Howdy
Does anyone know of any royalty free trading card images? What I really need are picture for the K,Q,J and the suits, but if anyone knows of a whole deck that would be great.
Thanks
Alex

Not a complete solution, but many fonts contain characters for the pips...

I think I saw one in the downloads here...

Edit:
And I did. http://www.idevgames.com/content/download.php?id=114
The GPL license is royalty-free right?

Yes, it's royalty-free.

Not entirely clear how it applies to non-software, though...

If they don't do, how about getting some generic playing cards, put them into a scanner, and scan away. If you don't have a scanner, ask someone here.

Since the VAST majority of playing cards you the exact same face design, I assume that they (the face design) must be public domain in some way.

Or i just might be that there is only once company putting out many brands of playing cards. In all likelyhood nobody would notice. But its good to be safe about such things. Lawyers are scary.

Unfortunately I was looking into this same question and I was able to find some free face card graphics that could be used. I haven't been able to find them again though.

There are also some cards (GPL'd) at

http://www.waste.org/~oxymoron/cards/

GPL! argh!! Does that mean I would have to release all my source code if I used them!

Somebody needs to tell these people that the GPL is a *software* license and can't be applied to artwork...

Anywho, I'd say those graphics are fair game to be used, and you wouldn't have to distribute your source if you didn't want to. Well, unless this if for a uDevGame entry, and then you would need to.

I think that the reason so many of the face cards are the same, is because the pictures have been in use since the 1800ís and the copyrights have expired on them. The only deck of cards I have handy is a Bee card deck by US Playing cards and they only claim rights to the case design, card backs, fonts, joker and Ace of Spades which has the manufacturers trademark on it. There is a large collection of royalty free cards at this link.

http://www.oberhumer.com/opensource/pysol/

Many of these card designs are scanned from antique card decks.

There is also a deck available here that can be used in your projects.
http://www.jfitz.com/cards/
-Jim