Up and Coming

How would people react to a donations -> vr mods gig?

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So I got a DK1 back in October and right away I hacked Morrowind to run on it with a modified DLL, but then halfway abandoned the project due to the small amount of people who played it, plus IRL stuff, and the fact that my DK1 is now obsolete and no longer exciting. I'm still planning on finishing it to some extent and it's already much better than any other Morrowind VR mod, but before, back when I was ambitious about it, I wanted to hack lots of different games the same way. Now, my problem is that I can't afford to buy another devkit (dk2) and I also can barely afford to take time out of my busy schedule to work on my hobbies, but I still REALLY want to bring some of the amazing games of the past into full 3D immersion like I did with Morrowind. Oblivion and Skyrim obviously, but imagine even things like Unreal Tournament 2004 (or UT99 even), or pretty much anything else that doesn't have and probably never will have oculus rift support natively.
My question is, how do you think the community would react if I had a thread where basically people could financially support the hacking of specific games they want to see supported, and I'd work on each one more or less proportionally to its number of supporters? Essentially, I'd be a one-man game-hacking service whose budget is both decided and provided by its customers. Would it be seen as some sort of unfair scheme, or would that actually be something the community would be interested in helping with? I can see it going both ways. In the past, when I made large mods (runecraft for minecraft, gravity hull designator for garry's mod), I got a bit of a community going first and then I put a donate button on the front page just in case people wanted to give me a push or show their support, and it worked pretty well to keep the mods alive for years. I don't know how it would work out here though, especially since I don't exactly have any sort of following on this forum yet aside from a few people over on my Morrowrift thread.
Anyway, I'd appreciate some feedback on how well or not well this plan would work-- I'd love to hack as many games as I can to work but it's just not in my best interest to do so right now, and I don't expect it to be so anytime soon on its own. Something like this would at least make it worthwhile for me so I could work on getting everyone's favorite games working on the Oculus like I wish I could. Idk though.

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superllamaAuthor

Up and Coming

So before I can have a website I guess I need to think of a domain name. Here are some ideas I had, maybe someone else will think of a better one:

rifthax.net
oculushackpack.net
vrpatches.net
yourgamesinvr.net
riftyourgames.net

I'm leaning towards either yourgamesinvr, riftyourgames or vrpatches-- what do you guys think? I just finished my summer and I'm going to be moving back to school over the next week, then I'll be free and able to really work on all this stuff. So far all I've done since I started the thread was make a C++ project called "skyrimhax" which consists of a (working) d3d9.dll wrapper that doesn't do anything except load correctly :lol: but after next week I'm planning on injecting my code into it and starting the arduous journey to locate skyrim's clipping planes and decipher its rendering pipelines.

Someone has very generously offered to make a website for me so I can focus on doing the hacking, so we should have that up eventually too and then things will really get moving smoothly. My hope is that this will grow from an idea to a reality and I'll be supporting new games fairly regularly, at least giving people a chance to do something about the previously-true fact that their favorite games might never be playable in VR. I suppose if you look at it that way, it does make sense for me to require donations for most of these projects since most of the games that other people want hacked are not games I'd normally be wanting to hack on my own-- it's the other people who want it hacked, so they can sponsor the projects with their own money and I'll work on it-- and it's still non-profit because once I make it, it's free for everyone. In fact even Skyrim isn't a game I'd probably be obsessed with hacking on my own-- I've always been a Morrowind person. But with donations and a lot of community support, Skyrim on VR could become a reality and so could practically any other game.

Now after writing this post I'm thinking "yourgamesinvr" is probably the best name for the project, because what I'm doing is hacking YOUR games to work in VR (also not *just* rift, since if people bought me a hydra or STEM I'd try to make it work with that too). Any thoughts? I definitely want this to be a community-led project, I'm just the one who wants to write a ton of DLL wrappers.

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saviornt

Up and Coming

Depending on the EULA and where you live, there may be legal repercussions with this.. so, just cover your bases before you set up shop.

