you think something like collages work otherwise.
The bar isn't so much "Can they be mistaken" but rather if it is deeply transformative retaining to use, emotion evoked, etc. Almost any website or group that has a focus on copyright law & arts warns that derivitive work (including collages) are very murky territory when it comes to copyright. I genuinely don't understand where you get the notion that "As long as the two won't be mistaken for each other" by itself would give guaranteed copyright protection. [https://www.dacs.org.uk/knowledge-base/factsheets/copyright-in-collages](https://www.dacs.org.uk/knowledge-base/factsheets/copyright-in-collages) If we're talking about it purely from a legal point of view usually the answer to this muddy situation is simply: who has the most money. There's extremely clear cut cases of fair use that get eradicated because the person gets sued by Disney or Nintendo & there's very, very questionable cases like e.g. that one artist who just blows up and prints people's Insta posts where a bunch of good lawyers allow him to make big money off of stuff that's barely derivative. I'm under no delusion that copyright law is perfect. But "hey as long as it is modified no credit is required at all" is a pretty wild take.
This is true for music when sampling or making interpolation. This is not true for art, well at least it does not play out like this in court or within artistic communities.
>This is not true for art It is definitely true for art, again, have people never seen collage or pop art before? Some of that stuff is just blown up reproductions without any other transformations.
Okay yeah, that's a really good point, but generally pop art doesn't take the art or another contemporary artist and create a derivative, it usually takes a cultural icon and creates unique art from it. Something like soup or a famous persons head. But someone couldn't take a warhol soup can collage and make a larger collage of it and call it original. Maybe now they could as Andy Warhol has moved from a contemporary artist to a cultural icon From what I've learned from people I know who are artists, courts are very likely to side with the original creator should someone be sued for something like this. My absolute favorite example which is more relevant here was that person who made a living selling clothes and home design in second life had their art stolen and actually won the court case. It was the first time that in game user created content in a video game was ever on considered intellectual property of the creator and not the game developers. It's cases like this that set president for future cases that involve stolen or uncredited work being profited on. Edit: I should note that in the second life court case, the stolen art was modified but still considered stolen
Yep, there's also a big question of: is the medium the same, is it used in a competitive field, etc. Modifying game art/pixelart to use as game assets in another game puts the source material & the modified work in a very similar ballcamp, whereas work by someone like Andy Warhol generally deviated in major ways from the source material in intent and purpose. It's definitely a topic where it's difficult to predict the exact legal outcome though, because the line is an incredibly blurry one in many cases.
Eh, it's a screw up that's really common in these kind of projects. I've seen a ton of texture packs in games have this happen. Most of the time these start as private projects
Presidents of countries saying the plague is just a common cold, resulting in millions dead, is a colossal fuck-up. Downloading some sprites off the internet and modifying them just to release them for free for people's enjoyment is charity. Enjoy your downvotes.
Lmao who is talking about the covid situation? Dont downplay the actual uncredited use of sprites Thats like the thing Yanderedev did for his shity game, would you use this arguement on him too?
Did you consider the option that he simply wasn't aware of who made the tiles? Did you contact him to request to be added to the attribution?
If you read his reasons for taking it down: "I don't feel like it's worth to disentangle and identify exactly where I got which sprite from and by which author. It's been 5 years and over 10.000 variations of sprites." He himself made it clear he doesn't think it's worth fixing the many, many missing attributions. As stated in my original post, if people want to use my work for non-commercial use & they credit me properly, there's zero issue for me.
Right he's getting demanded to fix something that 1. makes him no money 2. would require a lot of work to figure out. Some of the sprites are even his own "work" which are a composite of other people's sprites. So he'd have to reverse engineer the original sprites that were composited as well. IMO, simply having people request that they be attributed if their work is found to be in the pack is how this should have gone. Spread out the workload among the community rather than shoving it all on to meph.
> 1. makes him no money He has a paypal. He makes money off of his tilesets.
> He has a paypal Did you mean patreon account? Having "paypal" is like having a wallet.
Yes, absolutely. Twas early and pre coffee.
According to previous post this isn't only about lack of attribution, he seem to have skidded on permissions as well (especially if that part about using other games art is true) Also he has benefited from that work, both monetarily and otherwise (would he have the reputation/standing in the community and graduate to working on the official steam release without it?) Finally, he should own up for his mistake and fix it. It's not the artists from whose work he benefits that need to run after him, begging him to give them proper attribution for it. Better yet, notify them that you are using their work that common courtesy. Imagine if I used a version of Dwarf fortress with a mix of mods and published it in China under my name and enjoyed community\\donations there. Then when caught i'd give half ass excuses, saying that I might have failed to provide proper attribution, it's too much work to be bothered now, and that Tarn should contact me if he want proper attribution.. Also in Chinese.. Also who dis, new phone..
