Hmm, nothing is tagged? I was hoping the Maps tag would work. 

I don't think many authors are uploading their own works... just a handful, and the rest are people going through LvL and uploading stuff without much care. Don't maps need to be recompiled (or packaged?) specially for them to work on QuakeLive? 

QL no longer requires that you munge the pk3 through an xor encoding. However the textures and sounds available out-of-the-box in QuakeLive are different than in Q3. 

mm, maybe I should put my q3 maps up then, at least the couple more recent ones at least. 

Everyone. Then makes func msgboard list that I can follow and get all the maps :) 

 

By the way, QL is on sale for 2 bucks at the moment. Not as good as free, but still a fine game to have in one's library. And now that the F2P model has been dropped, everyone has the ability to create and customize private or public matches. 

Kind of strange that Quake Live was turned into a paid item but I never had to pay for it. It doesn't show up in my library properly but I get the option to install it when I go on the purchase page. I'm guessing if you had already installed it previously then you get it for free? 

Yes, it's tied to your account if you installed it through Steam at any time before the switch. The store page says 17 people on my friends list own the game, yet the detailed page only shows 7. Some of you might just be able to simply install it from the store page as well. 

I had installed it through Steam when it was free, but I uninstalled it before it became paid. I wonder if Steam will allow me to install it for free again.

Anyway, that's more a question about how Steam tracks ownership of free games than about QL itself. I don't play online. 

http://steamcommunity.com/id/vondur/myworkshopfiles/?appid=282440 

Is Lunaran's level workshopped? 

 

I don't mean to be the guy who posts an allcaps facebook update declaring that mark zuckerberg doesn't have my permission to own my photos, but I am curious about licensing/ownership surrounding what's added to the workshop.

http://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/

Section 6 seems intended to grant Valve the right to take screenshots and pimp your shit on the Steam frontpage with them if it wants, but does so by declaring that it has right to anything that falls under the definition of derivative works with regard to anything related to the operation of Steam.

Can any legal/licensing mavens clarify? 

My gut feeling is it's a boilerplate agreement and Valve didn't read it closely enough or give enough of a shit to change it. They don't want your maps. 

 

I'm sure Gabe is sitting in his golden tower, fingers tented, smiling a shark-like grin as he consumes Quake deathmatch levels and adds them to his empire. He feeds on your suffering. 

as long as someone plays my old cobwebbed shit 

I wouldn't really worry too much about it that much. If Valve wanted to steal your map they'd likely instead just pay you like $5k for it which is far easier than any legal battle... I very much doubt that small paragraph is anywhere near enough to take your intellectual property or copyrights if you ever actually went to court over it. 

I think someone is trying to contact you about your maps, they seem to be on workshop already! :)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=585770260 

aaargh 

The masters of the dark arts, such as myself, say 'ayyy lmao' 

The guy says he'd sent you an email asking for permission but it bounced. 

searching my name only brings up a single map Ididn't upload myself!...

vondur's... a map I tested and he thanked me in the readme... 

NO COPYWRITE INTENDED!!!

http://images.akamai.steamusercontent.com/ugc/608349439289335610/2BFF6A715207ADB1A81129571A1154A37BDECDCB/ 

Put "Feel the Way you Hate" up!

I also had "Space Invaders N Junk" up too... but it was super broken in Quakelive... so I'll have to fix that someday... 

(someday is likely codeword for 'never') 

They don't want your maps.

I'm sure Valve is a rosy, angelic organization that would never do anything heinous and has only your best interests at heart. I'm less sure that they're "never" going to be bought by an organization that isn't and would and doesn't. Everyone would have followed Reddit's beneficent, hands-off management into battle the day before jailbait shockingly stopped being okay anymore. Legal agreements last a longer than your positive attitude toward a company.

ayyy lmao

I think asking about licensing is a pretty reasonable thing to do in this case. 

Lunaran

I don't have feelings about Valve one way or the other. But they're a business out to make money ... Taking jer Q3 mapz isn't going to make them money. So the odds are good that this isn't a honeypot they set up to trap unsuspecting mappers. 

> But they're a business out to make money ...

> Taking jer Q3 mapz isn't going to make them money.

Why are they doing it then? 

