Agreements

I've had a read through of both agreements. The TTS EULA is pretty forgiving, it only mentions "mods" in the sense of dynamically-linked libraries and derivatives of the game itself, and they have a catch-all statement for custom content (the bit we're interested in) saying they are not responsible for their implementation.

The Steam Workshop Agreement has a potentially damning clause, however. Under section 6B, it states:

Workshop Contributions are Subscriptions, and therefore you agree that any Subscriber receiving distribution of your Workshop Contribution will have the same rights to use your Workshop Contribution (and will be subject to the same restrictions) as are set out in this Agreement for any other Subscriptions.

So given that workshop items are what they call "Subscriptions", section 2A applies:

Valve hereby grants, and you accept, a non-exclusive license and right, to use the Content and Services for your personal, non-commercial use (except where commercial use is expressly allowed herein or in the applicable Subscription Terms)

This was to be expected. We're only going to be able to use the items for personal use, unless we have the creator's explicit permission. There's also this under the same section:

To make use of the Content and Services, you must have a Steam Account and you may be required to be running the Steam client and maintaining a connection to the Internet.

I'm assuming this doesn't mean much, since you need to download the workshop items via Steam anyways. However, under section 2G, it states:

You may not use the Content and Services for any purpose other than the permitted access to Steam and your Subscriptions, and to make personal, non-commercial use of your Subscriptions, except as otherwise permitted by this Agreement or applicable Subscription Terms. Except as otherwise permitted under this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use), or under applicable law notwithstanding these restrictions, you may not, in whole or in part, copy, photocopy, reproduce, publish, distribute, translate, reverse engineer, derive source code from, modify, disassemble, decompile, create derivative works based on, or remove any proprietary notices or labels from the Content and Services or any software accessed via Steam without the prior consent, in writing, of Valve.

This 100% counts under "create derivative works based on". Given this, we have to either solve "Except as otherwise permitted under this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use), or under applicable law notwithstanding these restrictions", which asking the owner's explicit permission may do, but I'm not 100% sure on that, or we need the written consent of Valve themselves. If neither can be solved, then converting mods may still be possible, but only if the mod was NOT downloaded from the Steam Workshop.

Mod Conversion

On your point about the actual conversion, I'm in agreement that converting the assets themselves will be a lot easier than the scripts. In fact, I think it's pretty much been decided in #65 that the Lua API for TTC will not attempt to replicate that of TTS's, so converting the scripts from one game to the other automatically will be pretty much impossible in that regard.

Lastly, one more thing that was recently discovered on the Discord is that some (maybe most?) TTS mods are bundled as "Unity Asset Bundles", which may or may not have their own license (will need to check), and their own implementation difficulties when it comes to the conversion.

Uh oh!

Is it possible to create a tool to convert Tabletop Simulator packages? #273

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