Modlist Discussion: A Prelude to Sigil

[suy]

10 minutes ago, UMNiK said:

I see no reason why a modding community comprising multiple active forums couldn't work towards the common goal of making things as easy as possible for newcomers.

As I mentioned, people are doing their bests to improve the cross communication. The fact that such centralized list doesn't exist is because no one has put the time to do the effort. You seem to know what Github and awesome lists are. You surely will be able to create the repo yourself, and start adding mods. You can copy from Cahir's list and format it in Markdown if you please, then maintain the effort of accepting pull requests. There is no need to ask for permission to create one of those lists. Just don't expect people to submit pull requests to your project if you have not gained any traction. I personally have started to collect such a list for myself, and I want to publish it, eventually, on a certain website. It's more or less what you mention, but it's part of a larger Infinity Related website. In my case I don't expect to collect all mods, just all the mods that seem interesting to me. I don't want to spend that much time on doing that. But if you start the list and succeed, I'll gladly contribute some mod entries to it.

[DavidW]

7 hours ago, UMNiK said:

What I think is an absolute necessity is a simple shared list akin to any Awesome list - meaningful categories (game and within that what the mod does (NPC or script or fix etc.)) that are easy to add to by just editing the .md and creating a pull request.

I come back to my comment about content in general. It's not as if there's a shared list of all novels or all TV shows.

[jastey]

@UMNiK what don't you like about the mod lists that were already linked to you? A lot of effort went into these, a lot of effort is still needed to make sure they will be up-to-date in the future. How about you help @Cahir english-fy the Polish list that already includes almost all mods?

Please let this sink in: The experience from the past is that lists were everyone can contribute to don't work, because most people don't contribute. This is the reality that clashes with your awesome list ideas. All these projects were/are driven by one person, are very lucky if they find someone who takes over if that person retires, but ultimatively die once the maintainer retires. Kerzenburgforum had a Wiki and a linklist that would count for your awesome list specification with all mods from BWP - I burned out over the latter, and when I did it wasn't even up-to-date. The EET linklist is the first community-effort list I see that kind of works for quite a longer time now, and that's just because @K4thos already added more or less all mods to it.

In other words: Feel free to start such a list and call for contrbutions. Just make sure there is a kill switch so that we will not be stuck with another outdated modlist in the not too distant future.

[cdds]

I think many people who come late to IE modding are in for a culture shock of sorts. Almost all other modding communities (for pretty much any non-IE game) revolve around the Nexus, so people are used to having a central repository (and discussion platform) that hosts all relevant mod content in one place. Think of the Nexus what you will, from a consumer- and convenience perspective it is great.

To get an overview of interesting and up-to-date IE mods, it is necessary to investigate the content of several communities (at least G3, SHS, PPG, BD forums) and even then there are likely things you would miss (e.g., Tweaks and Tricks mod).

That reminds me: i wonder how many modders have never heard of Magnus' modding tools Happy IE and Golem, simply because they are hosted on the somewhat obscure BGforge website?

Edited September 17, 2021 by cdds

[Graion Dilach]

33 minutes ago, cdds said:

I think many people who come late to IE modding are in for a culture shock of sorts. Almost all other modding communities built around games released in the last 5-10 years revolve around the Nexus, so people are used to having a central repository (and discussion platform) that hosts all relevant mod content in one place.

I agree with the message, but only with this disclaimer. Even before Nexus gained prominence, ModDB was and still is a thing and there were games which where centralized around Fileplanet (I still feel Starfleet Command and Bridge Commander never were able to regain traction from that closure). I do acknowledge ModDB clearly lost the fight against Nexus and Steam Workshop, with most of the mods/games featured there being retro games. Still, I would say that the culture shock comes from a generation gap outright.

For the record, I only modded two games which centers around Nexus out of many and one of those got it's own external PI/EETMS-alike tool which doesn't rely on Nexus for downloads even. And I have modded more games which didn't, so my culture shock is that everyone talks about this site I never heard about nor do I find relevant. Sure, I've joined the IE modding scene this year but I am modding various games since 2004, so the way the IE scene works feels straightforward to me.

Another option to discover mods is to download the huge WeiDU logs from troubleshooting topics, then google for the mods you don't know about (this is how I discovered TnT myself).

Edited September 17, 2021 by Graion Dilach

[cdds]

1 hour ago, Graion Dilach said:

I agree with the message, but only with this disclaimer. [...] I would say that the culture shock comes from a generation gap outright.