Because Steam. Steam makes money. Stealing your Quake3 maps does not.

Keeping people engaged with Steam makes Valve money over the long term.

That's why they do it. 

Frankly, I would have assumed everyone here would have inherently known that but ... well, hope that helps! 

I've made a collection on steam of everyone's QL maps so that grabbing all of them will be easy. I will update the collection as and when people convert their Q3 maps over to QL and upload them to workshop.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=588931999

This should be handy for when people join us on our custom maps servers once we get the stupid port forwarding shite worked out! 

I'll say it again.

I don't give a shit what their intentions are right now.

I don't give a shit what their business model is right now.

What concerns me is what they have the legal power to ever do.

If you don't think a big game publisher with bored, expensive lawyers on retainer would try to seize ownership of something that they have no idea how to monetize just in case someone else out there does, you should try working for Activision. I've dealt with this before and I'm not fucking dealing with it again.

My original question "Can anyone here clarify?" has been answered. I'll ask someone else. 

Sure, do what you gotta do. Happy New Year! :) 

If I buy QL for 2 bucks, can I play Lun's maps or not? 

But this is just guesswork.

For Valve (!= Gabe Newell) it is enough to make Steam a more attractive platform simply hosting the content - I doubt they will try to leverage it for anything beyond that, because the return wouldn't be enough for a handful of maps.

For QuakeLive however, its highly likely that sooner or later all custom maps will be curtained off behind some sort of premium account payment - of which no revenue will go to the author(s) of (some of) that content.

Their general stance seems to be indicating this. The ownership of the content is in a grey area and they could easily crush the author if they wanted to.

The question is, do you really want it on QuakeLive? If you're prepared to surrender your claim to it just so people can play, then go for it. A decade or whatever ago, that was the intention. It's just a bit different to see someone profiting from it, however indirectly.

Email Valve to clarify it, but what Willem's already said (boilerplate statement to protect them) is pretty much spot on.

All just guesswork, and may be completely off the mark. 

Shambler
Yes, you can.
It is one time pay. All workshop content will be available after game purchase.

ijed

For QuakeLive however, its highly likely that sooner or later all custom maps will be curtained off behind some sort of premium account payment - of which no revenue will go to the author(s) of (some of) that content.
QL had premium subscription and they paid authors for the rights to update and use their maps. Subscription system was replaced with one time payment and there is no sense for id to return to it.

Don't have any confirmation, but I highly doubt valve can do this on their own for legal reasons. Screwing mappers not worth messing with zenimax lawyers. 

I think that's where I come down on it, in the end. It's not in Valve's interests to screw over the content creators. There's no upside. 

QL is on complete autopilot now, and anyway Valve's EULA doesn't give id ownership of workshop content as far as I can tell.

And yeah in the past id has been pretty scrupulous about managing rights and compensation for QL user maps. 

Is there a tutorial somewhere to compile a level to work on Quake Live?

I tried loading my Q3 maps into QL but gives me an error about incorrect BSP version number or something. 

If you look on the Quake Live steam community page at the guides section.

Sorry can't link now, oh phone 

http://steamcommunity.com/app/282440/discussions/0/490124466453397402/#p1 

I'm not sure what to do about this, but it does appear that the QL Live Workshop on Steam is simply a bunch of kids stealing other peoples work, running the maps through a converter and re-posting it without the original authors permission.

Many maps (from a quick browse) appear to be nothing more than this at all.

I have no issue at all with original works or the author granting permission but seriously I don't think "Mario" http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=598733591 is converted by Pen-Pen, who created the original version "Mario Arena" http://lvlworld.com/review/id:242 - The thief also stole the screen shot from ..::LvL. Not the only image taken from ..::LvL.

This is only a single example. Within seconds it is easy to find many more.

Anyway, my point and question is, what can we as a community do to let Steam (Valve) know we are not happy with the way the Steam Workshop is being run?

I've seen a number of community based protest get some positive results and I really think it would be a good idea to do something at least. My issue is not with the QL Workshop, just how it is run and administrated.

My thinking behind making this a public, community request is because it is next to impossible to report a violation (copyright issue) or anything else to Valve about the workshop or individual maps. Every option to report an issue requires a login. There is no other way to contact the admins either (that I found). 

