262 replies to this topic

[jcompton]

You know, it's very confusing having all of this discussion about TeamBG policy on Studios, while Studios policy discussions take place on PPG, etc. etc. Maybe that would be a good use for the otherwise-unnecessary FWP forum--a one-stop shop for all site policy discussions!

[Vlad]

Such a huge thread, wow! Just a waste of time reading all the posts. Once again, blah-blah-blah... Nothing important, nothing usefull. I just want to answer to posts which mention my name.

1. I have never used IDW - NEVER!

2. I didn't use IDU for about 4 years. IDU is bad! IDU is very very bad!! People, don't use IDU!!! It messes states and breaks weights. I would suggest to remove it from download. It's not worthwhile to keep it for download.

3.

The PM for link is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. If you want to make them available for download, do so, but don't make Baronius and Vlad tickle your balls just for the privilege of downloading tools nobody else wants.

Sim, you're rude... I don't know what did you mean though, and how this relates to me and to tickling balls.

4. I like graphics and multimedia TeamBG tools. They are extremely usefull and can easily handle most of the graphics/audio modding without problems. Cudos to Theo and other TeamBG guys who made them. Does WeiDU support any kind of modding except dialogues, scripts, patching and installation? The answer is NO! I cannot make areas with WeiDU, I cannot make new BAMs, spells, interface, record and convert audio with WeiDU! WeiDU is nice but its use is very limited in IE modding. Still if you are serious modder you cannot work without old TeamBG tools. So, please, acknowledge people who made them (including Theo) and now support them (including igi and Dax). I assume Sim and Co. can live without them because they make some strange tweaky-tricky-buggy-free-one-day-mini-mods and promote them as the best mods around.

[EDIT] Sim, I remember that time when you appeared at TeamBG, your worked on stripping project for BG2, you edited TeamBG tutorials, you were a nice guy... what has happend to you?

Edited by Vlad, 23 June 2006 - 08:04 PM.

[the bigg]

I assume Sim and Co. can live without them because they make some strange tweaky-tricky-buggy-free-one-day-mini-mods and promote them as the best mods around.

Y' know, some tweaks aren't one day stuff. The time for making them just lies in doing R&D for new tp2 tricks, asking for WeiDU improvements (if you want technical buzzwords, new API), and doing some tricky coding which will actually be useful in RL as initial training in languages like C++.
As an example, Armor Rebalancing from Refinements is over 1000 lines long, it used the (by the time) revolutionary 2da table lookup technique, which was extended to a special table tra format (which AFAIK is still unique). It is also compatible with all major mods out there without need of any treatment (besides ampling some text files, and if you're nice using automated scripts to update the description lookup tables); it doesn't biff your override, doesn't install a random new GUI, and doesn't require the WorldMap out there.
NeJ, on the other part, has introduced a twisted version of the "warez" concept into the modding scene, and is a pain in the ass to make compatible with other mods (and the install process is exceedingly ugly, requiring over ten passages in a BMP compilation).

If you don't want to read all the blurb: size doesn't matter.

[Vlad]

1000 lines of code for armor rebalancing! I pity you.

By the way, what is the problem with original armour that it requires rebalancing?

[the bigg]

1000 lines of code for armor rebalancing! I pity you.

By the way, what is the problem with original armour that it requires rebalancing?

With the rebalancing, heavier armours impose penalties to thieving skills, spellcasting (not flat-out blocking) and dexterity, while giving bonuses to damage resistance.

Anyway, my point was not 'I do a lot of work', my point is "you shouldn't classify tweaks and NPCs as meaningless and one-day regurgitations".

[Vlad]

So, you are changing the rules. Now, multi/dual-class mages can wear armour and cast spells simultaneously. It's ugly, in my opinion. I prefer enhancing robes instead.

[Baronius]

Sorry for interrupting the discussion for a moment:

I would like to apologise to Vlad for mentioning IDW as a tool used by him. I remembered wrong, I'm really sorry, Vlad.

[Andyr]

So, you are changing the rules. Now, multi/dual-class mages can wear armour and cast spells simultaneously. It's ugly, in my opinion. I prefer enhancing robes instead.

That's not really relevant to the discussion about different types of mods.

[Azkyroth]

First, the on-topic portion of my post.

So, in the interest of moving a little, I'll propose a solution to the tools issue, and some reasoning:
IDU/IDW will be marked even more clearly as not-for-use.
Visitors will be highly discouraged from downloading them (not that they are encouraged anyway).
If people would like any of the other tools to have an explicit and highly visible message, please post the tool name and some relevant reasoning.

