Tomes of Mephistopheles Alpha

[Baker]

Tomes of Mephistopheles Alpha

Tomes of Mephistopheles is a commercial DarkPlaces role playing game with destructible random dungeons from Kot-In-Action, which released the game Steel Storm on Steam last year.

[Phenom]

This looks like Skyrim if it were made in 1996. I like it!

[MadGypsy]

hmmm...sounds like quake, looks like quake, the skeletons even act like quake zombies with an added walk function. How do you charge money for switching out some Quake models, textures and sprites?

If I knew you could get paid for putting lipstick on plagiarism I wouldn't have spent all this time building an entire FPS from the ground up.

[xaGe]

..You know what happens when you assume don't you?
There is a LOT of work going into this that may not be apparent to some obviously judging from the post above! LOL! There is no switching of anything, but new content and code made by the authors using the DarkPlaces engine. I don't hear Quake when I watch the video nor do I see it, but everyone is entitled to their opinion.

..In 1996 there was Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall which was very much Skyrim back then. Tomes of Mephistopheles Alpha looks more 1st person hack'n'slash then quest driven like Daggerfall, but also looks way nicer!

[golden_boy]

To each their opinion guys...

[Spiney]

hmmm...sounds like quake, looks like quake, the skeletons even act like quake zombies with an added walk function.

If I knew you could get paid for putting lipstick on plagiarism I wouldn't have spent all this time building an entire FPS from the ground up.

Oh come on, that's just discrediting all the hard work that went into this.
Plagiarism? Get real.

How do you charge money for switching out some Quake models, textures and sprites?

So games like Hexen, Half Life, etc should never have been allowed to make money?

These days It's damn near impossible to avoid comparisons to older games.
No problem with that, but when people start declaring everything as a 'rip-off', it just irks me to no end

[Ronald]

... commercial DarkPlaces role playing game ...

Hmmm, good luck with that ...
I personally rather play some free custom made Quake maps any day.

[MadGypsy]

Wow, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I'm sorry (that I'm not going to rely on emoticons to make a point). I stated my opinion, as I am allowed to do.

There is a difference between paying homage and lacking the creativity to bring something fresh to the table. As-far-as "all the hard work" goes - go trace an H.R. Giger image and tell me about all the recognition you deserve for your unoriginal and belabored reproduction.

Maybe one day you will grow and realize that a random opinion, posted by a complete stranger and not directed at you or anyone you know in any way, should have absolutely no effect on you at all.

sorry to hear about your condition,
Gypsy

[foq]

I don't see how this so strongly resembles Quake. It's a dungeon crawler with magic spells, potions, treasures and such... I don't see how it resembles running around brutally slaughtering monsters with rocket launchers, tasers on steroids, shotguns and crude weapons that fire construction materials.

[Spiney]

Wow, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings. I'm sorry (that I'm not going to rely on emoticons to make a point). I stated my opinion, as I am allowed to do.

There is a difference between paying homage and lacking the creativity to bring something fresh to the table. As-far-as "all the hard work" goes - go trace an H.R. Giger image and tell me about all the recognition you deserve for your unoriginal and belabored reproduction.

Maybe one day you will grow and realize that a random opinion, posted by a complete stranger and not directed at you or anyone you know in any way, should have absolutely no effect on you at all.

sorry to hear about your condition,
Gypsy

Speak for yourself. Hurt my feelings? Heh, I guess I didn't use enough emoticons. But can we please keep the passive agressive posts to ourselves?
For what it's worth, I'm sorry, was in a bad mood when I wrote that.

And no offense, but I barely see any Giger in this, if at all. And I'm pretty familiar with his work. In fact, it looks as generic as a dungeon crawler game comes. If you want to retrace the 'original genius' you can go look at the Greeks and beyond, there's an entire western tradition of art encapsulated in fantasy. Guys like Giger or Frazetta are as dutiable to the artistic legacy of their predecessors as kot-in-action is here.

There is a difference between paying homage and lacking the creativity to bring something fresh to the table. As-far-as "all the hard work" goes - go trace an H.R. Giger image and tell me about all the recognition you deserve for your unoriginal and belabored reproduction.

Then you can take the last 20 years of fantasy games, films, whatever and do a ritual burning of them. Originality with capital O as in some ex nihilo creationist fantasy is a fairy tale.

And for the record, one zombie, some placeholder art... not much to judge here.

IMO

[Mindf!3ldzX]

No offense to the authors of the game, but if they had kept their intentions for finances hush hush,as opposed to telling me they're target is 3,000 copies sold x $10 a copy = $30,000 dollar budget for an indie game?


Maybe I'll see their cargo/product on the high ()seas later on in life.
Maybe instead of 30,000 dollars they make 100,000 dollars?
Does the goal of 30,000 being met, mean that all things are kosher and coding/updates would continue without more inflow of money from game sales?

It just feels DIRTY for some reason, I can't put my finger on it exactly.

[Spiney]

I also want to apologize for the mess between me and Gypsy, this is not the place nor tone for a healthy discussion and it detracts from the topic -- apart from making us both look like idiots.

So let's just agree to disagree and keep it at that.

[Cobalt]

Nah, good points both Gypsy and Spiney made. To me its an interesting debate , to a point I guess. IMO, it does trace back to the grandaddy of all 3d fps games, which from as far back as Wolf3d, probably onward, all have some familiar elements that were passed on.

Like I have said in the SOPPA posts here on the site, you can play this both ways...its positive publicity from an ID standpoint, because the experienced people are the ones who can recognize the detail involved, and those are the ones who will support ID products and be loyal. The ones who dont see it, will maybe buy the game, but miss out on the rewards that come from recognizing the original talents involved. Talent(s) , with an (s) that is. All this stuff about they ' stole my code ' goes wayy back:

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NofkWBp1LFA]YOU'RE STEALING FROM US! - YouTube[/ame]

Theres another part in posv where Bill Gates says hes is accused of stealing from the pirates....IE: who stole it first?

Go even farther back check out the Nikola Tesla story:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tTGg3LVCvk]Nikola Tesla - Master of Lightning 2000 Full video - YouTube[/ame]

If he decided to copyright generation of AC electricity, would we be even arguing over who stole whos code online?

[AAA]

Wheres the shareware?

[daemon]

Here is some information on modding and scripting in Tomes of Mephistopheles for anyone interested: Modding and Scripting in Tomes of Mephistopheles Kot-in-Action Creative Artel

If you guys are curious about code. I wrote it all from scratch. We use Darkplaces as is with our own qc, csqc, and menuqc. There is not a bit of old Quake quakec, or quakec from anywhere else, other than what I've personally written, or a bit of code that Vortex has contributed in the spirit of speedy development, in Steel Storm, or Tomes of Mephistopheles, and there never has been. Just FYI.