Thievery?

[Jarno Mikkola]

theft is theft. nothing gives a excuse to that..

Yeah, and none of us gives credit to the first pseudorandom number generators inventor... and from that we can actually see that "Sikret himself a thief", after all he stole that flawed system instead of the real random system and then calls his own as the "real randomization", as the real system was invented this year, by whomever, from which we can draw the conclusion that it wasn't Sikret in his Improved Anvil mod.

 

Yes, actually the "item randomization" is just just a flawed term of rearranging the already existing items to a new standard of distribution.

And the first one of those was made to BG games was in the BG1...

[Ipsy]

This has just occurred to me - Aurora's Shoes and Boots also includes a randomization system for a couple of the items the mod introduces. So why isn't Sikret attacking that? Is it unimportant because it just randomizes gooseberries and gems, rather than equipment?

 

Yeah, this really is getting ridiculous. Pardon me, it already is. Sikret and his followers obviously won't be convinced, no matter how reasonable everyone else's arguments are.

[lroumen]

Regardless of whether it is theft or not, the objections of Sikret to IR is clear.

 

It draws away players from IA because unlike IA, item randomisation is stand-alone and decoupled from the difficult tactical challenges of IA (which Sikret flat out refuses to turn into subcomponents). Who cares about other randomisation mods if you care about your player base?

[temujin]

Regardless of whether it is theft or not, the objections of Sikret to IR is clear.

 

It draws away players from IA because unlike IA, item randomisation is stand-alone and decoupled from the difficult tactical challenges of IA (which Sikret flat out refuses to turn into subcomponents). Who cares about other randomisation mods if you care about your player base?

 

If it draws away players from IA, then by that same token, wouldn't you agree that calling a mod "the new Item Upgrade" would draw players away from the original Item Upgrade?

 

 

I do agree, though. Sikret is extremely competitive. He sees Item Randomiser as a "threat." Competitive against players; competitive against modders. Competitive to the point where it's unhealthy for a guy his age (early-to-mid 40s).

 

Once you take a look at the method used to randomize items in IA versus the methods (yes, plural) used in Wisp's mod, you'll see that the difference in programming skill between the two becomes readily apparent. It's like night and day.

 

We have Sikky who uses a primitive, "hard-coded," monolithic approach where he does all the randomizing at the script (BCS) level. Whereas Wisp takes a much, much more sophisticated approach - by starting the randomization process from the TP2 level, and then passing control to SSL (another scripting language), and then proceeding from there, all using advanced WeiDU functions. Not to mention the multiple randomizing methods (install-time and game-time) and extreme flexibility, customizability & compatibility that he offers along the way.

 

Sikret knows he's been outclassed here. His ego and competitive instinct just wouldn't bring himself to admit to it. I'm absolutely sure that is the main reason he continues to diminish Wisp's work, thinking it would give him some solace.

 

 

 

Really, Sikky, is it that difficult to say "congrats Wisp, you did a better job at this than I have" ?

[Shaitan]

Sikret wont, he's in it for the money...

[lroumen]

Improved Anvil is (hopefully) a brilliant substitute for "Item Upgrade" mod and surpasses the quality of that already well-designed mod in all respects.

I remember this bit from when IA first came out, which basically shows how competitive Sikret is towards other mods. Still, with the fame that Item Upgrade already possessed, IA did not draw away that many players from the mod. Weimers mods were already kind of epic. There were discussions between IA and IU at that time similar as the current discussions between IA and IR. But the same can actually be said about the tactical novelty of IA as well. People said that it had a lot of resemblance to Tactics too, which was also out before IA.

 

In both cases Sikret was not the first to put out a mod that improved either items or tactical battles, so I'm thinking that if he is in it for the acknowledgements, he is going to try and get it for the item randomisation.

 

In any case, what Sikrets strong point is is that he can promote his mod as a package deal, especially since he always refused to make into subcomponents. By itself, IA is rather bug-free and relatively balanced (if you know your way around spell effects and have the heart to endure countless battle replays), so for that matter, I think his product is quite solid.

 

 

I think Wisps work is really good, especially since it's megamod incorporable, something that IA is clearly not. So I do not think that IR should never have been made, rather, I am happy that it has been made even if the original idea of randomising items is not from Wisp (Mind you, I'm not saying Sikret was first with the idea or whatever and I'm not talking about the ideas behind the scripting of teh randomisation here either; I'm really fathomed about the ideas that Wisp and David have constructed to get to IR. It's much more dynamic than IA).