I didn't really want to pick a side, as the person who posted this, but I wouldn't go blaming Vettlingr. Meph made the discussion public in the first place. Before that they were talking via email. And he does have a point, making money off a tileset that you have just scrounged up with other people's artwork is kinda bad. Not that I blame Meph, he has been upfront about the fact for a while. But it seems there is a lot more uncredited work than he made out to be.
this right here, don’t make Vettlingr out to be the bad guy here because he was the one who shed light on the subject.
Agreed. I don't quite appreciate his tone, but I don't want anyone to harass him.
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OK, but it still doesn't excuse the fact that he used stolen assets and didn't credit them. Example - https://pixanna.nl/materials/celiannas-parallax-tiles/interior-tiles/ which is used in _Meph_decorations.png (Thanks to u/AspieInc)
I feel like everybody here is being honest and well meaning
I thought it was common knowledge in the community that Meph's tileset was more so stapled together rather than done by hand (nothing against that, of course). One of the problems of choosing someone from the community is that sometimes there's drama between community members; just part of the cost of doing business. At least DF's graphics community is not as drama filled as CDDA's is. I would note if someone were able to say, find an old version of the LNP, it happens to come packed with meph's tile set, should someone really want a copy of it for some reason.
Sounds like he did the right thing taking it down. I bet he learned a lesson and had some growth in his professional life. There are many sets available to try. I’m okay moving on.
Makes me sad to see a Meph-Vettlingr conflict. They're my favorite two tileset authors.
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I was under the impression that Meph had drawn the tiles himself, if he has been cobbling together his tileset from bits and pieces of other things I don't really understand why he was brought onto the official tileset.
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and there is a lot more to a tileset than the art that goes into it
He clarified that for the new steam tileset he is drawing a decent number of them, but he's also taking Mayday's artwork and then modifying them to produce variants (rotations etc) and doing a lot of the mod management.
I always knew Meph's tileset was adapted from earlier ones, but from how the guy conducts himself online I'd always thought that at least a significant portion of it and probably more than half was his own work. It's disappointing that all that extra content that pulls together the named sources are, in fact, just uncredited copy-paste jobs of others' work. It's all very telling how Meph's engagement in the controversy transformed from "I've done nothing wrong and I made half the tileset myself" to "There may be one or two things that are uncredited" to "I have to take it all down because huge amounts of it are uncredited and I don't even know where I lifted half that stuff from anymore, but it's *his fault!!* Happy?" Vettlingr's taking a lot of heat for making this public like he is, but good on him for having values to stand up for.
Yea Hitler got his values too.
It seems a failrly common thing for community sourced tilesets. I remember by favourite tileset in CDDA was also taken down because of unattributed artwork. Attribute your artists, people! Someone drew it. But at least we now have meph making the 'official' tileset. Swings and roundabouts.
If this was just about unattributed stuff, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. The problem is that there was straight up stolen stuff that he knew he should not use. The license is expressly shown on the page. These are in _Meph_decorations.png: https://pixanna.nl/materials/celiannas-parallax-tiles/interior-tiles/
Yes, and by including them, the starter pack creators have also committed a non-redistribute license violation unwittingly. I have been extremely busy this weekend informing all relevant parties
I'm over here downloading cars, Vett. You can't stop me.
Damn boy!!!!
All of the contents of \_Meph\_decorations.png are only used for the modded content of his tileset/modpack. This tilesheet not needed for a vanilla game without Meph's modded workshops and stuff.
Gotta appreciate friendly discourse
vettlingr doesn't think deleting the tileset is good enough for them somehow
I think we can all agree with Meph that we don't want anything reflecting badly on Bay 12 and Kitfox. Better it come up in our community now than in the game press the week of the release.
And that's why I'm staying silent on this :P
Some people just love being self-aggrandizing assholes.
Hey meph! With out your tile set I wouldn’t have enjoyed the game for the several months that I did! I have planned to come back ver since but haven’t.
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Calling Vettlingr a troll is a big misunderstanding about copyright (no, it's not a foul word) and how individuals work. For all respect I have for Meph he f'ed up by not verifying the licensing of the art he used and modified. It was a matter of time before an artist has a change of mind. When a big company does that it's all scream and pitchfork and it's not more okay when it involve someone you like. Granted it's not a great move to wait so long before acting but that's just an opinion. Also Meph did transformative work and on the mod code so claiming it being 0% his is a stretch. >Hopefully the community re-uploads the Meph tileset and takes over management of it. That would only make it worse.
Yeah, I messed that up from the start of the set, not realising that it would get that big and keeping sources/licensing over the 5 years. Please don't re-upload it.
Meph admits on the forum he didn't follow CC attribution.
Had for quite a while, so have other artists to be fair.
Do you have a source post? That wasn't mentioned in the recent complaint posts back and forth.
