Pro Q, CEP, and PRC

[Legacy_TSMDude]

               I just have to get this off my chest. I dig all of you. I like and dislike certain things from each group. I think you guys did some amazing work. I really do. It is amazing at times what you guys have made this old old game into...

Now my complaint...I would give anything...ANYHTHING to get you all to work together. I have dreams about winning the lottery and buying this game and hiring you all to get together and make us a new offical 2.0 patch for Neverwinter Nights.

I know I am not alone on this...

You guys rock and I just wish that something one of us lowly designers could say to make you all agree and slap us all with this huge content celebration that makes us all shudder in anticipation like a kid on christmas morning...

Hell I would even bake cookies, bbq up my famous ribs and bring the keg for that!

Sorry just wanted to say that as have been dying to say it for a long long time. You all rock seperate but man...can you imagine together?

No matter what thank you for all you guys have done and all the other groups that have come and gone from single custom scripters like OldManWhistler to Amtheyst to Zebranky and all those in between.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Aleron]

               Amen to all that. ^.^
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_SuperFly_2000]

               CEP has some good stuff to it...a lot actually...but most of it is not quality work and also it seems a lot aimed at the high end of things. Like high magic stuff that many RP servers wont ever need.

The main complaints about it is that it is quite cumbersome and also there has been some backwards compatibility questionmarks.

PRC....well....its a good idea and excellent documentation but there is probably a reason no one is using it.


Otherwise...I get what you mean TSMdude...I would also hope that the CC guys would work more openly and together with each other....but we got to respect their will I guess...


There are many that have joined all kinds of CC however. Guess you just need the technical know-how....
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Bannor Bloodfist]

               This topic comes up every few months.

You are beating a dead, VERY DEAD, horse.

You can blame the folks in CEP land for that, since they have never honored or even respected, any other group out there.  

Believe me, other groups have attempted to work with CEP.  They no longer bother since CEP doesn't honor their promises etc... The won't honor reservations on 2da entries etc.

A large number of creative folks have been driven away from the community by CEP actions.

Since CEP can't be trusted by others, why would others bother to attempt to work with them now?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Drewskie]

               

You can blame the folks in CEP land for that

And you can blame Atari since there was a time when everyone worked together beautifully... it was called the premium mod program, which Atari killed prematurely for reasons only Atari knows...  At least we got 1.69, but there could have been much more...
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Frith5]

               I disagree entirely with Bannor on this matter.
In point of fact, isn't it other groups who've led the charge on restricting the packaging of content and its inclusion into CEP? Yes, it is. To make blanket attacks on a group, Bannor, makes me think, "Wow, this guy is still mad about CEP's success."
Sorry, but I think you're wrong. In fact, if anyone wants to combine CEP and anything else, they are free to do so. Likewise with PQ stuff, as far as I can see. CTP has some onerous (to me) restrictions on content, which is why I don't use CTP. I am all for people respecting CC creators, but come on. CEP is not the enemy. THERE IS NO ENEMY! This game is old; too old to be carping and sniping like a two-year old about groups and their faults. I for one am quite sick of it.

Happy Mother's Day!

JFK
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Estelindis]

               Hey TSMDude.  For the sake of clarifying the debate (and, hopefully, preventing it from becoming too inflammatory), might I ask what "working together" means to you in a concrete sense?  Do you want teams to respect each other's 2da lines?  Do you want teams to compile their content together into one giant download?  Do you want teams to merge into one giant super-team that produces content together?  (Or some other thing?)  Whatever it is that you want, please explain why this is desirable to you.  Thanks.

There have been a lot of hot words exchanged on this topic in the past and lots of feelings have been hurt.  Personally, I'm not interested in retreading old ground.  If this topic is going to be discussed (possibly in vain, as it usually is), we might as well try to be constructive.

My two euro-cents?  Personally, I'm not in favour of one giant download that includes everything from all major community teams. I prefer a modular approach.  But I think projects should make all reasonable attempts to be compatible with each other (unless compatibility isn't possible for technical reasons, in which case modders can hardly be expected to work miracles).  Usually, respecting each other's 2da lines suffices for this.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_TSMDude]

               WHOA there guys and gals! No fighting....dont make me look like the guy in the room with the big pants because I assure I am not it.

The reason I would love for this to happen is because latley I went about starting to do the dance with special content...including your wonderful cloak stuff, Est.

