Nevercallmebyname wrote...
Instead of telling people to give up and go home, have you considered encouraging people to stick with their projects long enough to finish them?
I never said nor implied "Give up and go home".
What I said was to REDUCE your expectations, take it in smaller chunks.
I managed the Community Tileset Project for about 5 years or so. That group started with a very easy to state, yet impossible to accomplish goal of repairing, updating and releasing 40 tilesets for NWN. Sounds simple enough doesn't it? 30,000 tiles later, we released a total of 11 full tilesets, and one reskin.
What I AM stating is that if you set a goal of repairing everything in cep2.x, you will lose most of your cc folks long before the repairs are EVER finished. CTP burned through 20 or so tile artists over the years... they all joined thinking that it would be easy to accomplish, and that it would give them time to also work on their own custom content. The members that left early all left because they wished to spend their very valuable time and energy creating NEW content instead of fixing all the bugs that existed in the various Bioware tilesets and tilesets from the vault.
Here, everyone is discussing merging multiple projects into one supermerged combination of haks. It is very unlikely that will be accomplished, just the merge alone will require multiple people to spend long, hard, hours/days/weeks/months of work just to get the 2da's to merge without causing game crashing bugs and without adding aditional bugs into the total.
I am a realist, the reality is that a huge project like what is being discussed needs to be
1) voted on by the individual contributors (the community vote doesn't matter as much as the votes of the folks doing the work, except that it gives a bit of clarity of what the community may wish for) This will not be a single subject vote either. But you have to start with the scope of what the project will be.
2) The actual work will have to be assigned and worked on by the members of said team. Just look at how long it takes each release of the custom content challenge, few have been released within the following month of whatever month was being worked on. These are typically small, individual custom contents created by various authors in whatever spare time they have. If it takes them 2-3 months to get a small project out the door due to time constraints, just imagine how long it will take with a full project.
3) The team will need a set of forums to work with/behind however you wish to state it. It can't be done here as no-one in the current community even has ban privaledges much less the ability to create new forums and sub-forums etc. You can beg all you want, heck we tried for over 18months to get the admins at EA to assign new moderators here... none were ever assigned. So, you need a host somewhere else.
4) The team will need a location to share files. Someplace that is not really public, IE only team members can access to share the files in work, THEN you need a public site for hosting the results... fortunately there are places for that aspect now.
5) You need a list of actual bugs... and more importantly even that a simple list, is you need some way to track a reported bug all the way to it being squashed.
Heck, I am not going to re-type that original message I had here again, but the list of things to accomplish just to get this team started is huge enough. Now, add whatever bugs that were, are, or will be found and assigned. There are thousands of them in cep2.x alone, I haven't checked Project Q in a while, typically their releases are cleaner, however they are not fully compatible with cep which just adds another layer of complexity.
ALL of this can be accomplised, but it will NOT be accomplished if you start out with such a huge project/goal of making the entire world a better place. Instead, start at your closest street corner, and help the elderly get across a busy street safely, before you start building and rebulding the entire US Highway system.
Oh, you can make the overall goal to be "Make all content work together", but that goal isn't even possible. Some content can be modified to make it work with others, but sometimes it just will not work.
The more things you add to that list of what you want done, the sooner you will see how unlikely it is that any of it would ever actually get released.
So, again... take SMALLER STEPS. There is not a single member of this community that can do everything, despite whatever their personal ego says. Dreams are nice, but they only exist in whatever fantasy world thought them up. Making them into something real takes time and effort, and if you already have your time split to take care of a family, work, take care of your dog/cat/fish/monkey, create some content that you personally wish to see added into NWN, there really is not much time left over to go find and fix the bugs that someone left behind when they got fed up with the nwn community and the nwnengine and walked away.
I know, I have tried it. I have the scars to prove it, I have busted up backups of a huge portion of the CTP project, I have pieces of junk that must be kept around to play NWN because everysingle pw out there uses CEP so I am forced to waste space on my hd to accomodate stuff that never should have been added to begin with.
You also have to remember that cep2.x has already EXCEEDED the maximum number of uti's for the aurora engine. You can NOT add more without overriding something else. (There goes backwards compatiblity) Fortunately, the engine allows you to organize things in a way that does NOT force items to be immediately followed by the next item in a given set etc, you can renumber and point to whatever location that item may be, or go the horrendous route of loading a fake item and then painting the correct one on top via the toolset.
Aurora is old, yes it can be pushed, the community has pushed it far beyond what Bioware thought was even possible. However, it is a 16bit app, it does not recognize a 32bit processor, so it can't use the full power of our current 64bit, multi-core systems. It crashes a lot.
Anyway, I am NOT saying "don't do it", what I am saying is that you must take it in smaller chunks. Maybe, just maybe, you could get something released in less that a year that way. It will NOT be the lofty goals already stated in this thread.
