I certainly did not mean to be mean in my emails to Sung. I'm concerned primarily because of my experiences with Wesnoth, a free turn-based strategy game.
Here, several graphics that had been in Wesnoth for years had to be changed, just because their heads were coincedentally similar to those of the skeletons in Final Fantasy 4. There is also a very strict policy on the Wesnoth forums (can be seen at
http://www.wesnoth.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2014 ), which proscribes banning for any violation of copyright whatsoever.
As a matter of fact, the Wesnoth trailer was yesterday discovered to have been banned from YouTube because of alleged copyright infringement (thread is
here).
Here are some of the graphical grounds for my concern. If they are not correct, I will gladly retract them. You can find other HW2 screenshots at
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/hom ... tml?page=1 for reference.
1. The engines are almost exact replicas of the Homeworld 2 ones (can be seen on a rear view of a HW2 ship).
2. Your Constrictor texture looks a lot like that of the HW2 resource collector (visible in the second row on the second page of the HW2 gallery).
3. The windows on the Worm, Anaconda and Python are very similar to those on the HW2 Hiigaran carrier (in your post on the Oolite forums).
4. There is a graphic on the bottom of your Cobra MKI that looks like that on the top of the Hiigaran Mothership (visible at
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/image_vie ... =undefined ).
5. The texture on the sides of the Asp Mark II is very similar to that on the side of the lower section of the Mothership (visible at
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/image_vie ... =undefined ).
6. The graphic on the top of the Cobra Mk I is similar to HW2's subsystem slot (visible on your shot of the
HW2 carrier).
I am also concerned because of what happened to Halogen, a Command & Conquer Generals modification that I was anticipating. Microsoft decided to fox it after three years of work. There is also FreeCraft, an attempted Warcraft II clone, and StarKiller, a port of Starcraft to C&C Generals, both of which Blizzard foxed. Killer Wolf gave another example of this. I do not want to see a similar fate happen to Sung or even to the entire Oolite project. Dr. Nil also raised this concern.
Also, I do not know German copyright laws, but American laws are indeed very strict (no, I'm not a lawyer either), to the point where a company sued 754 people in one day (
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/12/ ... ues_1.html ). There are even automated computer programs that will detect copyright infringement, which were probably responsible for the Wesnoth trailer's banning (an example can be found
here). And yes, I do agree with Ahruman in that a lot of this is
clearly batshit insane, although I will not take up for music pirates.
@Wolfwood: I must admit to being slightly color-blind, but I have not had problems with this before (possibly until now). I may not be able to discern the differences in the color shades that you point out as well as you can. Also, HW2 is in full 3D, and has 3D lighting, meaning that a HW2 ship can take on many colors, depending on its team colors and how the virtual light hits it.
@Charlie: English is my native language (and only language of fluency).
Finally, please note that I have absolutely no concerns with the models, only the textures. And also, I do think that Sung is a very good artist, and I never sought to question his artistic skill.