Fair point

Edited September 17, 2021 by cdds

[UMNiK]

There seem to be two fundamentally incompatible threads here: histories of INDIVIDUAL'S burn outs due to trying to create and maintain a SOLO PROJECT and trying to arrange a way for a COLLABORATIVE EFFORT that doesn't demand more than approving a pull request once a week or so by any of the same MULTIPLE people who are currently running and populating all these multitudes of forums. My commiserations to the former category, past, present, and future, but I must stand by my polite declination to join their ranks. Let's see if I have the current state of the latter right.

Last and most ambitious attempt, BWS, covered every Infinity engine game and practically every mod and fell apart due to trying to integrate them all together and keep them integrated. It lives on in a heavily modified state as EE/EET Mod Install Tool, maintained by a controversial person. Question 1: is EETMIT worth looking at for inspiration? Question 2: if not, is the last BWS still good as far as broad categories for included mods are concerned?

Current smaller going concerns related to mod centralisation are the EET compatibility list , Cahir's polish lists for BG1EE-SoD and BG2 (also his last EET install) and the occasional post with a  PI install order on the forums. Question 3: are there any notable additions to current lists that would make applying BWS categories to them difficult? Question 4: if taking Cahir's request for an English translation as an open invitation, it is worth going top to bottom or just through EET-compatible stuff?

Mod communities that are likely to be primary sources, i.e. not translations or rehostings: Gibberlings 3 , Pocket Plane Group , Spellhold Studios, Beamdog Forums, Weasel Mods (obviously, this list is incomplete, feel free to link others). Question 5: how best to go about engaging as many people as possible in shared maintenance (Just start whispering admins to consider slowly linking all mods they host at their convenience? Try to impress the value of an undying first stop that doesn't depend on a single person or site)?

The technical side. Since it will be a shared sheet, the options for hosting are: GitHub (see example of Awesome lists), Google Docs (example using Path of Exile skills as the target of documentation), Notion (example of collaboratively documenting an emerging category of application) Question 6: what is the platform preference?

 

Obviously, this will not be a short process, nor one carried entirely on my back (no matter how many times I am asked), but it should be easy enough to get a start by arriving at concrete answers to these questions. Here they are again, with my personal answers. Anyone at all interested in the idea, please provide your own answers and any salient questions you feel I missed. 

Question 1: is EETMIT worth looking at for inspiration? I have no idea. Here's documentary footage of me wanting to get back into BG modding after a few years' absence.

Question 2: if not, is the last BWS still good as far as broad categories for included mods are concerned? They certainly made sense to me at the time.

Question 3: are there any notable additions to current lists that would make applying BWS categories to them difficult? All the mainstays seem to have survived, and smaller stuff may be categorised opportunistically as it gets more players.

Question 4: if taking Cahir's request for an English translation as an open invitation, it is worth going top to bottom or just through EET-compatible stuff? I'm open to either approach, and am willing to assign a letter or two to myself.

Question 5: how best to go about engaging as many people as possible in shared maintenance (Just start whispering admins to consider slowly linking all mods they host at their convenience? Try to impress the value of an undying first stop that doesn't depend on a single person or site)? Best I can tell, it's the same dozen or so power users crawling all over these places - hopefully they will welcome a chance to channel their energies toward a specific goal rather than answering the same noob questions with slightly different backgrounds.

Question 6: what is the platform preference? Any of the above options will work for me, I'd say let whoever is willing to devote the most time to this at the moment have the greatest vote weight (being a sheet, it's easy to migrate if need be). Personally, I've invested a few hours into this over the past week and can probably afford a bit fewer every week. As far as I know, ALIEN and K4thos are the most active developers interested in widely sharing the fruits of their labours, and they use GitHub to do it.

 

Obviously, CamDawg has spent who knows how long putting the OP together, so I'd love to know how his experience copy-pasting it around has been - what do the literal new players make of the state of things? Are there any new players on these forums?..

[Graion Dilach]

Let me just drop the pretense for a bit. @UMNiK, do I read it right that

• you don't understand the depth of what you're talking about
• you don't want to put much effort into this to experience the pitfalls
• you still think you know it better than actual people who have explained the pitfalls from actual experience
• and you want to ignore every answer as long as it doesn't suit you

Let that sink for a moment.

Despite the above, I'll still answer your questions, even if it'll fall on deaf ears again.

