transcience/docs/ASSETS.md

Asset packs and attribution

The packs themselves are not in git (see assetpacks/README.md), which means their bundled licence files are not either. This file is the record that survives. Keep it current when a pack is added or removed.

How assets get from a pack into the game

assetpacks/ carries a .gdignore, so Godot skips it entirely — nothing there can be referenced from a scene or script. Files are copied into res://assets/ in game-ready form, and only then imported. The tree is 3.9 GB and tools/check.sh runs --import, which would otherwise walk all of it every run.

What is in the game today is three sprite sheets, four sounds and twelve small UI sprites. Sprite rects and sound paths are all declared in one place, src/view/art.gd, and tests/unit/test_art.gd asserts every rect lands inside its texture — a wrong atlas coordinate does not error, it silently draws the wrong pixels.

Licence findings

Checked against each pack's itch.io page, and against the licence file the pack itself ships where there is one. Two of the five forbid redistribution, which is what publishing a repository containing them would be — so they are not in the repository.

Pack	Licence	Commercial	Credit	In this repo?
0x72 DungeonTileset II	CC0 1.0 (public domain)	Yes	Not required	Yes — assets/sprites/dungeon_tileset.png
Helton Yan Pixel Combat	CC BY 4.0	Yes	Required	Yes — assets/audio/sfx/
Complete UI Essential Pack	CC BY 4.0	Yes	Required	Yes — assets/sprites/ui/
Fire Pixel Bullet 16x16	Custom	Free tier non-commercial; paid tier allows commercial	Encouraged	No, at any tier — local only
750+ Effect and FX Pixel All	Custom	Free tier non-commercial; paid tier allows commercial	Encouraged	No, at any tier — local only

The blocking clause

Both bdragon1727 packs state, verbatim:

You cannot do: Resell / redistribute this asset.

And the paid tier of the FX pack is no better for this purpose:

You can NOT re-distribute the file, no matter how much you modify it you can use it but not share or re-sell it.

Putting those files in a public repository distributes them to everyone who clones it, which is squarely what that forbids. Paying for the commercial tier does not unlock it — the restriction survives payment and survives modification.

So they live in assets/local/, which is gitignored. Art.bullets_texture() and Art.impact_texture() load them at runtime if present and return null if not; the bullet renderer falls back to a generated dot. Verified both ways: with the files present the game uses them, and with them hidden the whole suite still passes and the game runs — tests/unit/test_art.gd has an explicit case for their absence, because a clean clone is the configuration most contributors will actually have.

This is also why nothing there may be preload()ed — preload resolves at compile time and would fail the build on every machine that lacks the files.

The UI pack is the easy case

Crusenho's Complete UI Essential Pack ships its own License.txt naming CC BY 4.0 outright, with the licensor and store link spelled out. That permits redistribution and commercial use, so unlike the bullet and FX packs a subset of it is committed — twelve PNGs, 48 KB, under assets/sprites/ui/, listed in UiTheme.TEXTURES.

Only what the game uses was copied rather than all 98 sprites: each committed PNG costs a Godot .import sidecar, and a directory of files nothing references is a directory nobody prunes. The rest stays in the untracked pack.

The obligation it creates is the same one the audio creates — see below.

Two obligations this creates

1. Two packs are CC BY 4.0 and require attribution — Helton Yan's audio and Crusenho's UI art. A file in the source tree does not satisfy that once the game ships, because a player who downloaded a build never sees it. Done: Settings → Credits shows the same list, built from src/core/credits.gd, including a link to the licence text as CC BY asks. tests/unit/test_credits.gd asserts every source there also appears in CREDITS.md and in this file, so the three cannot drift apart.

2. Both bdragon packs are non-commercial in their free tier. Buying the full tier does fix that — confirmed verbatim from the FX pack's paid licence: "You may use these assets in personal, commercial or non-commercial projects."

   It does not fix the repository problem. The paid licence's very next sentence is: "You can NOT re-distribute the file, no matter how much you modify it you can use it but not share or re-sell it." Redistribution is forbidden at every tier, so paying moves these assets from local-only-and-non-commercial to local-only-and-commercial. They cannot be committed to a public repo at any price.

   The only route that puts bullet and FX art back into the repository is replacing it with something permissive (CC0, or CC BY with attribution), which would also remove the local-asset fallback machinery.

Not in use

assetpacks/considering_dont_use_yet/ is the "not chosen" marker and nothing there is referenced. It contains RF Catacombs v1.0 (public domain per its bundled public-license.txt — free for personal or commercial use, credit appreciated, no reselling; artwork by Szadi art), plus Tiny RPG Character Pack 02 and neo_zero demos, whose terms are unrecorded.

Converting audio before use

Helton Yan's pack is 24-bit / 96 kHz stereo — studio masters, averaging ~2 MB per file and 5 MB at the largest. That is roughly a hundred times what a game needs for a gunshot.

Downsample to 16-bit / 44.1 kHz mono before copying anything into res://assets/. Godot imports .wav losslessly and keeps it in memory uncompressed for low-latency playback, so the source format is what you pay for in RAM and in export size.

Where converted assets go

res://assets/, which is committed and imported. See assets/README.md. Art is Stage 2 in ROADMAP.md; everything currently on screen is drawn from primitives plus one runtime-generated dot texture.

Placeholder art worth revisiting

• Warden's Ration draws as a gold flask (Art.ITEM_ICONS[1]). The 0x72 tileset has no food sprite, and the item is deliberately useless flavour, so a recoloured flask stands in until the art pass. It reads as a potion, which is the wrong thing for it to read as.