from what little i know about actual programming as opposed to scripting in morrowind, they are very close. my impression is morrowind scripting is to, say, java as training wheels are to a "big boy bike"

dreamweaver is an editor, not a language. it allows you to edit, in a human readable format, the HTML used to create a web page (well, used to anyway, nowadays it's all LAMP/WAMP) i could write my own page up, not using dreamweaver, and get the same result. kind of the crux of Fliggarty's argument, at least in my eyes.

Actual programming has a bit of a difference from scripting. MW script draws elements from BASIC, but it doesn't really prep you for programming in any hugely meaningful way.

As for Dreamweaver, it is an editor like any other. Most/all web pages still use HTML, the few exceptions are an XML and XSD or XSLT combo. LAMP and WAMP are server technologies, completely different.

As for copyright applying to file formats, it really depends on how things are done. Many formats now use a block-based system, where the file is made up of block ID, length, and data, repeatedly. It's such a common setup that you can't patent it. With the exception of patents, there is very little that can be done to prevent a program from reading or writing a file format. Most formats are fair game, the few that aren't (GIF, RAR, etc) usually have something patented in their creation (in those two cases, it's the compression algo).

IMHO, I would label myself a cathedralist and I completely agree and sympathize with Wrye, In light of recent events (which I find offensively extreme :verymad: ), I'd say this thread is mostly about those on either side of the argument, not the "most of us" aren't as passionate about either.
I don't find anything wrong with labeling two sides to help clarify an argument.
It seems like if you care so much about how your artwork will be used or distributed, you wouldn't post it on the world-wide internet. Pretty much all of us so-called cathedralists are primarily interested in progress, because 2011 Morrowind is infinitely more appealing than the 2002 version. It's rational to feel frustrated about people who want to impede the progress toward an impressive but realistic goal because they're sensitive about what they release to the public. Technology and information compounds upon itself to reach awesome goals; it seems like this is sort of a similar case.

*shrugs*

Either you want people to use your mod or you don't.

Mods that heavy handedly close off to outside improvement will eventually be the mods that become replaced and face the doom of obscurity.

Frankly, I find it amusing that people can be against outside users modding a mod created for a game being modded by outside users. Where do you think Morrowind would be today if Bethesda were as against modification as some mod creators are? How many would still be playing Morrowind if there had never been a construction set?

Categories are a useful tool in our search to begin to understand unfamiliar ideas. The problem arises because, for too many people, categories become not a means but an end. Too many people, when presented with categories, look no further than the category. They think that, because they understand the category to which a thing has been assigned, they understand the thing itself. They do not.

Like any tool a category can be useful - if one knows how to use it. But like any tool, in the wrong hands a category can be dangerous.

I argued against this concept when Wrye posted it in this forum. I argued against his long list of names for Oblivion modders and players, for the same reason. Wrye is an enormously talented technician. I would go so far as to say he's brilliant. But he does not understand human beings well. He has never understood that dividing human behavior into pseudo-scientific categories is inevitably going to alienate the large percentage of humanity who do not fit into any left-brain, either/or, them-or-us, rationalistic boxes. Error is introduced in every attempt to squeeze human behavior into inhuman pigeonholes.

Categorical thinking is like a stopped clock: it is only accurate part of the time.

I think in the long run it's worth noting that Bethesda claims ownership of all mods created for their games. The private ownership of Morrowind mods is really only because Bethesda do not bother to enforce that rule. It is only a the property of the modder as long as Bethesda's grace obtains.

As a community, we respect the author's right to make alterations to their own work, and annoying as it is when a modder removes their stuff, we really have no say in the matter as mod-users. Obviously as I use many mods, I prefer a gentleman's agreement to allow others to fix and alter works, as it benefits my own gaming experience if old works can be improved and made even more enjoyable. But I can understand that if you had put all your effort into something, you would feel entitled to do with it as you wish.


And yet, as Pseron Wyrd says, drawing a line in the sand isn't very helpful to the community. We are here at the grace of Bethesda. The community is not under the jurisdiction of any one modder or any faction of modders. Nobody has the authority to enforce ideological rules, however much we may feel they are a good idea.

ok my other 2￠. since i spent the first two.
after some thought i kinda came to the conclusion that in essence of "Cathedral-ism" vs "Parlor-ism" work as one in the community would be to have a community government. (I am Not Volunteering, I'm under qualified.) Having a SMALL government to give direction to community projects or i guess i should say could help organize / initiate community projects could help truly expand MW.

now i'm broke and i'm done with this topic.

if a topic by happen stance starts about the possibility of a government i'll dig through the couch for some more change.