I suspect that the original content creator would have to protest for it to gain any traction. 

it's difficult to police and you can't really blame people for wanting to upload their favourite quake maps to quake live for people to play...

Stealing is an oft overlooked sign of flattery :P 

AFAIK, it is up to ID to curate their game's workshop, so they are the ones to contact.

I'm not sure there is much that can honestly be done though... the guys converting maps aren't claiming to be the authors, and most of us have always written .txt files that give permission to distribute the maps free of charge (even if some author's aren't keen on their work being on Steam, see Lunaran above). So it's a question to ID if it's really a scummy move to do a conversions and upload to Steam. Grabbing Tigger's shots from LvL though is real scummy... at least take your own shot of the map!

I do wish ID had made it so you would need to fully recompile a map from the .map source to put into QL... at least that would've limited conversions to just maps with released source. But it's too late for that. 

There is a distinct difference between "distribute" and "convert map from one game to another". QL Live is very clearly not Quake 3.

Taking screenshots from ..::LvL is just lazy and points to the conversion process being pretty simple. If it was complex to convert a map, taking a screenshot would be the simple part - and not an issue.

There seems to be little concern for this topic. Maybe I'm just defensive because of ..::LvL housing (a copy of) a lot of the original maps that are now being converted without consent. I guess in a way I feel a little like ..::LvL may be felicitating the conversion process.

Would people be interested in signing a petition on Change.org if I (or someone else) started something? Promoting the petition would be nice too. 

They come from World Spawn Archive
No Ones Making Money

Its Ok 

http://i.imgur.com/rD06m56.jpg 

Shut Up is an interesting response from a spam ip - https://stopforumspam.com/ipcheck/162.244.25.249

If you have to hide your id to make a comment, keep it to yourself. 

I don't think a petition is likely to do anything. 

And I'm okay with this. (Does it even work?) 

Iron Yard works, although (of course) they didn't bother to convert the aas as well. The readme isn't included outside of the pk3.

Lunaran's maps also work, but an even lazier job, as they don't show up in the maps list and can only be accessed manually (console). 

This is one of the reasons I decided to convert my maps myself to be honest (well, that and to have pretty workshop images on my Steam profile, heh.)
I would have been pretty annoyed if someone had converted them without asking, especially if they did it half-assed.

Doing it myself I was able to tweak a few things, update the arena file to make the maps appear in QL, update the loading screenshot to proper HD resolution like other QL maps, etc.
Unfortunately I'm still unable to get the .aas working on all the maps, not sure what is up with that, quite annoying. 

Since some of you guys have gone through this process:

I took a shot at converting titans/jlctf2 and it seems to be working OK (if I just manually put the pk3 into baseq3) except that in the map select menu it just shows a generic QL logo instead of a map image.

I do have a square little appropriately-named jpg in the levelshots/preview folder, and I'm pretty sure this worked the last time I looked at running the map in QL. Hmm. Any gotchas I should know about?

...or anything else, like differences in the arena file, or game entities, or whatever? I'm just kind of assuming that the CTF, Oneflag, and Harvester modes/entities are the same in QL (I guess Overload is gone?). Looked around for guides and stuff but not much luck yet.

Found this guide for uploading to workshop: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=539821860

... is that the right process?

=====

P.S. as for the aas file issues Bal mentioned, that does seem to require a lot of hoop-jumping, but various folks have apparently figured it out. This thread has some discussion and a converter program (although I haven't tried the program): http://quake3world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=51522 

Well poop, they changed the entity gametype keys for oneflag (now is "1f") and harvester (now is "har"). Guess that's not too bad, just need to relearn how to do some onlyents fiddling.

Still dunno what's up with the levelshot previews. 

I guess the preview thing is a universal issue with all workshop maps?

Gone ahead and published here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=612037662 

(Above posts were by me!) 

yeah, I'm not sure how to make thumbnails work either... There must be some magic, but who knows what it is. The whole Quake Live Workshop thing is a pain. 

I haven't seen a single custom map with the thumbnail working, so I think it's a bug with the game.
For the .aas, I've seen that discussion already, and it works for most maps (which I've done already), but for some maps it just won't work, no idea why.