question about XSI mod tool and OGRE partnership
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makeshiftwings
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question about XSI mod tool and OGRE partnership
Hey all, I'm wondering if anyone here knows anything about the XSI Mod tool license as it pertains to game developers. I know for modders, you can download the XSI Mod version for free and export it to whatever game format you have an export for. Right now it seems there are only exporters for Unreal and Half Life 2. Does a developer need to pay an outrageous fee to get the rights to produce an export script for modders to use? I know the 3ds version of this, Gmax, worked something like that... the developer needed to pay some huge fee to get the rights to make a Gmax exporter for his game, so that the modders could mod for free. Does Ogre's "partnership" with XSI grant us Ogre developers any kind of right to distribute a dotScene (or similar) exporter for the mod tool so that modders can mod for our games? I'm guessing not, as if there were a dotScene exporter, all of us could basically develop our own games using XSI for free. But there must be some way to allow modders to use XSI Mod to export to your game. Anyone have any clues?
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sinbad
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Only signed plugins will work in the Mod tool, and you can only get your plugin signed by SoftImage it seems. Our agreement doesn't cover the mod tool, just membership to the XSI developer programme. I'm sure that to use the mod tool requires a game-specific license - the intention is not for it to be used to make games, but to mod existing games, and I'm sure the game publisher has to pay for that.
It wouldn't make any sense for SoftImage to allow the mod tool to be used to make games generally without this sort of limitation since it would undermine their Foundation product. Which, let's face it, costs a quarter of the price of competing tools, and yet still rocks (just ask anyone who actually tries it - I haven't come across anyone trying it out who doesn't really like it yet).
It wouldn't make any sense for SoftImage to allow the mod tool to be used to make games generally without this sort of limitation since it would undermine their Foundation product. Which, let's face it, costs a quarter of the price of competing tools, and yet still rocks (just ask anyone who actually tries it - I haven't come across anyone trying it out who doesn't really like it yet).
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makeshiftwings
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Yes, I did read something about signed plug-ins, but I couldn't find any info on their site or in their forums about how to get one signed. My intention wasn't to try and use the mod tool to make my game, but rather to use XSI Foundation to create it and then leverage the XSI mod tool to make my game moddable by players, rather than trying to write my own construction kit from scratch.
But judging by the lack of any info anywhere, I'm guessing that getting a license to create a signed plug-in is something that's handled on a case-by-case basis by XSI, and that the cost is probably far out of the reach of a low budget indie developer. My idea for a dotScene signed plugin would be so that Ogre developers could pool the cost and make one signed plug-in that could be used to mod for many Ogre-based games, but the unwanted (for XSI at least) side-effect of that would be that you could then create your own game without paying for XSI, which is admittedly unfair. I don't know if there's a way around that. It would be great if Ogre could use its partnership to create a base Ogre Mod plug-in that developers could point players towards, but I don't know if it's possible given the way licensing works.
But judging by the lack of any info anywhere, I'm guessing that getting a license to create a signed plug-in is something that's handled on a case-by-case basis by XSI, and that the cost is probably far out of the reach of a low budget indie developer. My idea for a dotScene signed plugin would be so that Ogre developers could pool the cost and make one signed plug-in that could be used to mod for many Ogre-based games, but the unwanted (for XSI at least) side-effect of that would be that you could then create your own game without paying for XSI, which is admittedly unfair. I don't know if there's a way around that. It would be great if Ogre could use its partnership to create a base Ogre Mod plug-in that developers could point players towards, but I don't know if it's possible given the way licensing works.