FAKE FREE?

Hey on the main page I see this advert:
BUT when I click and foollow the link I see that I WILL make a donation via paypal...

Now I do not pretend to be a scholar of Crown Law... Especially since I live in Texas. But here in the Lone Star Republic it is illegal to insist on a DONATION to provide a free service. Such a donation would then be a FEE and become taxable and (subsequent articles detail how certain TAX FREE entities would loose TAX FREE status for requiring DONATIONS which could then be termed as FEES) etc.

Can someone clarify this?

It's free tow download and use non-commercially (I got it) but if you use it commercially they want a donation right? I don't mind doing that. But yeah if they are a business the donation is still income and tax must be paid on it. In fact even as non-business individual, any money you "make" should be declared in your annual tax return, even bank interest!

Well all I see is a DONATION PAGE... exactly where is just the link to download?

I see that I have to give them my email address. This is a cost. It is a valuable piece of information.

That and I don't like SPAM and I am not insured by anything on this page that giving them that info will not generate SPAM to me...

Giving them your email is a cost? Well I suppose so, but if they didn't require that to give you the link then people could post the link to to the file on other websites (they may not know how to prevent that) and then those people would never see the donation page, or any ads, and that's not really fair.

I suppose you want everyone who's offering free code or DLL's, like myself, to stop asking people to email them in exchange for it as well? Ha!

If I was Tom right now I'd have my head buried in my hands wondering why I ever bothered. Those textures were top stuff, and I think he was way premature in giving up on selling them personally. I think they're worth every bit of what he was asking, and I surely would have bought them if I had been able to find a use for them.

If you feel that giving out your email address or being asked to donate if you use them commercially is too much to ask, then it's not my place to judge you, nor is it Tom's, but to actually start a whiney thread to complain about it after someone has shown such generosity is a real kick in the teeth, in my opinion, and if this is how people are going to react, I would suggest that people shouldn't give away anything for free in future. Some people are just too ungrateful for words.

Tell you what ROOK, when you make your comercial project, I'll pay them £20 and you give me a copy of your project for free?

i know, i wasn't too keen on that bit either.

reminds me of that truespace 3.2 free release,
the one where you had to submit an email address
before you could download it. then they started sending
me all these ads for their stuff, at first it was interesting
but when i decided i didn't like truespace the emails
got irritating and felt like spam, although maybe
i could have stopped the emails if i made an effort.

so when i saw to get this free texture pack i had to
enter an email address i didn't bother, just out of
habit really, not that i think the speed brothers are
spam merchants.

i think their site is poorly set up though. not the actual
design/graphics but the buy/download system.
i went to the buy page and i couldn't figure out how
i would actually buy the texture pack 1, there was
no easy path such that a blind man could follow. it
seems you have to contact them directly by email.
i think they definitely need to upgrade that to at
least an order form via email, although better to have
shareit, etc.

2 Muk,

The way I understand it, the dont want bulk sales, they want proper contract work. And when you follow that path contact with your clients becomes a nesesity.

I dont think that they will spam you at all, but an email address is a good "in". What they want is good showcase material for their CV's etc. So they make sure that they have the email address of all their "Clients", and (Probably in 6 months or so), we will all get an email, asking if we found the pack useful, do we have a project to showcase, can they have a some screenshots and a statement. It might not even be an email, Tom might simply ask us here.

I dont see anything wrong if they are trying to use their texture packs in this way. (I might be totally wrong about this, I emailed and asked, but they wouldnt tell me)

oh come on!

funny thing about this is that my RAR file is about 100 Mb and extracted content out of rar file was about 28 Mb...soooo...whats going on?? You guys have same results??

114mb here.
992 textures.

Seems like a great deal to me. I can't see the problem donating even if you don't use them commercially.

@Rook:
<sales pitch smile>
If you use them in a commercial project, you are expected to make a donation. Otherwise, free!