I don't belong in this thread as I have no large releases, merely a couple of small releases, and they require things other than morrowind to be useful, they are an edited ingame.fx for use with MGE svn 186 and a retextured vivec temple water mesh which requires the MCP and its bump map/local lighting fix....

That being said, I personally couldn't care less if someone were to take the textures from my water mesh and apply them elsewhere for their own mod, or if someone came up with edits to improve upon that ingame.fx...I would however, like to be given credit for my contributions(actually, the ingame.fx has no real contributions of my own, but I took other people's work and combined it with more of other people's work...so yea, I didn't really add anything of my own design, but rather just copy/pasted in a way that it all worked together), and honestly, I don't know why, I guess, perhaps, that it is just an ego thing.

So, I feel that I am kind of cathedralist in that I don't mind other people using my work to improve the game, but at the same time I would like some credit for what little work I have done(basically, the 32 normal map textures and 1 regular texture that I made and included with my temple water mesh).

The issue of recent events had nothing to do with this subject though, it had to do with respect for the original mod authors wishes, or a lack there of. I would bet that Readme's are included with 90+% of all mods released, and I would say that 90+% of those readme's include usage/restriction wishes by the authors, if those wishes were taken into account by the creator of mw2011, then there would have never been a problem, he didn't take all of those into account, which means he didn't read all of the readme's and therefore he was disrespectful to the original creators, and that is it.

Mod compilations are a mistake to begin with in my humble opinion, because while they may be created to eliminate conflicts, they introduce a new problem, and that is that they are so overencompassing that they themselves can't be added to without having conflicts, and while lazy people will complain and bicker that the evil modders won't share their work through compilations, the truth is, that the modders know that when you download one mod, it will only lead you to downloading more, and with a compilation, there will be some very restricting limits on to what you can add to it, which would cause an even bigger headache for those lazy people than if they just would have stuck to downloading one mod at a time.

(I can guarantee that if even one person downloaded mw2011 and then added an extra mod that caused something to break, that the individual would have blamed that mod that wasn't included in mw2011 to be broken, when in fact, it was mw2011 that was just never made to work with that one mod).

....ok I'm done with this subject, moving on......................... :bolt:

OK my final 2 cents on this issue.

Cathedralism as defined by the OP (or defined by Wrye) is one of those Utopian ideals that in the real world doesn't exist and in our modding world, can't exist, except in limited situations. That's because we are all different with different views and, for the modding community to work, all those views have to be respected and worked with. The word 'respect' is an airy-fairy concept to some so when lack of respect is used as a reason for some modders being angry about mw2011, a lot on non-modders just don't get it. But it has a practical side. Modding is collaborative. We don't all work together but we rely on each other to some extent, whether that be meshes, textures and scripts, or just knowledge and experience. I doubt many mods, and no big ones, have been made entirely in isolation. Connary made the same point early on in this thread but I think many people, especially non-modders, miss the significance. Which is, that without the cooperation of other modders, the to and fro, give and take, my mod isn't going to get made, and neither is anyone else's. And the only (as well as being the right) way to retain that cooperation is to respect whatever wishes each modder has regarding their work.

If you accept that, then respecting the wishes of all the other modders (whether you personally agree with them or not) is the only practical way for modding to work. What the compiler of mw2011 did was to undermine that cooperative structure. I'm not saying that one compilation alone can kill modding (it hasn't) but if that attitude became common then what's a fairly open community would become a closed one, where only known and trusted individuals could enter.

Ergo, in my opinion Catherdralism can't work except within a project setting such as Tamriel Rebuilt, and most of us work within a much more practical framework, whatever our views. I can't think of a name for it offhand, which is probably just as well

I have always been under the impression that most modders are "Cathedral" kinds of dudes. You don't go through the trouble of making and publishing something, generally, unless you want it to be used and appreciated. It is quite literally a community FULL of helpful, generous people.

These discussions always seem to end with the general consensus amongst modders and regular players alike that a user friendly mod compilation is a good idea. Personally, I'd be honored if some of my work was included in a pack like that, and I'm sure many of us feel the same way. But that really does not make it OK to go ahead without asking first. It's the difference between asking to have something and being robbed. It's a basic social principle, really.

