Make OFP missions playable in ArmA - Permission needed by the author? Thoughts?

[kju]

Would please mission makers share their opinion on that one
please. Thank you! 

---

The OAC project is meant to make OFP missions and campaigns
playable in ArmA. At times the missions need slight changes
as some aspects are different between OFP and ArmA technically
(script syntax changes).

Now is OK to update the mission without seeking the authors
approval, while keeping every other aspect intact (like readme,
stating the original author and credits) and stating very clearly
that the mission was only updated to work in ArmA by project OAC?

Thank you for your consideration.

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My personal thoughts:

The need to request permission for every mission or to wait for
x weeks or months will effectively make the project non
functional and would kill it.

IMHO the original author's main interest was to share his work
and let others enjoy it. So as long as the true ownership and
the role of project OAC is stated I would say no permission is
needed and most authors should welcome to see their work
also playable in Armed Assault.

The exception is of course if the author explicitly stated that he
wants no modification of his work what so ever. Not to sure
on this one too though.

.kju



PS:
More details on project OAC
BIKI
BI forum thread

[savedbygrace]

Hmm, although this is a noble effort to keep the authors labor of love alive, I feel it is imperative to seek his/her approval. The differences between OFP and Arma can magnify any errors made in the translation. What was doable in OFP is not doable in Arma and vice versa. I speak particularly of the cinematics. Due to the simple fact that Arma does not offer the same types of units, animations, and other misc attributes, you will not be able to duplicate the beauty of the original authors work. I know from experience that it takes equally as much time to build a great cinematic as it does a mission and sometimes it becomes the simple things like those cinematics which people take away from the mission. You must also consider the utilization of custom addons. Authors most of the time conjure stories around those addons and if you replace them with standard sla or blufor then you have not accomplished a successful transition of the existing work of art. My input is this, try the author...try him/her again, and if you receive no reply of approval or disapproval, then its free game. Afterall, its not really the same mission.

Otherwise if you mean only to recreate the same scenario as the OFP Mission in Arma....why not name it the same but append the arma tag to it such as "The Unimpossible Mission [Arma]" It's like a father and son with the same name.....The original does not have to make any changes, but because the second is not the original, he must add Jr. to his name.

I know this ones old but I didn't see any replies to your question and thought it more rude to not reply than to dig up old posts.

[kju]

Thanks for your response savedbygrace 

Good points. We have handled it the way you suggested so far.
Try to get the permission. If there is no response over some time we just move on.
Thankfully almost all campaign creators we tried to contact so far have indeed responded. 

Unfortunately there seems to be only limited interest in SP play in ArmA these days.

[savedbygrace]

My opinion of this is that SP missions would get downloaded and played more than MP if editors would just make them. The fact is that editors spend all of their time making MP missions and flooding our beta boards with them and it is difficult to test them as we have no dedicated team of testers with set times to play. But our SP mission submissions are low. So, please keep up the effort, those missions will not be wasted nor your work forgotten. As you can see people still play OFP today and had we not lost many of those awesome missions in the unnamable, newcomers would have more to play, pull apart and learn from. The same can be said for Arma. I do have one request though, if you guys are not already doing it....build yuour missions so that others can learn from them, i.e commented scripts. Thanks.