The other tools currently marked as 'legacy' will stay as they are - I'm not aware of any game-crashing bugs, and I see no reason to remove something that is potentially useful. IAP will carry a message explaining possible compatability issues.

Igi: What do you think of my suggestion of specifically detailing the known issues with all of the tools, as a matter of course? I'm not sure whether this was meant as a response to my specific suggestion, which might have gotten lost in the white noise.

I'm against a two-tier tool section, as I feel it may confuse people.

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. If you mean having a separate page...well, in all fairness, exceptionally few people are that dumb. If you mean something more elaborate, then it makes sense.

Now then, speaking of white noise...

Please do not tell me what not to say or do. I manage my own arguments fine, thank you very much. Not meant as a flame, but to clear up: My arguments were my own words, and not based upon any prior arguments you may have spoken

Grunker: Perhaps I should clarify. Your arguments (in sense 2), which were presented as a response to arguments against suggestions that TBG-2 (yes, you may use that if you wish) should not go out of their way to make archaic tools available, but were in fact arguments against "banning" those tools (a misnomer suggestion significant confusion of the issue), reminded me of embarassing rhetorical blunders of my own, made in a time and place far removed from this forum or thread. My point was a somewhat roundabout way of pointing out the fact that you were (however sincerely) jousting at windmills.

Baronius: I'm not going to post all the quotes of this conversation, but I also got the impression that you had a low or trivial opinion of NPC mods when reading your original statement. If that wasn't your intention, I'm glad, but it's understandable, in my opinion, that others might mistunderstand as well.

However, there is one part of your post I absolutely must take issue with, as a matter of principle (please tell me I don't need to define the concept here, as I have repeatedly had to in arguments elsewhere):

Furthermore, each site with a forum has its own policy, and this should be respected. If a forum admin decides to disable guest posting, it's none of others' business. No, this is not a (virtual) democracy. It doesn't even have the basic conditions required for a democracy. Using a free forum service is a privilege, and not a right. Bashing a site just because you don't agree with its policies is ridiculous. It is their business.

Granted, criticizing anyone in a way which conforms to the conventional understanding of "bashing" is generally a suboptimal approach, compared to making calm and well-supported arguments to support one's position. However, bashing a site because you don't agree with their policies is perfectly legitimate, since the same principles that entitle a person or organization to establish their own online communities and set up their own rules for those communities necessarily entitle others to express their opinions of those rules and communities. And if expressing one's opinion of another's rules and communities in some way infringes on that community's rights or is in some other way illegitimate, then the same is necessarily true of expressing one's opinion of another's opinion or another's choice to express it.

It is absolutely essential to recognize that a legal right does not necessarily imply moral rightness--in other words, an action being allowed does not make it reasonable, appropriate, or moral. Neither does being allowed make an unreasonable, inappropriate, or immoral action less deserving of being labeled as such, nor does being allowed make an action anything else except allowed. One could dismiss this as semantic quibbling, but having witnessed repeatedly the results of decisions that might not have been made except for rationalizing based on confusion or obfuscation on this store, I would contest that, and probably take more than three paragraphs to do so.

(For those of you tempted to misquote me in support of positions I do not now support, please note that this works both ways: an action being unreasonable, inappropriate, or immoral does not necessarily mean that it should not be allowed, and arguments to the contrary are both fallacious and known for their tendency to function like a a blazing neon "kick me" sign in online discussions, both at the time and for years afterward. I should know...)

If you have a quick question about a mod or a technical query, it is much faster and less hassle to post a message as a guest on a message board than to go through registration, wait for account validation and then post, or to email the author and then wait for a response.

I concur, with reservations. For boards which have actually experienced problem spamming, etc. related to guest posting, disabling guest posting is reasonable and appropriate. Preemptively disabling it, however, seems like overkill.

The special focus that BG (like no other CRPG before it and not that many after) has on NPC/NPC/PC interaction open the path IMO to the lasting success of this game. I would therefore claim that the NPC-mod is actually the mainstay of IE modding togheter with kits, banters, romances, flirts and some gruesome stuff which luckily never got finished.

Define "gruesome"? Or shall I, when it's finished? ^.^

Sim, you're rude...

In keeping with my comment about reminding me of a younger me, I second that.

I don't know what did you mean though, and how this relates to me and to tickling balls.

By "tickling balls" whoever did right this post means doing favors for, or by extension begging without actual favors, the person whose "balls" are being "tickled." In other words, he's contending that you or Baronius shouldn't have to PM to get these tools, on the grounds that such is in some presumably sarcelastic fashion analogous to begging.