Good example, Enzo. Shoplifting from Goodwill is still stealing.

Another problem with compilations in general is that there's almost always something that's "good" and something that's "less good", and you've got to take both or neither. The focus of the compilation is often dependent on the personal tastes of the compiler, or is something where various individuals all throw something in, with no prior plan as to what "fits in". Balmora Expanded was a perfect example of a "hodge-podge" compilation, which combined a set of additional shops with a wide range of wares from "fitting" to "spoilerish", a tavern, a brothel, a hospital, a vampire-friendly underground, a waterfall, a tomb, and various and sundry other unrelated items all lumped under one file name. The player who wants a vampire dance club, the player who wants to fletch arrows, and the player who wants to buy furniture, probably aren't one and the same. It's a compromise at best, even when all of the participants are willing. That problem isn't relevant when the mods are distributed individually, but then you have more chances of potential conflicts that haven't been checked out in advance.

Either the community does as it does here, which is to exchange ideas and work on a voluntary basis, leading to a lot of freedom and creativity at the expense of possible compatibility, or else you have to create an "authority" to maintain some semblance of order and structure, which tromps all over personal freedom to mod the game as you see fit. As for the latter, the TR project went through its share of "teething pains" until it established rules and leaders. As long as everyone is polite, the first method works well; when individuals step over the line and breach that trust and respect between members of the community, then either the moderators have to step in or there's chaos. In short, the Cathedral method only works if some individual isn't trashing the cathedral; the Parlor can be locked by the originator if they don't like what's happening in the community. As long as we don't toss our cigarette butts on the rugs or break the stained glass, the Cathedral has more potential. Tread softly in the sacred precincts.....

I think if the community was more friendly to compilations in general, or produced more, then we would see better ones float to the top.

A lot of the time, people just want one mod that does a load of things and makes the world look better. They want to play the game and not spend time looking for mods for it.

Mod lists do go some way to addressing this problem though

The right thing for me to do as a modder is whatever is most fun for me. If I enjoy feeling like I'm giving something to the community, I should make my mod completely open and reusable. If I fear that someone will reuse my stuff in a way I find offensive--and some people are offended by non-obvious things: adding a barter service to a communist author's Mary Sue, adding Better Bodies clothing to NPCs when the author considers the peanut gallery option an insult to women, adding a quest that isn't playable as a pacifist, adding porm to the one asixual or unmarried NPC in an R-rated mod, even breaking the fourth wall in what the author believes should be a purely escapist setting--then I should release my stuff parlor-style, so people can play it at all. (In practice, cathedralism/parlorism is more about being attached to a creation than believing in open source.)

The right thing to do with other people's content is whatever bothers them least. The community isn't more important than a modder, so that their desire weighs more. Mods aren't cures, or the livings of artists. A community project isn't a great pyramid, no matter how inspiring the teamwork; it's a few hours of enjoyment for some gamers. (Besides, the awe at a community coming together is undermined by knowing that one person may not have wanted to contribute.) Giving a parlorist mod to the people does not make you Robin Hood, blowing the dust off someone's cache and giving it to people who need it more. It just risks making modding a bitter memory for someone.

I like the sound of cathedralism and if I released my mods (don't wait up), I might do that. I appreciate the resources provided by people who already have. But parlorism is simpler than trying to spell out what is and isn't offensive to me to do with each part of my work, just in case other modders want to use some little mod I made. (Think about that. If I'd made LGNPC Seyda Neen, I wouldn't have imagined a big project like LGNPC resulting. I'd have thought it was a neat thing I made that maybe someone would play.) Also, therefore, some of my mods would be parlor, some cathedral. What does that make me? Apparently people are one or the other, or only one mix/alternative. Would people assume that if I released a questless town as a resource, they also had permission to change my companion mod's political views? Or add MCA's "make love" option to her? What if the town were complete, but I gave people permission to expand it as they saw fit?

Mods I'm likely to release are meant for players. The modding community is just there, incidental. I am giving something to the people--to play. How is it not enough for me to spend hours of my time making something to entertain other people, that I need to also give another, overlapping set of people something to pick apart and remix, or else I'm being selfish, even destructive?

I do agree that mods should always be available once they've been widely and publicly distributed by the author, for the sake of whoever it was aimed at: modders in the case of resources, and players in the case of anything else. (Authors should also have the right to distribute things only privately. If getting precise hit counts, or direct feedback in a controlled environment only, is what makes modding fun for that author, then it is right to do that and wrong to interfere with it.)