1. EETMIT is 50%-70% correct. The order is wrong, broken mods are marked as "recommended" while actually reliable mods are marked as "expert" or outright omitted. You need to put effort into untangling that mess and figure out which mods worth your time despite not featured/recommended in it's list.
2. I don't know the BWS list, but it's last update predates early tweak mods like EndlessBG1/Transitions and it installs the UI too late besides probably having the same issues I've listed in point 1 (because I know from the EETMS commit history that the order was only changed when someone actually pointed it out on BSW, but most of the people on BSW don't understand that this could cause issues, so it still has a lot of legacy baggage).
3. See point 2.
4. I don't see the need of a translation required for that list, it's pretty obvious and Google Translate can manage the portions which isn't.
5. You seem to ignore/overlook that there is no standard megamod installation. There is a counterpart for every mod and there isn't guaranteed that every mod will be featured. Not even the juggernaut mods like BG1NPC and SCS are straightforward to be featured in every installation of their respective games and there are practical incompatibilities which a global perfect installation order cannot resolve (Imoen Friendship vs Imoen Romance, Reunion vs Turnabout, Turnabout vs Lava's Khalid, Imoen4Ever vs a lot of older mods/Imoen is Stone/Imoen Can Die, Neera Expansion/Banters vs A7-ConvenientEENPCs, LefreutUI vs DragonspearUI++ vs EET-GUI, the Yoshimo mods and I could go on). Even mods like A7-TotLM-BG2EE are prepared to convert the IWD spells on it's own because it can't know if SCS/IWDification's respective components are part of the current install. There's no general answer beyond what you received already because we can't tell what would the individual's preference be so we just fall back to generic suggestions and while we try to cover the compatibility in the readmes, we need to reserve the right that we miss out on some technical or practical conflicts due to being unaware of the other mod conflicting with ours. You really can't expect modders to test their mods against all the thousands of other mods and the millions of combinations generated from it (even without reordering involved) because that would ensure no mod would ever get released.
6. GitHub works fine. Subtledoctor even provides a list for one to start from but I had no time to provide updates to it myself either.

[jastey]

4 hours ago, UMNiK said:

histories of INDIVIDUAL'S burn outs due to trying to create and maintain a SOLO PROJECT

You didn't get my point. The Kerzenburg Wiki, the BWS linklist, BWS itself - they were all meant to be "COLLABORATIVE EFFORT that doesn't demand more than approving a pull request once a week or so by any of the same MULTIPLE people who are currently running and populating all these multitudes of forums". But collaboration of multiple people run dry eventually. Modders are busy with their own stuff, most of them do not have time to maintain a list on top. Some really assiduous modders provide updates for their mods to the lists, most don't, some might not even know the list(s) exist, some lists have no maintainer any more.

What you belittle as "individual burnouts of a solo project" is what started as collaborative efforts. It's just the ones who felt responsible to keep it alive that burnt out over trying to keep it updated while the others had RL or moved on (not judging that, btw.).

There is the Polish list - is anyone helping @Cahir maintaining it? I don't think so. There's the EET linklist - how many people contribute, out of the whole community? Exactly. There's the modlists at BeamDog's - the BGII one was last upsated 2019. 2019! At the official forums of the BG(2)EE games. What makes you think you could initiate a modlist that has any more info than the links to the modpages, if those lists are not even contrinuted to as you expect such a list?

To your questions: I'll only say that discussing which mod would go into which category would be a source of never ending dispute. There is mods that do not fit into fix-kit-quest-npc-tweak, or fit into several. Listing mods per category is not a help, because it will never be true to all mods.

For the rest: what @Graion Dilach said. I tried to explain the experiences this community gathered over the decades and how we are trying to make it work now. I am honestly fed up with people coming here, telling how they found the Holy Grail - which in the end, is just a dead end we hit years ago, and of course expect us to do the actual work to hit it again.

[subtledoctor]

21 hours ago, UMNiK said:

What I think is an absolute necessity is

Dude... if you think something ought to exist, the only reasonable thing to do is go out and make it. Yourself. Just do it. You seem to have the details of your preferred implementation worked out, and you seem pretty dissatisfied with the efforts made by other people, and you seem to lack compunction against very pointedly expressing your dissatisfaction with other people's efforts. Haranguing people for not doing enough for your benefit is just never going to make them want to do more for your benefit. That is not how you induce people to get things done. You're going about this all wrong. Either do it yourself, or develop some real leadership skills to better encourage other to do work.

