[In-Progress] Unofficial SEIV Expansion Pack

[Urendi Maleldil]

Gandalf Parker said:
Whoever wants to do the work can upload it to CafePress on a free account and let people go there to buy it. Id have no problem paying 10 or 20 dollars for it. And it certainly wouldnt bother me if the person got some dollars for the work.

Hmm. That's an interesting idea. I hadn't thought of selling the mod. I remember Hadrian got permission from Malfador a long time ago to sell the Ultimate Mod.

There are a lot of third-parties that sell game add-ons for games like Microsoft Flight Simulator, so why not for SEIV? The trick would be to work out some sort of percentage-based revenue sharing thing with each contributor... complicated, but do-able. Plus it would be an interesting way to give back to all you SE4 modders that have been ou there for like ever.

What do you guys think? Is trying to sell a mod like this something you'd be interested in, or is it not worth the hassle?

It's probably too much work to make sure everybody gets their fair share. Besides, no one's going to be making handfuls of cash, since there will hopefully be a whole bunch contributors and SE4 is an older game with an audience that's largely moved on to SE5. But who wouldn't love getting an extra quarter in the mail each month? If you save up, you can buy a candy bar.

By the way, I thought you could only sell mugs and stuff on Cafe Press.

[Captain Kwok]

Hadrian got permission to sell the mod in the sense to cover the shipping costs - not for profit.

If it were ever possible to charge money for such a mod, I would think the cash would have to go to something like PBW.

[Urendi Maleldil]

Captain Kwok said:
Hadrian got permission to sell the mod in the sense to cover the shipping costs - not for profit.

If it were ever possible to charge money for such a mod, I would think the cash would have to go to something like PBW.

Great suggestion. That's actually a better idea. It would support the SE4 community as a whole, plus it would be easier to manage the money because it would all be all be going to the same place. Brilliant!

[Atrocities]

You cannot sell it. The legal ramifications of such a thing would only cause hardship and anger.

[Captain Kwok]

You would ask SFI/MM if you could give it away with an $XX donation to PBW. The expansion itself would have to contain no copyrighted material outside of SE stuff and the permission of all contributers to distribute their work. In that case I don't see any problems.

[Gandalf Parker]

Atrocities said:
You cannot sell it. The legal ramifications of such a thing would only cause hardship and anger.

You mean you should not sell it? I dont think there is a legal "cannot" involved. Many people in many games sell CDs of add-ons for games. After all, its their own work. Its no different than selling a CD of avatars, or icons, clip-art, sound effects, tiles, etc. There should be no problem selling a CD of help files, or nations, or replacement text files, or whatever for this game.

The advertising part of it might get shakey. You can announce it here and give a link but creating a page that sells the CD and mentions "Space Empires IV" or Malfador could complained about.

And it doesnt matter what the market is since it doesnt cost anything to put it online for sale. If I remember correctly the materials cost of providing it on CafePress is some like $6 so if you set it at $6 then you make nothing (CP handles the burning and shipping). If you charge $7 then you get a dollar each time.

But I guess with Shrapnel offering free download off of their servers then its no biggie for most of the mods. But a major mod-compilation that takes someone quite abit of effort would make sense to offer off of CP (also mugs and mousepads with keypress charts, tshirts with ship sets and funny sayings, posters of great space battles, bumper stickers, etc etc)

[Urendi Maleldil]

Anyway, there are several parts to the expansion:

• New Tech Areas (& Racial Traits)
• Expanded Tech Areas
• New Components, Facilities, Hulls
• New Races (& AI, possibly using some of the new techs)
• New Quadrants, Systems and Planets
• Flavor Text (Empire Types, etc.)
• Additional Graphics (load screen, UI enhancement, etc)
• New Events, Intel projects
• New Formations, Strategies

Most of these can be taken from existing mods (with the creator's permission of course), but it will take editing to make everything work together and keep the stock flavor. I know of several items from the Masters Mod and the Ages mod that might work as part of the expansion pack.

For graphics, we might be able to use a version of the Image Mod with the non-original and copyrighted images removed.

Post here or send me a private message if you want to help out with one of the above areas. Once we get the ball rolling I can assign you a particular task.

Also post links to any of your mods mods or race styles that might be able to help fill those areas.

[douglas]

Colony Tech 2.0 I'm pretty sure can be worked around by means of analyzing ships. The racial trait scheme cannot.

[Azselendor]

Captain Kwok said:
Hadrian got permission to sell the mod in the sense to cover the shipping costs - not for profit.

If it were ever possible to charge money for such a mod, I would think the cash would have to go to something like PBW.

Kwok is right, my permission only extended to recovering the costs of making the CD's and mailing them because, at that time, online distribution was cost prohibitive for me. I wasn't gonna make a penny off of it.

[Atrocities]

You might consider looking at such mods as Adamant's racial traits to see how they use REQUIRED negative values to further limit cheating and such.