And i saw so much overlap my eyes started to bleed. I saw things though that were awesome in ProQ and some that were pretty cool in CEP and some in this and some in that...and yet to get all those wonderful great things to work is going to take a bit of time that takes me away from our PW.

So i felt forced to cut things out or not even add. Then seeing notes all over the place on vault submissions about Do not use this with so and so and it floored me...I could not understand it at all.

I know I am so old dude who likes to drink his mead and can muddle around in the toolset...even write some scripts that work somehow, lol. And when i see something awesomely awesome and people not willing to let it be added because so and so spit in thier tea then really it is not the spitter who get shurt but the players. You know the folks we build this crap for...(who run by it looking for shinys the ingrates )

I was in a round about way saying thank you to them ALL OF THEM from the AMA to the ZZDialog group...and any other acroynm in there. Yet I was also saying yes...maybe now that our playerbase is smaller we can do the whole new year thingy and put this crud behind us and see if maybe...just maybe we can all raise a pint to the players still here and work together.

Find a welcoming area/forum for devolpers to talk that is not going to go down and SHARE your dang stuff with one another. The secerets thing is done as there is not 1000s of new players weekly now...there is just us diehards left.

Sorry if I brought up bad blood and if we need to lock this thread let me know and I will have it deleted in a minute as all I wanted to say was you all rock and if I learned one thing from the PW Alliance of stopping the Griefers it is that open communication works when people put down thier own egos and start talking like I dont know...humans to one another.

I end this with a quote from two great men,
Be excellent to each other.


               
               

               

                     Modifié par TSMDude, 09 mai 2011 - 01:18 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Frith5]

               You're right, TSMDude. I'm sorry for being so harsh, Bannor.
I apologize.
I simply feel (strongly) that the time for assigning blame, pointing fingers, etc., is far past for this game and this community. It is not constructive, only destructive.
The wish for all content to work together seamlessly is an old one. It's also one with a very real chance for success, because of Bioware's design. 'Respecting' groups' 2da entries is a great idea. However, I think the idea would be to find a way to move forward instead of looking backward.

JFK
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_omen_shepperd]

               I for one would support such a merger. I think that it could help to strengthen the community and show we can work together to keep something alive and kicking well after others considered it dead. I also have to agree that I as well am tired of the fighting. I understand that people may never agree about everything, but do we really need to fight about something? This is not a competition in the aspect that there is no prize to be handed out. We play the game to have fun, we build the PW’s and single player mods to have fun, why can’t we all just have some fun?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Bannor Bloodfist]

               Frith, CTP has always honored our agreements with other teams, including the promises made to CEP.  Project Q has also attempted to do the same thing.  The community music pack did, so did other teams.  it has always been CEP that has overridden what was reserved by other teams.  So, expecting ANYONE to agree is a waste of time, as CEP can't even honor their own promises to not screw up old stuff.  They have moved content, not only into newly renamed haks, but between those same haks in different versions.  They have overridden their OWN reserved lines (IE changed them for no valid reason, other than that they forgot to check their prior releases).  They have left duplicated content in multiple haks on the same release, some of it exact duplicates, some of it duplicate names but different images/items etc.  

ALL of the other teams have attempted to reserve space, and have striven very hard to not overwrite lines in 2da's used by other teams.  All of that makes those teams "modular" in that you can safely use them together.  CEP is the only group that refuses to do that.  At this stage of the game, the entire CEP team is pretty much gone, what is left is not really doing much, except for their own PW and releasing things as a side project.  

CEP seldom responds to requests for help, other than to point folks to their own private forums and not share the answers.  They don't like negative comments yet their own members ensure that negative comments for other teams releases on the vault get entered when comments are allowed.

The history is what it is.  No one out here is quite willing to replace CEP and clean up the mess.  Project Q has come the closest, but they are only releasing new content, not combining old stuff.

So, the fact remains that if an individual wants content that is NOT included in CEP, they have to manually generate merge files.  Many, MANY Persistent Worlds do this already, with their own customized haks.  There are a few that have even created top-level merge haks so that their players can continue to use CEP content.

Most though, have hit the content limits, and the only way to overcome those limits is to get rid of old stuff that no one really wants or uses anymore.  This means no CEP as it is nearly impossible to pick and choose what you want to use from their haks.  