Also, some "hack detection services" and security software may pick up DLL injectors as hacking / viruses / malware. I've seen it before, so just let your customers know that beforehand, or things could go bad in the PR front.

Some MMO companies said that they will try not to ban people for "hacking" the game for better display/graphics, as it doesn't provide the user a benefit over others, however, almost all of them have automated services. Usually, you can send a message to a CSR and they will sort the account out in a few days.

Current WIPs using Unreal Engine 4: Agrona - Tales of an Era : Medieval Fantasy MORPG

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superllamaAuthor

Up and Coming

Yeah, I was a little nervous about that-- I wasn't sure whether I would need to contact the developers or just make sure the EULA's don't have anything too restrictive in them, I guess doing both would be a good idea. One difference though-- I'm not actually *injecting* the DLL, I'm making a wrapper for it that sits in the folder and is loaded instead (the way Morrowind Graphics Extender works). I think scanners usually give those less of a hard time but I could be wrong. I'm not entirely sure how services like PunkBuster and VAC work but I do suspect they wouldn't like me modifying the game's clipping planes in memory, which is often required for good VR support (not to mention the fact that any aim-with-headtracking techniques might easily be seen as an aimbot). If it comes down to it, I'll be the first one to get banned from a game for hacking, so I'll be able to warn people not to play on anti-cheat servers-- people might have to make their own servers without anti-cheat services enabled in order to play VR. Either way I don't think I'll encounter this problem with Skyrim specifically but it could definitely be a problem down the road if people want me to hack BF3 or something like that; glad you brought it up because it does need to be sorted out and discussed.

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Gablar

Up and Coming

Have you thought about using Patreon for crowd funding? In Patreon people subscribe to your channel but only pay you whenever you release your next art(mods).

HiroProtag0nist

Honored Contributor

Sounds ok...ish.

If somebody donates £20 for you to hack Skyrim, but he's the only one who asks for Skyrim, how do you tell him it isn't worth your time?

Let's say the first 100 people who donate all ask for a different game - from what you have said, you don't have much time, so how will you mod 5, nevermind 100?

The usual way is to start off doing things because you love doing it, you get lots of interest because you've done a good job and then people will invest in your work.

I'm just slightly worried that you didn't manage one game and it's the game you yourself love and really wanted to play in VR.

Big PC, all the headsets, now using Quest 3

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superllamaAuthor

Up and Coming

"andyring" wrote:
If somebody donates £20 for you to hack Skyrim, but he's the only one who asks for Skyrim, how do you tell him it isn't worth your time?

People would be able to vote for games they want in the poll without donations, and only games I pick from the top of the poll would be added to the main page with donate buttons. And even if I did add one and got donations for it and then later found out it's not possible to hack or something like that, I'd refund any donations it had.

"andyring" wrote:
The usual way is to start off doing things because you love doing it, you get lots of interest because you've done a good job and then people will invest in your work. I'm just slightly worried that you didn't manage one game and it's the game you yourself love and really wanted to play in VR.

Yeah, but not everyone can afford to do everything they love to do on their own. I finished Morrowrift well enough that I personally didn't mind the remaining bugs, and any work past that point was regrettably superseded by things I had to do that were more important to me. I do see what you mean though, and that's why this topic was originally a question of whether this idea is terrible or not (I honestly didn't know). So far most people have been okay with it, but I'm also grateful for those pointing out the flaws. I did consider just making the hacks and then letting people donate after I finished them, but I know how my mind works and some sort of website like I described just seemed like it would be the most effective way to actually get things done. Once something like this is up and running and people are supporting it, the sense of duty and gratitude would power me through the hard work even when I wouldn't be able to motivate myself otherwise.

Now that I'm back and able to work though, to address everyone's concerns (including my own) it'd probably be a good idea for me to just go ahead and try to hack Skyrim for DK1 on my own with no support other than people wanting me to do it, and if I can manage near-perfect DK1 support for Skyrim then I can most likely hack other games too. Morrowrift was admittedly easier than others because I had MGE to springboard off of, and it was Direct3D 8 so I didn't have to worry about shaders. So yeah, I totally understand the concern that Morrowrift isn't a good enough example of what I'd be able to do-- maybe if I can just do Skyrim then it'll open some doors.