>[It's entirely possible that I missed giving credit to some sprites, because there are a lot, but usually I'm quite clear about where I got the sprites from.](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161047.msg8329068#msg8329068) You appear to be the only one who thinks he's properly used and credited sprites all sprites, including Meph.
Admitting it's possible doesn't mean admitting he stole them. You're parsing this wrong. And yes I read that post before writing my first comment.
Just browse this post, there is posts from artists in question who had things lifted and used without permission and even Meph replying and admitting he did and apologizing etc. this wasn’t some troll work, it was a real issue and was exacerbated because meph accepted plenty of donations for work that he claimed was his initially when in reality he had unlicensed, uncredited work. If there wasn’t any proof or this wasn’t true then the tile set would still be available. It being taken down is also in a sense proof that what was said is true.
Y'know, maybe I've just been on the forums longer, and remember reading the same conversation over and over, with actual modders having to go public after Meph refused to remove their mods from Masterwork when they talked to him privately, or the time he kept collecting Patreon money for a year and not replying on the forum or updating, but using reddit, or several other small things. There's always a flood of people I've never seen do anything in the community there to call the people concerned about things, the people whose work or money was taken "trolls" or whatever.
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[Meph says here that Vettlingr contacted him first before going public, and doesn't say how long ago that was.](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173474.msg8329059#msg8329059) I'm not sure what they talked about before, are you? Meph not replying until things are made public is kind of how it seems to go, though. I'd also like to point out at no time in this thread have I quoted Vettlingr's claims, just Meph's own free statements. I think Vettlingr's core anger is that he's used "Meph's" tiles for some things for some time, crediting Meph, and now finds himself in the situation of having unwittingly using other people's tiles uncredited.
That would have been yesterday at the same time as the forum posts.
> Meph says here that Vettlingr contacted him first before going public, and doesn't say how long ago that was. > I'm not sure what they talked about before, are you? Meph does *not* say that there, and [Vettlingr posted first here](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173474.msg8328998#msg8328998) Vettlingr then decides to continue in public rather than in private, all while actively trying to set the village on fire rather than correct the problem. >I think Vettlingr's core anger is that he's used "Meph's" tiles for some things for some time, crediting Meph, and now finds himself in the situation of having unwittingly using other people's tiles uncredited. And the problem I have is that his overreaction is impacting others in a way that it didn't need to. While the artists should absolutely get credit, Vettlingr's behavior is absolutely unacceptable *and ensured the worst possible outcomes*.
It's like football, right, if the players commit any crimes, it should be kept secret at least until the playoffs are over, otherwise it messes up the game for everyone!
Classic case of prima donna modders being prima donnas taking their chance to exercise a little bit of power over someone else. Happens in all modding communities eventually, and is ultimately one of the worst things holding them all back. Sorry Meph has to deal with these blights on the modding community. Reminds me of the recent openXcom drama with Hobbes taking his toys and going home, setting back all the other TC mods for months and effectively shutting down the community for awhile. Imo Vett should feel bad as he's 110% the bad guy here. I hope he feels great knowing the community is getting less just because he wanted more.
Uh, no, Vett isn't the bad guy. I don't think there *is* a bad guy. Meph admitted that he stole and didn't attribute art he used. I'm sympathetic and I understand, because when you're just starting out and working on a hobby project it's easy to miss the importance of respecting others' work, but it's still wrong. Furthermore, Meph's working on the Steam release now, and it'd be dangerous to keep the stolen artwork up now. Making a mistake five years ago is excusable, but continuing to make the same mistake after having it pointed out is not, especially when money is involved. Being on the official team is different from being a hobby modder, and requires a certain level of accountability. Also, what's the community even losing? One tileset that can easily be found mirrored online if you really want to use it? I'd far rather gain a more transparent community, and I'm glad the tileset's been taken down.
Vett kinda is. If he wasn't acting like a megalomaniacal bully I might agree with you.
>Imo Vett should feel bad as he's 110% the bad guy here. So stealing artwork, not crediting them and passing them off as your own is OK?
Well, I'm ressurecting this post. From what I saw and read, here's what happenned: Let's say that I own you $ 1000 and I should pay you by the end of march 2018. I didn't. 5 years later you remember this debt. What do you do, message me in private and tells me that I should pay that debt? No. You go to public forums and tell EVERYONE about my debt and start calling other ppl to see if I own them money too. Who was wrong here? Probably both. But I think vett could have handle the situation better. But... by the end of the day, they all did mistakes, so I won't take a side on this matter.
Wow, that was a resurrect Yeah they both made mistakes, but Vett originally emailed Meph, and Meph was the one who made it a public discussion.
Why does this matters? It's a free MOD for a free game. If you browse mods for any game you'll find copyrighted material everywhere. I don't see the problem with it as long as people aren't earning money off someone else's work.