At one point in time, right at the beginning of the 2.x phase of things, CEP had a chance to make their content more modular.  They have several "core" haks.  At one stage those haks were properly named as to the type of content that they contain.  But, at 2.1 stage, CEP started moving content around to make it harder to modularize their content.  They have mixed and matched content from multiple items across several haks so that you are forced to include all of the core regardless of what you really want.

CEP is a mess, a MAJOR mess.  Not even CEP members have a clue on how to clean it up now.  If they are not willing to do that sort of work, how can you expect other authors/creators/teams to be willing to attempt to make NEW stuff work with CEP?  Heck, even when you do, CEP does a quick, badly built, release that wipes out the gains someone else has made in making content compatible?

I know it sounds like I am beating up on the CEP team, but shoot, many MANY other teams have attempted to make content work around/outside of, in inclusion with CEP content.  Each time that has been accomplished, it gets wiped off with a new CEP release with badly formatted 2da entries.

Heck, even Bioware attempted to not step on folks when they released the 1.69 content.  Bioware did everything they could to NOT use 2da lines that others already had in use, they also made every attempt to not step on loadscreen lines that CTP had reserved for our tilesets.  

When teams respect other folks works, things can easily be made modular.  When a single team refuses to respect anyone else as anything other than source material for their own releases, well, you get frustrated folks all over the place.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Jedijax]

               Idealistic. The thing is not whether one may respect another's 2DA lines, or develop great content together; this is merely an expression of human nature. We, as beings, are not made to agree, but to develop context and variety by having different perspectives, backgrounds and timelines. Just think about how much content others may think is great seems useless/ugly/insufficient to you. This has never happened, not in the history of humankind, unless there is (ding ding ding!) MONEY involved. Once upon a time, I decided if I ever became a millionaire, I would offer economic rewards so authors would use the content I wanted specifically, in modules created to be compatible among them. Yet again, idealistic.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldMansBeard]

               Anyone remember the early days when a module could only have one hak ? It meant that players had to download the specific hak for each module, even if it contained a lot of the same stuff as the hak for a different module. And people thought : "wouldn't it be a good idea if we could all use the same hak with everything in it and just download it once" ? And they were right. And CEP was that hak.

But that was then.

There is a concept called "requisite diversity" - google it if you are not familiar with it. A community doesn't thrive with just a single team with one goal because that would prevent alternative ideas and lines of development being followed. The NWN community is still alive, not because everyone joined CEP but because some bright, creative people didn't. It had to be that way.

And so it is. And long may it remain so.

OMB
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldMansBeard, 09 mai 2011 - 07:40 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Estelindis]

               I agree with OMB.  Much as players might want a single source for everything, variety is the spice of life.  Some examples of creative collaboration can be seen in the custom content challenge, which I heartily support - but that only works because of the good atmosphere.  If people felt they "had to" work within just one group, I'm not sure that atmosphere would persist.  One can't pressure people to work together on the same thing if one wants the community to stay alive and vibrant.  This is a hobby, after all, and people only stick around if they're having fun.  For that matter, I think people will only produce good work if they're having fun.  

TSMDude: if I recall correctly, my cloaks *used* to be CEP-compatible.  Mind you, it's been a while since I revisted them (in spite of various things I meant to add subsequently) and CEP has been updated in the meantime.  If there are some modifications needed, please PM me!  Mind you, I'm not going to do another total renumbering (I did that once, when I initally made the cloaks CEP-compatible), and the limitation of 255 cloak slots does mean that, eventually, someone's going to step on someone else's toes in Cloakland.  But such is life.  :-)
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               I agree 100% with OMB!
Where would the community be if everybody had joined the CEP? Would there be anybody left making new content?
I may be wrong here, because I'm not 100% sure for I never used the CEP, but I think unlike project Q they just compile content and don't make new content themselves.
So if everybody was just busy compiling content that has already been made by somebody else, who'd be left to make something new?
And sometimes you really got to wonder if you should make any new content at all because there are those people who propagate hak-free PWs while at the same time they say people should use CEP. CEP has all you need, even tilesets. That is absurd!
The CEP is a great compilation for those who need it, but I would rather play a PW with lots of new stuff (especially tilesets which in my opinion do not belong into the CEP at all) than a PW with just the CEP.

And now I want to thank all those teams for their great work too. Not just Project Q and CTP but also the CEP. I don't have any problems with the CEP. I just get slightly miffed by those 'hak-free' people who say that the CEP is all you need. Hmm. Didn't the Beatles say that all you need is love? '>
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Zwerkules, 09 mai 2011 - 03:26 .