Unrealistic expecations on modders.

[Mishaxhi]

 

Thanks for the advice :smile: For the moment I'm just building stuff to have fun. Honestly I spend more time in the geck than I do playing the game. Hopefully people reading this will be a tad more informed. Perhaps they'll be compelled to go back and endorse the mods they've been using.

 

 

That's the only way to be.

 

You can make something solely because you think it might be popular, but what's the point? You have no attatchment to it, you probably didn't enjoy making it and you expected it to be popular so big deal, it performed as expected.

 

Or you can make something you want to make, no matter how gritty, niche or against the grain, and when that gets popular then it actually feels pretty damn good.

[Imca]

My issue is two fold really.

 

1) I download so many mods I have a hard time remembering which ones I downloaded where to endorse them, I think I am running 70 mods right now? although 5-10 are made by myself.

 

2) As some one who just mods for the hell of it, and to make her own fun usualy deciding "Oh an X would be nice, why dont I go make an X", I never really relised endosments mater to some people, because I always saw modding as something you do for fun yourself...

 

Sorry.

[gunslinger6792]

My issue is two fold really.

 

1) I download so many mods I have a hard time remembering which ones I downloaded where to endorse them, I think I am running 70 mods right now? although 5-10 are made by myself.

 

2) As some one who just mods for the hell of it, and to make her own fun usualy deciding "Oh an X would be nice, why dont I go make an X", I never really relised endosments mater to some people, because I always saw modding as something you do for fun yourself...

 

Sorry.

I suppose it makes sense that it wouldn't dawn on people that modders like endorsements and I'm sure some modders just don't care about the numbers. I can also see how it would be hard to remember what mods you have installed. Like I've said before I hope if nothing else this gives raises some awareness of some sort.

[bruse]

Regarding house mods:

 

(1) There's a lot of them around.

 

(2) Try not to pack free stuff - or give a version without it - in a house mod. A house with high grade armour, weapons and this and that to many feels like a cheat. I know it does to me. Unless somehow you earned it (see, 5).

 

(3) Presentation is key. Show it off, describe it.

 

(4) Companion friendly is what a lot of people are looking for in a house mod. I'm using a variant of the Homestead mod, because it's sizeable enough to house all my "stuff". Over the course of my travels I end up ammasing a lot of things, it just doesn't feel right putting them all in a shack where they physically possibly could not fit.

 

(5) Backstory / quest (esp. if voiced) to get the house is great for "selling" it. One of the big immersion breakers of most house mods is the fact that you just get in an empty house in good condition, you don't buy it or earn it..

[Sirropoo]

Regarding house mods:

 

"(5) Backstory / quest (esp. if voiced) to get the house is great for "selling" it. One of the big immersion breakers of most house mods is the fact that you just get in an empty house in good condition, you don't buy it or earn it.."

 

Flip side of the coin, I needed a place to store and organize early on, so I wasn't into whether it was lore friendly or not (the act of obtaining it) BUT, I wanted the house to be somewhat lore friendly itself.

 

In so far as "endorsing", I like to see my MOD's get endorsed but then, I'm somewhat awful about endorsing myself, not until I check the MOD's for updates will I usually stop and make a concerted effort to endorse the MOD's I've been playing ...so I try to be understanding about others being forgetful.

Edited October 20, 2013 by Sirropoo

[drithius]

Forgetful is one thing. Only 2% of unique downloaders actually making the effort to endorse is another. Whole lot of self-entitled people out there; sometimes, it's just not worth the extra work involved to debug/release something for public download.

Edited October 21, 2013 by drithius

[charwo]

The house mod thing is a bust, particularly in New Vegas. I am distrustful of house mods on principle: a house is where my character stores her war trophies and I'm scared of mod failure or some mismarked containers that respawn and I lose unique items, especially mod items I can't wiki the base id.

 

More importantly for recognition purposes, you have a forum policy which is use assets with permission only, rather than acknowledge in the description policy. For those assets that were made by those who have moved on, this is an issue. Then there odds the issue that this isn't a modding community really, it's more like a trade show. We don't work together to pool resources and more importantly from my point of view, train new talent.

[charwo]

Sorry, on phone, clunky interface. But to elaborate, No one has any idea what those who download want and why. I can't speak for others but some of the things I want are plot, like taking over vaults 3, 22 and 19 and refurbish them. But I'd also like the vaults completely redesigned because I liked the Fallout I and II door mechanisms and that the vaults were prefab with only modular changes.

 

But first we'd need to discuss how a vault WOULD have been designed, from a security point of view and taking advantage of the schizoid tech of fallout.

