Content repository

Overview

This section is dedicated to the gathering of all kind of content to feed our games, or yours, with beautiful artwork. As there already exists projects aimed at providing open-source selected content to game creators, we list them hereafter so that we keep a close look at their great creations. We placed each project in the relevant sections (ex: graphical or sound), even if it makes us specify some projects multiple times.

These artists, alone or gathered in groups, generously follow the path initiated by the developers, who, some years ago, launched the open-source principle, if not philosophy. The resulting artwork is released through similar licences: of course, the artists keep their intellectual property on their work, but they allow others to use them for their own purpose, as long as they comply with the rules the authors edicted. These rules are most of the time perfectly legitimate and do not hinder a proper usage of the artwork for hobbyist game creation.

The topic of licenses is discussed here, more details about OSDL and licenses are available.

Content might be:

graphical: 2D pictures and animations, movies, 3D models, etc.
sound: musics, special effects, voices, and so on

Besides, some technical external resources have been gathered.

Projects releasing genuine multi-media content

These projects focus on providing multiple media sources, and thus often are repositories for both graphical and sound content, as opposed to mere art galleries for instance.

In this category of projects, we spotted:

List of true multimedia content providers
Project name	Description	Licence	Direct link to the content
WorldForge	Perhaps the leading content project, provides game creators with, among other things, 2D & 3D media, music, rules systems and world development. Maybe a bit hard to browse, but a significant and growing amount of digital content is already available	Disjunction of the FDL and the GPL	Go
Art Libre [in french]	A project gathering music, litterature, video, movies, plastic arts and other content in an open-source-like way of freedom of distribution, with respect to the intellectual property of the authors	LAL	Go
Lune Rouge [in french]	The website of an association for audio-video creation and film-making	for sounds: LPM or LAL (both permitted) for 2D and 3D objects: LPM or LAL (both permitted) for textures: LAL for musics: undefined at the moment	Go
GNU Art	GPL artwork: animation, plastic arts, music, painting, photograph, texts	GPL	Go
Prografix [in french]	This website centralizes sprites, textures, 3D objects and sounds coming from various other sites	Depends on each website	Go
iDevGames	Lot of high quality content, only usable if the Apple platform will be targeted	iDG License	Go
Creative Commons	Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share.	CC Licenses	Go
Games creators	A french portal focusing on all kinds of video game creation, which includes a media repository	Various licenses used, everything should be free (as a beer)	Go
Clanlib	Website of a multi-platform game development library, with a media repository	Free media only, either licensed under the GNU GPL, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, Public Domain or a similar license which allows free reuse and distribution of the media	Go
3D Cafe	The free part of an e-commerce website helping artists to sell their creations	Free media apparently, but license scheme is rather unclear	Go
Aminet	Internet's largest collection of Amiga software, which includes content too	Free media apparently, but license scheme does not seem very reliable	Go

There are also very interesting forums about Help Wanted, Help Offered and Art, Modelling & Media Creation.

Please react!

If you have information more detailed or more recent than those presented in this document, if you noticed errors, neglects or points insufficiently discussed, drop us a line!

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Last update: Friday, July 10, 2009