Have a nice day!
</sales pitch smile>

Don't you have to actualy MAKE money, before it can be taxed? :)

Seriously, I simply didn't want all that time & work going to waste, hence the freebies. Donations cover b/w costs (over 240 downloads so far @ 97meg), and generosity permitting, some beer money.

We do not spam. If we were after eMail addresses, we'd buy them in bulk, not give away hard work as cost to ourselves.

So turn down the paranoia, and get downloading them.

Tom

I filled out the form but it never gave me a link. I want to check them out for possible usage. What do I do now?

eMail me (your profile here has no eMail address) and I'll drop you a link.

Tom, may I try it again?? Extracted textures is about 5 time less in memory usage than rar file I received??

Sent, and Thanks!

This .rar has really nice textures in it. For some unknown reason, though, over 100 of the images are repeated in a second subfolder. That is probably what Naughty Alien is seeing - the contents of the subfolder and not the main folder.

Tom - why are some of the images repeated in a subfolder?

"Giving them your email is a cost?"

Yes.

All it's going to do is build a worthless mailing list for them to spam in the future. Worthless because the people on it didn't choose to be there. They weren't asking to be sent sales pitches - they were forced to sign up to get the textures.

That's not permission marketing. That's scamming people.

You are well aware that you can register a free e-mail account anywhere for this type of offers right?
Or even use services like dodgeit (http://www.dodgeit.com/)?

Jesus some people like to kick a gift horse in the teeth. Thanks very much for the textures, Tom.

He just said he's not sending the emails to spam people. It's free texture. Dam good ones too. I can imagine the work that went into them and he's giving them away for free. I myself made a donation, because i think he deserves something for them and they are excellent textures.

Can't believe people crying over an email address...

I totally agree with Gab...

Oh and, take a peek here. The man's giving blitz3d the best upgrade it can get hopefully.

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=61164

heh, I stopped being surprised how picky/demanding/critical people can be when giving away FREE stuff, ages ago. It really is quite astounding.

I donated and got the textures. And they're top textures to.

So you give your email address. I get spam anyway no matter what I try to do to block it so getting a little extra doesn't matter.

Plus Tom does state he won't sell emails addy's to others or spam.

Give the guy a break for Christ's sake.

I know for a fact that Tom put a hell of a lot of work into his texture pack, and they really are great. He was charging below £30 for over a thousand high resolution textures (most of which were tileable) and nobody was interested. Why? You lot want to make games don't you? You were basically offered most of the artwork you could ever want for a very small sum of money.

Now he's giving it away completely gratis (against my own advice I hasten to add), and people are still bitching!

I've heard some nonsense in my time but that takes the biscuit.

If I was Tom then I'd take the textures down right now and tell everybody to go and screw themselves.

</rant>

> You are well aware that you can register a free e-mail account anywhere for this type of offers right?

well actually Gosse you're wrong there. see this?

> Please note we do not accept anonymous email addresses such as hotmail,yahoo & google etc.

Hehe, it's really funny how some poeple think when they got something for free, then they also get some special right for perfection, extra service and total customer support.

Once I really used to release a piece of freeware using a perl script that first checked a list of "sucking IPs" and sent them a 404 , while all other users were redirected to the real zipfile :)

Very nice textures, thank yoo very much, I will be playing around with them in the near future.

Cheers

Garion

Whoops I didn't read that line - used my hotmail account with no problems.

Suggestion for those who think it's a scam: Don't download any free textures. It's no loss to anyone else, including Tom.

> Why? You lot want to make games don't you?

Well, that's debatable. "Start" yes, "make", well... :)

@Nomen,

Tom did say it was his brother who didnt like Hotmail etc, and that if he (tom), reconised the adress it would be alright

@Muk

You are right that it says you cannot use those types of account, but Tom, (In the real thread for these textures), said all you needed to do was Email/inform Him (Tom), and He would make that his Brother excepted the address.