 

Just a mod that allows you to convince Boone to not attack legion forces in order to get to the legion fort to attack Caesar first. Or an OWB script that allows you to take Raul to the autodoc and change his appearance to a human one like in the Raul Human mod. And of course, of one is ambitious a mod that opens up non nuked versions of Dry Wells and NCR highway if those places didn't get nuked at the end of Lonesome Road.

 

Of course, how to organize pow wows of interest and collaboration is something I can't figure out. Right now it's plead and hope someone responds.

[dangman4ever]

More importantly for recognition purposes, you have a forum policy which is use assets with permission only, rather than acknowledge in the description policy. For those assets that were made by those who have moved on, this is an issue. Then there odds the issue that this isn't a modding community really, it's more like a trade show. We don't work together to pool resources and more importantly from my point of view, train new talent.

I have to disagree with both of those points:

 

 

First point:

Yes it does make things a bit harder when you can't use someone else's work for your mod, whether due to that author being gone or not willing to share. But respect for that mod author's wishes and intellectual property outweighs that hardship. Not everyone subscribes to the open source philosophy. Nor would forcing them to subscribe to that philosophy help either. One effect of not being able to someone else's assets is that it forces you to be more creative and willing to learn new things.

 

For example, I'm currently working on a simple new outfits mod. There were times when it would have been easier if i could use another person's assets but I couldn't due to permissions. That forced me to come up with different ways to accomplish what I wanted to do. I learned how to do basic textures in gimp, basic separating in Blender, how to fix weird issues in NifSkope, etc. None of which I would have learned had I been able to use certain assets from other people.

 

So in other words, if you truly want something, you're going to learn how to get it.

 

Second point:

We don't pool resources? That's what the search function is for. Not to mention the Nexus wiki. Or the voice actors thread? Not to mention the forum itself. I use the search function all the time to find tips and tricks for modding. Or how there's numerous mod collaborations that happens off forum? Like the collaboration behind the next Willow update, the New Vegas Bounties and related mods, Project Brazil, etc.

 

Of course, how to organize pow wows of interest and collaboration is something I can't figure out. Right now it's plead and hope someone responds.

There's numerous tools out there that'll let you collaborate and share with others like Skype, Dropbox, Google Drive, email, ventrilo, facebook, instant messaging services, flickr, and even the forums itself. Hell the image section in this forum is pretty good example of some great colloborations going on. Though yes, the act of organizing collaboration is a pain but it is not impossible as evident by the mods I mentioned above.

 

As for the pleading bit, is this coming from your numerous requests threads in the FNV requests forum?

[charwo]

Actually, its not just me, I'm talking about the whole procedure of submitting mod requests. I have found, much to my utter joy, its a lot easier to get requests filled if I can get a picture of what I want, the Enclave uniform thing I wanted is BEAUTIFUL. Problem is I can't figure out s#*! in Gimp (I'd need a print format instruction manual or a teacher to get it), so I had to go back to a program I do know, MS paint and had to re familiarize myself with how it works. I'm working on requests know and they are looking much better. Unfortunately, I don't think you can modify textures in Paint, so I can't begin to experiment.

 

This lack of pointing out successful strategies for request submission is a problem. Another is that the things I could probably design a quest, I could imagine all of it, but I can't work the GECK for s#*! on the Cell side. I'm actually getting close to competent on the item side. The problem is that I can't make heads or tails of video mods and wikis. Part of this is that when I acquire basic conceptual knowledge, I'm very slow and need to manually cross reference things because literally nothing makes sense. They other, more important thing is that I'm being given recipes and I need to be given unified relationships. Here:http://www.education.com/reference/article/distinction-conceptual-procedural-math/

 

That's an article on teaching math. I couldn't get math to save my life in high school. This is because I was being drilled in procedure, on how to do something, rather than the concept of that operation, a way to understand the interlinking of all the parts and WHY it has to be done that way. I went from C-Bs in high school to nothing but As in my college work because the teaching was on concepts, not on procedures. And I could ask questions of my instructors then and there to integrate those conceptual concepts into a working reference system in my head.

 

All of the tutorials I have seen do not even attempt to do that. I'm left with a bunch of discombobulated rote facts that make no sense because they aren't integrated into a greater whole that I can make sense of. Like a whole bunch of wiki pages, but with no links to each other for cross reference. And my attempts to find a teacher who can slowly and painfully establish those connections has been for naught.

 

As far as I'm concerned, the cardinal sin of anything is re-inventing the wheel. I don't care how a process gets done, because the end result is the only thing that is important. The notion of intellectual property in the modding community is ludicrous because no one is making money off of anything. Stealing in this case can only consist of claiming credit, both implicitly and explicitly. Using someone else's work and documenting it correctly is like quoting a source in a research paper.