I like graphics and multimedia TeamBG tools. They are extremely usefull and can easily handle most of the graphics/audio modding without problems. Cudos to Theo and other TeamBG guys who made them. Does WeiDU support any kind of modding except dialogues, scripts, patching and installation? The answer is NO! I cannot make areas with WeiDU, I cannot make new BAMs, spells, interface, record and convert audio with WeiDU! WeiDU is nice but its use is very limited in IE modding. Still if you are serious modder you cannot work without old TeamBG tools. So, please, acknowledge people who made them (including Theo) and now support them (including igi and Dax). I assume Sim and Co. can live without them because they make some strange tweaky-tricky-buggy-free-one-day-mini-mods and promote them as the best mods around.

I heartily endorse DLTCEP for most of those, despite

its stonewall failure to support window resizing

^.^ However, I haven't specifically noted Sim's mods as being buggy, and in fact have really appreciated some of the fixes he's worked on, especially the Improved Know Alignment spell which I've gotten permission from Kish to copy for Arkalian but may or may not have yet remembered to ask Sim for (hint hint).

060624-1631: [EDITs, spelling and concision (IAWN).]

Edited by Azkyroth, 24 June 2006 - 03:31 PM.

[Grunker]

Please highlight examples.

I'd be more than happy to, Sim

Here are some examples, all quotes from SimDing0:

If you are going to operate your forum like a farce, I will treat you as the joke you are.

I think you're going to have to offer something beyond obsolete tools and associated tutorials if you want to establish yourselves as anything more than pretentious. Give us some mods which are not Game-Be-Gone.

Seriously, what the fuck is this bullshit? Posting things like this, you're wondering why half the forum ends up making fun of you?

I don't understand it. At one point, I found you to produce challenging arguments which I had to carefully consider. You're now a total joke. What happened?

This will be the last serious post from me, because I'm certain everything you respond from now on will just be the same lame-ass arguments recycled again and again.

Guys, guys. We've had five pages of NiGHTMARE being a total embarassment to whatever cause he's trying to defend

The moral of the story is, I suppose, that if you want compatibility adivce on Studios mods, you probably have to make do with inaccurate nonsense, or ask elsewhere.

No, no, I think that selective memory of yours is kicking in again.

Since you'll doubtless pretend none of that ever happened

I believe what you're trying to say is "EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR LYING SIMDING0!!!"

On the other hand, we've had an entire Christmas of bullshit arguments, and you've successfully provided us with another two threads' worth. If you'd like to discuss whether you find me funny or not, then by all means, let's do so in a few weeks' time when we're all having a great laugh anyway. For now, I'd very much like to recoupe our losses from the last three fucking Hitler threads.

That's right, guys, Studios continues its tradition of being the only board in IE modding history to restrict my posting.

SC thought TeamBG.eu was getting too much attention and needed to re-assert Studios' position as the ultimate provider of modding hilarity.

Here's a conversation between Sim and SConrad, about Sim's ban (Sim is here speaking under the alias, THE_MACK):

(19:48:20) (SConrad) It's actually fairly simple.
(19:49:01) (THE_MACK) I await.
(19:49:15) (SConrad) Your warn level was raised to 100 because of the post, which automatically gives you a week's suspension.
(19:51:12) (SConrad) And really, registering THE_MACK on the forums does not help your cause very much.
(19:51:35) (THE_MACK) Why.
(19:52:54) (SConrad) Because you're suspended and creating another member can be considered evading the suspension.
(19:53:28) (THE_MACK) It's fairly simple.
(19:53:32) (THE_MACK) Fuck your suspension.
(19:54:39) (SConrad) ...or not.
(19:57:16) (THE_MACK) I will continue posting.
(19:57:30) (SConrad) *shrugs*
(19:57:40) (SConrad) Up to you. But you'll probably be banned.

Sim, Sim, Sim. I really don't give a rat's ass whether the suspension was fair or not, it has not nothing to do with what I'm trying to say. Reading through these quotes, especially the conversation with Sebastian, your rudeness is always easy to see, and rarely called for. The fact that Sebastian often remains calm when you use the tone you've become so famous for, should tell you that maybe the whole world is not against you as you seem to believe. In fact, most of us actually like you. When I first met you, at the DLTC forums, you were the type that made people wan't to stay on the forums, because you were funny. Funny guys like yourself are sometimes rare in the world of computers. In my mind, turning that innocent sarcasm and humor into rude sarcasm and ridicules, was never a good move from your part.