By the way, we didn't all see "recent events" or eight years of implicit rules. I got Morrowind after the peak of modding, and only pop into the forums when I have a question. (So as one last aside, I often look like I've abandoned communities and projects when I haven't. I don't like that my rights depend on how boring/reliable my habits are. I accept that if use matters, I should put it in the readme.) I've never thought about a consensus on this besidesthe obvious "do what the readme says." While many individual parts of this thread are pointless, and for some this may be redundant, the thread was worth starting.

Those labels are horrible. This type of thing should always be voluntary for the person who created the part to be used. Meaning, yes you should ask permission, and if you don't get an answer, keep asking for an appropriate length of time. Ask around on the forums and the community as a whole. Has that person disappeared off the face of the Earth? If so, you can use the content, but if they ever come back and want their "stained glass window" back, you better remove it from your mod. It's not about the legal rights, all of those belong to Bethesda, which simplifies matters for us. It comes down to being a good person and not being a [censored].

If you piss off somebody by using their stuff and they leave the community and take their stuff with them, then the community will be mad at you, not them. Do you want to be shunned?

There are places that are commonly understood to be Cathedralist in practice, and to great effect. For instance the Tamriel Rebuilt team can create wonderful landscapes and their mod is beautiful. If you work with them, you understand how your contributions will be used. But in this sense, it is voluntary. You understood, from the moment you started contributing what the rules are. You voluntarily give up your claim to keep separate your own contributions from the whole.

Edit: I should say that this is a debate that has been going on since nearly the beginning of the community. There have been a few examples of people leaving because of disagreements but these instances do not overshadow the vast majority of great and wonderful things that the community is capable of, whether they be done by a team or a progressive line of additions, or if it is the single contributions by the single person making their own separate mods.

Since I really don't mod I'll just throw out general opinion stuff out there.

Anyway, I think the worst thing about those that leave the community and take their mods with them (label them if you must) is that they essentially are harming the community in response to the slights of the few. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be angry if their stuff is used without their permission. That I'm perfectly acceptable with as it isn't hard to email someone asking to incorporate another modders work in another mod with credit being given where it is due.

I think we can all agree that a more open community that builds upon it's content rather than having to rebuild and discard outdated mods is the best possible situation. For whatever reasons it is, that is not reality for us. But I would like to say that when a modder, for a lack of a better way of putting it, "picks up his ball and goes home" they're as bad, if not worse, than the people who have angered them in the first place. Again, I understand the anger of someone not giving out the respect that you ask. But to spite everyone just because you want to get back at someone for not respecting you as you would like, well, I think that's even more selfish given the very nature of modding which is to share works between other players. The most mature response, I feel (and since I'm not a modder feel free to consider me an idiot on this), is to leave the mods you released out there and simply walk away from doing any further mods if you have been angered that much. I just don't see the point in being so spiteful of the few that you would therefore take your work away from the entire community.

One thing which is wise to keep in mind is that in any community, there are jerks. Convents, monasteries, sports teams, military units, girl scout troops, Sunday school, and, of course, gym class. There are selfish, self centered, self absorbed, and sometimes just plain mean people in any cross-section of humanity. There are also thieves in every community as well. I had more stuff stolen from me at religious retreats than when I was in the army, but that was only because by the time I got into the army, I'd learned to always lock up my stuff.

The point of this post is that there are always extremes. You'll have the de-marbelizers on one extreme, wearing their feelings on their sleeves and holding their mods over everyone's heads in an odd form of blackmail and at the same time you'll have those who believe "if it's on the internet, it belongs to me". Think of it as the kid who owns the ball and decides that means he/she gets to make the rules and the klepto who figures you must not have wanted your jacket if you took it off and put it on the back of your chair instead of taking it with you to the bathroom.

Then there's the rest of us. Those of us who believe in sharing, but not without some level of appreciation. Those who create for the benefit of all, but still want to be able to say "I did that!" Those of us who know that recognition is nice, but not the only reason we do what we do. Having only two labels makes it impossible for the majority to distance themselves from the extremes. I think one of the prevailing themes in this thread is that you can't shove us all into those two categories and it is a disservice to try. It is also unnecessarily divisive.

As hard as it will be, I don't think I'm going to read this thread anymore. It really appears to have run it's course and now posters (including myself) are just repeating what has already been said; I hope I don't miss anything earth-shattering.