I have been working on a mod that is nearly release-worthy, called SmartQuiver. It builds on Sandman101's "OB-Style Quivers and Sheathing Bows", and adds a significant amount of additional scripting, item rework, etc, to achieve the effect of equipping a quiver automatically only when arrows are equipped, along with some other features, like using BTB's balancing tweaks built in. This is something the original mod shied away from doing due to the difficulty in pulling it off (and now, I can see why!). But, it's done, and it works.

Since the .esp relies heavily on existing records (items, scripts) present in one of the original plugins, I think this goes beyond a simple add-on. His readme also states, explicitly, that a modified version of his plugin should not be released, so I'd need his permission.

I've been trying to contact Sandman101 for over 2 weeks, with no response. What is the community's stance on how long a modder can "go dark" and be considered effectively gone? This mod is such a serious improvement over the original, and required such a serious amount of additional work, that I really don't want this to languish on my hard drive, never to be released.

EDIT: Also, if you have good contact information for Sandman101, please let me know.

Sandman works on a ship and is gone about half of the year. GHF is the best place to contact him, but don't expect a speedy response.

Thanks Jac, I'll try there.

For the record, there is no limit. It is always best to get permission from a modder *before* you start a project where their work is essential. Even if the modder could not ever be reached, if they explicitly said "don't use my work without my permission" then it would not ever be appropriate to use it without their permission. Not even decades later.

ugh. why are people so protective? it's just a game.

When you put weeks, months or years in to something you get a little protective, It's you child you raised it from nothing. also from what i have see a lot of people release stuff that they are planing to update or improve it would be a little annoying if someone else took what you did and ran the other direction with it gave or gave no credit. Even worse would be to include someone else's stuff in their mod screw it up and then the creator gets a bunch of questions as to why it's messed up and they had nothing to do with messing it up when they released it it worked fine.

Basically there are a lot of reasons.

I'm kind of torn on this subject, because on one hand, if a modder puts something out there, amazing and popular or no, if they get out of the modding thing entirely, regardless of them granting permissions at any time, I think at a certain point their stuff should be up for grabs.

On the other hand, with a lot of modders, it's near impossible to determine that they're gone for good unless they explicitly state such before they make their exit.

I don't imagine that there's a Red Mountain-sized pile of head-exploding mods out there stuck in limbo because certain modders can't be reached, but I don't think that matters either.

The ideal situation is for modders everywhere to make it known that they're moving on to other things and never looking back. It's not always possible, of course, but it's ideal.

yeah, i've made ALOT of mods, which took weeks\months to make, but people can take and improve any of my mods however they want. -except suran underworld 3 (as the credits states).-
but like... people only start working on other peoples mods when that person has officially stopped modding. otherwise people just PM the modders asking for updates, or ideas they'd like the modder to stick in the mod.
i mean, would somebody seriously pick-up say... my regional tree mod, and remove all the bugs while knowing i'm still a very active modder? probably not, they'd ask me to do it.
if i was gone? they'd just do it themselves. everyone wins. :goodjob:

Well I'm not a huge fan of copyrights, and the issues of modders trying to protect their work are not all that different. Still, out of my respect for my fellow modders I generally respect their wishes about sharing their work.

That said, if a modder is gone then that should be no reason not to use or improve what they put out there. Unless they were specifically known for not lending their work for other projects it's pretty safe to assume they would be cool with it.

And if they do come back someday and they have a problem with you using their resources, you can still take your mod down. No harm done.

Just my two cents.

What a lot of people don't realize is that there's a lot of history behind the reasons modders do what they do and how they do it. One of the reasons modders are "protective" is apparent in many other gaming communities. There was a *lot* of theft in the early days of Morrowind modding. A *lot* of people blatantly ripping off other modders work and even actively claiming credit for it. The reason the currently active forums take such a hard line against plagiarism is because their founders and staff remember what it was like before the people in the community said "no more".

People like to complain about the inconveniences of modders not wanting to give blanket use permissions, but there are very good reasons why the Morrowind modding community hasn't fallen apart like so many others. It's because, for the most part, we still believe in courtesy and respect.

BTW, although many Morrowind modders don't mod for Morrowind anymore, they're still active in the gaming community. They still check their emails and browse the threads. Many don't offer support anymore, but they will still grant usage permissions when asked.

