[Akkadius]

Originally Posted by Zaela_S

Yeah, I missed the early days when it seems legal issues were discussed here a lot. Don't know much about all that stuff; curious where exactly the line would be drawn. Can I modify my own files? (Well, not much they can do there.) If so, what's to stop me from making and distributing a program which modifies peoples' files for them in a pre-set way, e.g. inserting new textures into an .s3d and modifying a .wld, but not distributing any of the original data from those files? Probably too blatant a loophole... presumably "modify" does come right after "distribute" on the list of Things You May Not Do.

For mob models, at least, I would be interested to see if they would work split up. I.e., load the file containing base data for a certain model, then load a brand new custom-made file which only contains data for a new texture set for that model. Would depend how the client's loader is structured -- but it already surprised me with how permissive it is: the Texture Adder just shoves new .wld data at the very end of the file rather than following the internal ordering/structure, and it works. Being in separate files is only a step further than that. Maybe.

I'm kind of disappointed that people in the early days were only really interested in custom zones and not, say, item models (to the extent than stuff is only documented as far as it is relevant to zones). Item models seem like they might be pretty open to having brand new data loaded from new files. (Unlike mob models which as far as I can tell are dependent on the client for the translation from 3-letter model code to race id numbers that go in server packets.)

Blah blah blah...

I wouldn't let that keep you from toying around with this. It is at the servers discretion to do what they want with graphic files. We can have the tools hosted here and guides around it but obviously we won't be redistributing Sony's intellectual property here.