Welcome modders (aka What's all this then?)

[CamDawg]

If you're reading this, you're getting a sneak peak of planning for the EE Fixpack. For now this forum is only visible to modders so we can discuss the framework and standards before we open it to the public. Keep in mind that everything here, including this thread, will eventually be open to the public. Like BG2FP and IWDFP, there are no private forums. I had reached out to some folks via PM to see if there was interest in such a project, and received a positive response, so here we go. This was not meant to be exclusionary so if you were missed, please know that this is intended to be a community project and will happily take help and advice from everyone.

I've wanted to start this project for months now, and now that I've crossed a number of other projects off my to-do list I can finally turn my attention to it. There are a number of fixes popping up here and there and I think it would be a substantially better situation for the modding community to have a centralized and authoritative (for lack of a better word) source for these.

One of the things that made the BG2 Fixpack so successful was a good team, which is why I'm opening this up. At this stage I'd like to mainly talk through some basics of the project, gauge interest, and create a framework for moving ahead. I want to make it clear that, while I have some ideas that I'm going to lay out, all of this is up for discussion.

Unsurprisingly, I think the BG2 Fixpack model is a good one, primarily:

• Well-defined standard for what constitutes a bug with vigorous discussions about whether something qualifies as such
• Everything is open, e.g. no private workrooms
• Player involvement in the discussions
• Making well-documented code that is as simple as possible, allowing players to edit the tp2 to change/remove fixes they don't like
• A main stable component with a secondary 'beta' component for rolling testing
• Game Text Update
• A selection of optional 'we think this is a bug but we're not 100%' fixes

The main thing, for me, is the first point. From a technical standpoint, Fixpacks are pretty straightforward: the main contribution of team members is not necessarily code, but their insight about how the game should work. This is why, for example, I think the team-built BG2 Fixpack is a substantially better project than my solo-effort IWD Fixpack even though I coded most of the former.

I've already broken out threads for a couple of larger discussions (101s vs. 318/324; what is a bug anyway). Feel free to start your own if you have something you want to discuss, as I'd like to keep this a fairly general welcome thread. Also feel free to post bug reports. If you have a fix, great! But hold off on posting fixes quite yet since we haven't quite decided on a structure for the project.