I wasn't here, true, but I can still appreciate all that Elaura. I agree with Adul though, to an extent. For me, it's very much dependent upon just how much one is using of someone else's mod, and how said mods are labeled. For example, there's a big difference between me using a grinding wheel resource I found for Demolank's Shop, and transplanting entire cells from Sobitur Facility (bad-ass mod BTW) into Ahkmchambir, with or without permission.

But that isn't always the case it's not common but. People have started working on and changing stuff of people that were still around but not 100% active. and no i'm not going to site examples.

If one tries to contact the original modder and ask permission one would be surprised how many get back to you and are cool with some on making changes or additions. The only thing i have ever put a limitation on in my stuff is RL paintings that i got permission to use from the artist.

Edit: kinda funny i was think that Sandman101 hasn't been around in a while yesterday...

I know Sandman was working on a HUGE upgrade to his mods before the boat took him away for a while. (I was helping out where I could )

Long absences are normal for Sandman, and he invariably comes back with some sort of mega-mod that just blows you away. Don't write him off as gone just yet.





KF

Well, maybe with some luck Chesko can help him with it, I imagine he's done a lot of the work already.

yeah, i should of said this earlier, but it's gotta be a fairly "long" time since the modders been gone. like.. 2 years? not 2 months. imo.

I know one of the features he was working on for Oblivion Style Quivers and Sheathing Bows was the number of arrows in the quiver showing up in-game when you started getting low on arrows. I was helping with the meshes for this to happen. With all the new meshes, integrating Chesko's changes could prove problematic. I know ThatBloke was helping out with sorting the script issues as well.

I don't see why Chesko's work couldn't take the form of an add-on rather than a remake. Pretty much everything but the meshes and textures could be put into an .esp that would overwrite any of the scripts if it were loaded after OSQ&SB. :shrug: The last mod loaded, wins.





KF

It's not that unusual for a modder to be inactive for weeks or months (especially when a sweet new game comes out ). Sometimes things do happen "in real life" that interfere with checking one's messages regularly, much less responding to them. Personally, I'd never suggest assuming a modder is gone or uninterested. If they said you need permission, take it as a firm requirement. Sometimes you can find a similar resource that doesn't have the same permission requirements.

To me, courtesy, and good manners, cannot be rationalized away.

If you use something made originally by someone else, and their ReadMe says "It's free to use", then go for it, but give credit where credit is due.

If their ReadMe says "Don't Redistribute," you must obtain their permission beforehand, or just don't use it.

If their ReadMe is silent, at least make an attempt to contact them for permission, and if that fails, be SURE to give "credit where credit is due," and be prepared to pull your mod from the distribution site if they eventually get back to you with a "No! No! No!!"

That's just how life in the Big City is...

DARoot

This is true. There were many battles and many harsh words spoken back in those early days. It's the main reason why redwoodtreesprite and others spearheaded a community-wide initiative to get modders to be very specific about what they wanted - and didn't want - people to do with their mods in the event that they 'disappeared' from the modding scene. A modder's preferences about usage and re-uploading to other sites (another thorny issue) should always be spelled out as clearly and concretely as possible in any mod's readme.

Some of that old stolen content has been, so to speak, "grandfathered" into the pool of resources we still use today. I'm sure there are players right now who have no idea that some of the content in their games was appropriated from other modders or other games or from model and texture sites on the internet without bothering to get permission. But that's the way we did things back then. Sadly, we got away with murder and now we hold today's generation of Morrowind modders to stricter standards than we applied to ourselves. It's unfair, and I feel sorry for the current generation of modders, but I don't know what can be done about it, aside from returning to the old ways and I doubt anybody wants to do that. *sigh*

as seen here http://www.zyworld.com/redwoodtreesprite/ModderOks/ModderOKs-Reuploading.htm

This is pretty much my view on it too. With an emphasize on really trying hard to get permission. But, I have held onto one one mod for a long time because I didn't want credit for work that I didn't do or wasn't "blessed" by the original author. That being said. I see no problem in making a "patch" that updates or fixes a mod.

Wow, sorry, I just rechecked this thread a few minutes ago, I didn't realize it had started such a large discussion. Let me try to reply to the high points.



Ultimately, I work on mods that I want in my own game first. If I think someone else might benefit from it, great, I'll look into release viability. For now I'll stay in a holding pattern until Sandman101 gets back with me. Worst case scenario, I enjoy my work privately.