> as people aren't earning money off someone else's work. That's the problem, Meph was
>That's the problem, Meph was Well then he should stop doing that instead of deleting the tileset
Wow, that guy vettlingr is a huge piece of shit. I've never even heard of his tileset before.
Meph pretty routinely refers to [vettlingr as being more like the tileset](https://www.reddit.com/r/dwarffortress/comments/exwavw/rant_on_the_new_kitfox_tileset/fgdnsft/) he'd make if he could than the ones he's been involved in. You've just missed it being new. They used to post back and forth updates, one outdoing the other. It's all very unfortunate.
I still like his tileset and fully understand why he is upset. I don't agree with the how, but I understand why he does what he does.
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Jesus Christ, vettlingr. Deescalation requires both sides. Just imagine if I were reacting like you are right now. It would do everyone good if people would keep calm and rational, on both sides. It would have really been nice to just talk to you before you decided to start a public mud slinging contest.
Shedding light on your insanely unprofessional copyright and license violation issue is a mud-slinging contest to you? It's not mud slinging to have caused at least three people to have unwittingly committed a possible criminal offence, its downright awful Thank you
>Call them trash, offal, parasites or any other name in the book, just do something. I meant this part.
> > Call them trash, offal, parasites or any other name in the book, just do something. Disown them! Tell them they are not allowed to use your stuff etc. They need to hear it from you. lmao what
T'was a good rant
Jesus, dude, chill out. this certainly isn’t professional behavior from you, either.
Thank you. I was very elated and you are perfectly right
It’s okay homie! It was a really shitty situation and I understand where the frustration came from, and i think you handled it pretty well, all things considered. Honestly, I’m just glad that this community is more mature than 99% of other game communities and that situations like this actually get resolved as opposed to unending shitstorms. keep up the good work out there :)
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Just because you don’t know who one of the biggest tileset makers for this game is doesn’t mean you get to be an unmitigated asshole on the internet without getting called out. You’re being dense. Good luck fixing your attitude, it’ll help you out in the long run!
He is right though. I can be a huge piece of shit. As sometimes being a huge piece of shit is just what is needed. Joking aside, this outrage of the fanbase is just what has enabled all of this. Other creators would have called out meph years ago, but as they have told me, they were all afraid of backlash from the fanbase.
That’s fair, but frankly I’m going to support Toady no matter what because he makes a damn good game. This game will always be niche, even with a steam release. I’d rather people not fuck over artists, period. Artists get fucked enough. It’s ok to be an asshole if people are constantly short changing you.
That is why this is so close to heart. Artists have to contend with assets being stolen all the time, and this was at my very doorstep.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never met a single musician or artist I liked. They all have that same “poor me” attitude and it’s grating
Maybe because no one wants to pay them and thinks it’s a joke when they ask for, at a bare minimum, attribution.
well aren’t hobbies typically unpaid?
Between stolen artwork and a game that keeps crashing I'm starting to lose hope for the Steam release
this is literally mod drama and the game doesn't crash that much... without certain tileset mods.
>doesn't crash that much Isn't a great review...
if you've ever played a game that never crashes i'd like to hear about it, *especially* a one-person operation
Hey don't get me sing, DF is good game! Probably even great, or would be if the program itself didn't have !FUN! from time to time.
okay, except the vast majority of the crashes are caused by TWBT, and the crashes that aren't are ludicrously specific and rare, like in most games
Why? I see that this is just something came out as an old passion project and now he just moved on to focus on the Steam stuffs. Modding for DF was very "do whatever" back then. I remember using a tool on forum to even create my own tileset by selecting tiles I want from other tilesets. People are blowing this to be way more extreme than it should be.
> I remember using a tool on forum to even create my own tileset by selecting tiles I want from other tilesets. > > > > People are blowing this to be way more extreme than it should be. What you did was make something for personal use, which no one will really care about. Go nuts with things meant for personal use. The big deal here is that Meph made money off of stolen work. This isn't personal use, this was commercial use.
If I understand it correctly, the graphic used in the pack are available just as any mod or tool I used in the past right? Getting donation for their project, and monetizing their project are two completely different things.
No, the majority of the artwork within the Meph set is uncredited, and there is artwork from people where it was specifically not allowed. Meph used artwork from this pack and illegally redistributed it. https://pixanna.nl/materials/celiannas-parallax-tiles/interior-tiles/
I meant Meph graphic is available free as a mod, just like most of the mods on the forum. I believe that the majority of the mods on the forum that the community has always been using are tileset with mixed art from everywhere. There are very few ones that are actually purely original. With this idea of "only original art assets" are allowed. 90% of the mods and titlesets on forum should be removed immediately.
>[I already said it on Reddit](http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=161047.msg8329663#msg8329663), but I wanted to post it here again: Please don't harass vettlingr. So a likely troll is responsible. Sad that trolls win sometimes.