Possible cause for some peoples assets being used without permission

[chucksteel]

This is not a debate about Mod theft or asset theft but, today I was trying to help someone new to modding get there first mod released. They had it all cleaned and ready but when they tried to upload the mod it wanted a texture for the world map that they had not edited in the mod.

 

It took me some time to figure out but it turned out that they had a map mod which edited the vanilla map texture. The files were loose in their texture folder and the Ckit wanted to pack the texture with their mod because they had edited the Commonwealth worldspace.

 

I'm not saying this mistake is the cause for all asset theft but with the influx of new modders there may be some that are making this mistake. Example would be if I have a mod mesh/texture replacer for some armor. I make a mod that edits that armor and have the loose replacer files in my data folder the CKit will pack them with the mod.

 

just saying some may be inadvertently redistributing your files because they don't know any better and think that the vanilla assets are being packed.

[Rooker75]

That's a nice gotcha. I always try to edit the original object page and then rename the editor id so it creates a new entry to get around having to extract loose files, but that's not always possible.

[Deleted3507349User]

This very thing got me as well. It caused a simple esp to get bloated to over 200MB for a PS4 port.

[ousnius]

The Creation Kit takes all files that are referenced in the edited records and puts them into the BA2 archive.

That includes meshes, textures and material files.

 

It even happened to Bethesda themselves - the Far Harbor DLC comes with a NIF file for the Vault 111 Suit, even though that NIF file wasn't edited in any way, it's 100% the same.

What they did edited is the record for the vault suit in the .esm to add a new material swap for a new vault that's in the DLC to swap out the number on the back of the suit.

 

So what the CK did, is put the NIF file into the Far Harbor archives as well, even though it wasn't touched in any way.