My other option is to simply re-do how his scripts work from scratch, so that it contains all original content. A download of his mod for the art assets would still be required. However, I don't have a lot of motivation to do that because a) the TES scripting language is extremely limited, and there's only so many ways to accomplish something the most efficient way via scripting, and it might end up being an inadvertent copy of what he's already done, and b ) his scripts work perfectly fine as they are; if the goal shifts from being efficient to being original, game performance will suffer.



There's a few reasons why this won't be viable, and it mostly comes down to script execution time, script efficiency, and script length. Here's a breakdown of how my primary script works.

• Check to see if one out of 26 different arrow types are equipped on the player.
  
• Check to see if one out of 29 different pauldrons are equipped.
  
• If a pauldron was not found equipped, check to see if one out of 29 different "pauldron+quiver" items are equipped.
  
• If a "pauldron+quiver" item was not found equipped, check if the player is equipping one out of 14 different bows.
  
• If a bow was found, kick off a script that checks if one of the 29 different "pauldron+quiver+sheathed bow" items are equipped, specific to that bow type. There is a different script for each bow, to limit the script to checking only viable possibilities. This script returns to the primary script whether or not a "pauldron+quiver+sheathed bow" was found, and if so, which one.
  
• After all of those checks, run a bit of logic that figures out what to do based on the circumstance. "I have arrows equipped and a pauldron, so remove the pauldron and replace it with a pauldron+quiver item", etc.

As you can see, I'm shuffling around a lot of items. It's sitting at 995 lines now, and not long ago I hit the upper bound of script length that it would still allow me to compile, so I had to restructure some things a bit. If I had to guess how the depleting arrows functionality would work, it would be that you would have a separate pauldron+quiver item for each "stage" of arrow depletion you want to show. Assuming you have 5 stages (100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 0%), that would mean I'd need to check 29*5 = 145 items instead of 29 at step 3, and 145 items per bowtype at step 5 (2,030 items total would have to be accounted for!), which runs things way out of bounds in both length and script efficiency. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MOAcki6V3XYzqyAQPbhQOqtVeqrEvEOJdf_S9YOcOTM/edit?pli=1&hl=en_US if you're curious. It's not done, so expect some ugliness.

I'll look again and see if it's possible to decouple my work from his, and only include my original work, but I'm not sure if that's possible yet. It will require some variable passing tomfoolery between scripts in different .ESPs, something I've never tried before.

Thanks everyone for all of the input. While I am a believer in the "living work" approach to modding so that things continue to get better, I also understand that the modder's own wishes should always be respected.

I had no intention at all to denigrate your work, Chesko. :cookie:

I was only trying to let you know that the work on the quivers was still going full bore last I heard from Sandman. There are indeed a LOT of nifs involved in the process. That's the main reason I was helping out with them. There are still quite a few kinks to be worked out with the scripting as well as the huge number of nifs. This is all still in the development phase and may well not make it to release. :shrug:

I apologize if I've offended in any way. :angel:




KF

I ...wasn't offended at all. Sorry if I came across that way. I just wanted to clearly define the restrictions I was seeing and why something like that would be cool, but due to the numbers, probably isn't possible.

I prefer being as detailed as I can rather than just slinging numbers around or vaguely saying "not going to happen!" That's why, and now you know And since you're close to the project, I figured you might appreciate the details.

I am all for copyrights as well, but people should be realistic about what to expect when you release something onto the internet. The thing that happened with connary is a very good example here. Once something is on the internet, people shouldnt expect that they can maintain tons of control over it. This is why when I release something, I make sure its known I dont care what they do with it and I certainly dont want to be bothered by people contacting me about it asking if they can do whatever. I think the most reasonable thing you can expect is for people not to take credit for something you did. Indeed if you do try to limit use, you will either get people ignoring your wishes or simply making something on their own which could out do what you have done.
Anyway, I think there is no set time limit and it depends more on what it is and how popular it may be. If someone has been gone for a couple years with no sign of ever showing up again and someone does a fix or upgrade of somesort that becomes very popular, then I think most people would accept it being released with the condition it could be taken down if the author returns and doesnt like it. I would definitly say that it takes more then a few months before you can consider someone as disappeared.