Another quote from you, to seal my off-topicness:

It's the same reason it used to be depressing when people found TeamBG, read through a Ken rant, and decided IE modding wasn't for them

Are you sure that your rudeness doesn't have the same effect today, that Ken's rant had back then? And if it has, is that really something you wish to be responsible for?

I hope you ponder this post, and not throw it aside like worthless junk. It was written because I, for some reason, respect (or respected) you, not because I wanted to flame you

@Everyone else: Sorry for being off-topic, but I needed to say this.

Edited by Grunker, 25 June 2006 - 12:35 PM.

[Drew]

Are you sure that your rudeness doesn't have the same effect today, that Ken's rant had back then?

Sim doesn't ban people that disagree with him or make bug reports like Ken did. I'd say that makes him different.

[Azkyroth]

...wow. And here I was mainly working from your responses in the FW-SHS changeover thread and the mini-flame-thread it spawned, Sim. The main things I noted or inferred that inspired my comparison to my JEC-era-self were a tendency to respond explosively to provocation; a tendency to shoot first and ask questions someday maybe when responding to a perceived injustice on the part of leadership; and the tendency to take a legitimate complaint (the prior leadership of FW, from what I'm hearing) and then lash out indiscriminately, including at people who aren't really connected to or responsible for the issue at hand other than being part of "them" (the new leadership of SHS).

By the way...an idea I had for any board I might ever found would be to have a separate forum called "The Arena" or something where flaming is permitted, and users are warned before entering...and any threads that degenerate into flaming get moved there, whether in whole or in part (like with the mini-flame-thread above). It seems like a nice compromise between people who don't want to read flames and the dubious alliance of people who want to be able to say whatever they want, and people (like me) who see red for a day when someone flames them, and then the thread gets locked before they have a chance to respond. What do you guys think; any potential there? (We could even let Sim moderate it; give him a provisional chance to put his money where his mouth is).

[Grunker]

Sim doesn't ban people that disagree with him or make bug reports like Ken did. I'd say that makes him different.

As I said before, I have little knowledge of what went on bag then. Sim was referring to a "rant" that made people scared of the modding communities, which was what I meant with the reference.

I didn't intend to flame Sim, as I believe my text states. I meant to say that Sim was the guy that originally made me hang around the forums, and now he's changed. That was my only intention - and I have tried my best to secure that it wasn't understood otherwise.

What do you guys think; any potential there? (We could even let Sim moderate it; give him a provisional chance to put his money where his mouth is).

I'm indifferent to that idea at the moment. I could picture plenty of bad/good results coming from it, if it was realised

I will, however, still say that disallowing flaming from the general forums is and should be natural. While I and others pretty much do not care whether people flame (I've always seen flaming as an expression of a lost discussion: When people start flaming it's usually because they don't have anything else left to say), some people might be offended. It's in the community's best interest that their's room for everybody. A room for flamers might be a solution, but again, it may change the tone of the forums in general into something worse.

Edited by Grunker, 25 June 2006 - 12:32 PM.

[Azkyroth]

I will, however, still say that disallowing flaming from the general forums is and should be natural. While I and others pretty much do not care whether people flame (I've always seen flaming as an expression of a lost discussion: When people start flaming it's usually because they don't have anything else left to say), some people might be offended. It's in the community's best interest that their's room for everybody. A room for flamers might be a solution, but again, it may change the tone of the forums in general into something worse.

The entire point would be to get flaming out of the general discussion.

Veering back toward the thread topic, Igi: do you have any more concrete plans with regard to mod hosting, etc. that you'd like to share? Arkalian being hosted at SHS is only natural, given the way things have gone, but I'm curious nonetheless.

[khay]

What's wrong Sim, have you lost your password? I believe IPB has a 'forgotten password' function somewhere. If you still have problems logging in, the password can be reset.

igi: Will the contests be back?

[jester]

@Drew: Sim/Ken dissimilarities:

Sim hardly has the powarz that Ken had at his forum, but, I agree, that he invites comments and suggestions in numerous ways.

[Azkyroth]

I missed this before. I gave the files to Kish to do as he pleases, so if he grants you permission then that's fine by me. On the other hand, if your mod is hosted on Studios, I would invite you to consider carefully whether using my work while your host site bans me intermittently is a situation you support.

I don't know enough about the situation to take sides, but I'm inclined to remain neutral so far.

This is a historical inaccuracy. My complaint with the new leadership is utterly unrelated to my complaint with the old leadership. When he initially took over the site, I spoke at length with SC about how to improve on Neil-style administration; this appears to have had some effect, since as I note elsewhere, he has developed his own unique brand of comedy.

If so, I retract it.