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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

> To get the game to start you need one file from the original settlers 1 game because graphics and sounds are read from there.

Leaving aside the moral aspect of compensation for the artists who created the original graphics and sounds (who probably won't see any money from sales of the original game anyway), would it be legal to reverse engineer (intentionally simple) prompts for each piece of art needed, and then commission either humans or GenAI to create these, to then be able to distribute the remake without any dependency on the original?

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>would it be legal to reverse engineer (intentionally simple) prompts for each piece of art needed, and then commission either humans or GenAI to create these, to then be able to distribute the remake without any dependency on the original?

Sounds like clean room design. If you can prove the art was independently created, and you weren't just abusing the process to launder the original works (eg. prompting the AI a bazillion times until it looked exactly the same as the original), then you'd probably be fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

Of course, to legally be in the clear with AI art you should make sure it's both from sources that have proper licensing to avoid later possible lawsuit implications (Adobe's focusing on this, for example), and also keep in mind that AI art is uncopyrightable. Fortunately, the latter is a non-issue for MIT license-type projects.

In a clean room design, the person doing the implementation needs to have never seen the original. So the same would apply to the human or GenAI doing that in this case.

What if I prompt a first AI to create a detailed prompt from the original resource, and then ask a second AI to create the resource from that prompt ? The AI creating the resource have never seen the original.

If I included the exact same graphics as the original, but I did paint them all by hand myself, would you think that makes a difference? No it doesn’t. And what you are proposing is just the same with extra steps. They could include graphics that don’t look the same but I guess that defeats the reason for the game.

There’s a middle ground. For instance OpenTTD has fan made artwork that matches the aesthetic of the original game without being a direct copy. Still plenty of reason to play even if it doesn’t look exactly like it does in my memories.

> They could include graphics that don’t look the same but I guess that defeats the reason for the game.

How does that defeat the reason for the game?

I just assumed that the goal was to make an exact reproduction of the original, but I might have gotten that wrong.

For me the game is mostly about the mechanics and I don't think I'd have any issue playing it with an entirely different visual and auditory design, assuming it can be made to be self-consistent.

There is no issue with creating new graphics and sounds from the scratch, OpenTTD did exactly that for Transport Tycoon Deluxe. It’s not identical but is enough to convey original intent and be freely available.

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