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JFlynn

Participant

"superllama" wrote:

So I guess that's $300 + 10 games x $60, which would be 900, and if I round it up to $1000 then that's probably about how much I'd need to hack ten games.

Consider doing a few games really well rather than a shallow pass over a big set of games. 10? Look how long it took you to get 80% of the way through just Morrowind when you get the details right. VorpX, Vireio, and whatever else already exist if I want a quick and dirty VR version of something. What you bring to the table is doing it *right* as opposed to being a general purpose tool. That said, if you can really crank out conversions at that pace that are notably better than stuff you'd get with VorpX or Vireio... then that sounds great. I just have trouble imagining that.

Why not pick a couple of games that you are personally into, or the community shows they are willing to toss some money towards, and dive much deeper on each. Skryim is a great choice, and Dark Souls 2 would be another suggestion -- strong fanbase that I could see might toss money for a really good VR version.

If you've already shown you can do a good job with Morrowind then asking for funds to get a DK2 on that alone might be reasonable... I don't know. I'm not going to install Morrowind to verify that myself. Doing a single high profile game would go far to establishing some cred.

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dghost

Up and Coming

Personally, I would be extremely hesitant to do this. I have not accepted donations for Q2VR explicitly because I don't want to be in a situation where someone can say I profited off of the (re-)distribution/packaging of their intellectual property and copyrighted materials.

The simple reality is that even if it *is* fair use (e.g., in the case of Q2 where the engine is GPL'd and distributing modifications is definitely not illegal), all it takes is the threat of legal action and it's over unless you manage to pull in pro-bono legal counsel or a group like the EFF - and to be honest, I don't have the time to deal with that shit.

And even then, it's much easier to argue fair use when you didn't profit off of it.

If you do it, be extremely careful what and how you choose to distribute...

Current Quake II VR stable release: 1.3.1 DK2 support: see this post

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superllamaAuthor

Up and Coming

I wouldn't be repackaging anything, just distributing an entirely new module of code which links into the normal game and wraps its function calls, like TriDef etc does.

I would normally just hack the games I play, but I don't really play games that much anymore. I have a grand total of 35 hours in Skyrim since the day it was released, and I rarely even play Morrowind anymore even though it's my favorite game. I was hoping other people would have enough enthusiasm for the games they love, which would translate into support, which would translate into me getting work done.

I do see what you mean about skimming over games too quickly and trying to spread everything out-- just doing Skyrim by itself to begin with definitely makes sense as a proof of concept, and I don't need a website to start that out. The idea of the poll from which I can pick new projects myself was mostly to allow me to control pacing so I wouldn't be spread too thin-- I'd only have 1 or 2 beta or unreleased hacks up at a time-- but I suppose I might find myself in a situation where I'm on a roll and then suddenly stuck and unable to keep up with my previous pace, and that wouldn't be very good.

I don't know-- I can still see it both ways so it's really confusing. What I imagine is I'd have a website, with games and progress bars and donate buttons and download links on the page. To begin with, the only thing on the page would by skyrim and morrowind, but there'd be a poll on the left for people to vote for games. Once I finish either skyrim or morrowind, then I'd pick something off the top of the poll and add it, and there'd be a completed hack and two WIP hacks. Then I'd finish another one and pick another game off the top of the poll. Then maybe if any of the hardware goals like the DK2 were reached, then I'd go back through each of them and add DK2 support. The entire process could take anywhere from weeks to months, but if I think of it being controlled that way it seems manageable and maybe even like some kind of good idea, but I don't know if I'm just being overly optimistic.

At this point I'm getting more and more cautious with each post, though I'm still thinking of ways the issues could be addressed and still work more or less the way I described, but I'll definitely have to think more about it. I don't want to cause any trouble, lol.

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n00854180t

Up and Coming

(re-)distribution/packaging of their intellectual property and copyrighted materials.

As superllama noted, that's a way different situation and he's not repackaging or distributing any material that's not under his own copyright.

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