21 hours ago, UMNiK said:

What would be nice every once in a while is for some brave soul to post their successful install order of a load of mods, including conflict resolution,

There have been some efforts along those lines. IMO the best recent ones by far are the one by @Cahir and the one by @4udr4n. In general I think that sort of thing is immensely helpful - people simply describing the experience of modding the game and playing the modded game. Here are the mods I used, here is how I installed them and any issues I had during installation, here is how my game went and any issues I had while playing. I find that kind of thread to be both good reading, and immensely helpful for future attempts to mod the games.  I have made my own attempt at such a thread. I would love it if more people did so, and I think more of that kind would be a great resource to other players. But there aren't many; I suppose one has to essentially write a 'let's play' and not many people have the time or desire to do that. (Going back to my earlier point, I don't recall seeing any such effort by you...) Places like the 'challenge run' subforums at the Beamdog site have lots, bot those tend to be more about the gameplay and tactics, and rarely include much about the mods used.

Heck, maybe there should be a more dedicated space for such discussion here. At least, the two threads by Cahir and 4udr4n should probably be stickied so that they remain easy to find. (Ahem, moderators.)

21 hours ago, UMNiK said:

Project Infinity could be developed to a semi-automatic state

@AL|EN has been making great strides toward that, with little assistance and sometimes against strong headwinds. Honestly this sort of reads like a complaint that he isn't working fast enough for you.

EDIT -

Whoa, there was a lot of further discussion before I hit 'post!' Oh well.  I will add this:

  

5 hours ago, UMNiK said:

There seem to be two fundamentally incompatible threads here: histories of INDIVIDUAL'S burn outs due to trying to create and maintain a SOLO PROJECT and trying to arrange a way for a COLLABORATIVE EFFORT that doesn't demand more than

What you don't understand is, it does demand more than. You may be suggesting the creation of a "collaborative" project, but all that means is you are suggesting more work (to your specifications) for the individuals who make up that collaboration.

"Ask not what your modders can do for you; ask what you can do for your modders."

Edited September 17, 2021 by subtledoctor

[jastey]

8 minutes ago, subtledoctor said:

At least, the two threads by Cahir and 4udr4n should probably be stickied so that they remain easy to find. (Ahem, moderators.)

I pinned them for now. We need to watch them though - as they will slowly outdate unless updated. EDIT: I also pinned @Caedwyr 's.

[subtledoctor]

5 hours ago, UMNiK said:

Question 1: is EETMIT worth looking at for inspiration?

Lol. As soon as BWS was put on Github, one modder forked the repo and converted it to supporting the installation of a single mod (and whatever other mods that invdividual feels like using in conjunction with that  mod). It is hilariously outdated, warning players about mod bugs that were fixed years ago, and ignores good sense and mod readmes with regard to install order, instead prioritizing an install order that may best work with that one particular mod.  (My favorite was when it decided "what the hey, let's install SCS first instead of last, and push the update to users without telling them we're about to utterly bork their efforts")

I say again, "lol." Just no.

The old real BWS repo is still of some value; I used is as the initial basis of my own install order/mod list for Mac users. But I also solicited a lot of advice and made a lot of updates since then.

Also, btw, pretty much every post here since UMNiK's first one should probably be broken out into a new thread. This discussion has utterly derailed the thread from Camdawg's well-intended effort to provide concrete guidance to necomers.

[Ardanis]

22 hours ago, UMNiK said:

What I think is an absolute necessity is a simple shared list akin to any Awesome list - meaningful categories (game and within that what the mod does (NPC or script or fix etc.)) that are easy to add to by just editing the .md and creating a pull request. The additions are links to mod pages on the mod author's preferred site (and possibly to mod repo), the pull request authors are modders themselves or anyone they trust to add their mods on their behalf, e.g. community site admins.

If it were an absolute necessity, it would've been already done at some point in the 20-years long span of IE modding history.

[Cahir]

55 minutes ago, jastey said:

I pinned them for now. We need to watch them though - as they will slowly outdate unless updated. EDIT: I also pinned @Caedwyr 's.

I plan to revisit my EET installation at some point, but it would definitely be more modest. I put far too many gameplay changes there. For someone who played the game so long ago that barely remembers the details, I tried to steer away from vanilla feeling way too much. I also tend to install too many kit mods. I need to decide which kit I want to play and install just the necessary mods. But sometimes I can't help myself.

[subtledoctor]

Yeah I'm going to get a new iPad soon. Once I have decent hardware I might finally dive into EET!  And I'll also document the install.

Edited September 17, 2021 by subtledoctor