[zoe]

These posts in this http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1504099-the-future-of-morrowind-%E2%80%93-a-discussion-of-the-mod-community/ mention about what status the Morrowind Patch Project has and I completely agree with all of them, because I have exactly the same impression too about what disarray the current patching has.

Please note that this is not a direct complaint towards qourn or any of the past author(s) in any way, who have done a great work for the whole community over the years. Thank you to all authors of MPP/UMP.

Before I continue I will first give brucoms an answer for a very valid question; "I don't know for sure who is in charge. However I do know that quorn are the one who is active at the moment, so I guess that he is in charge."


Now you may ask why all this fuss and my reason for doing that I too want to contribute to the community in any way I can. So here is what I would like to offer to the Morrowind modding community.

I both can and will offer my site http://forums.sovngarde.se/forum/index.php (it's not much to see there right now for several reasons) to be a permanent home for as Mistahtokyo suggested it - Unofficial Morrowind Patch - to be a place for further maintenance, which includes a separate UMP-team forum for discussions, intensive testing, releasing new versions etc etc. However doing that brings up another matter though that I need to mention about and that is about myself.

I am not a modder in general speaking and will probably never be one, but who knows for sure and my destiny as a modder is written in a crystal ball. This is one of my not so good side, but I do have other good sides too.

One of them is that I do have some basic knowledge about phpBB forum software, which is the same as GHF forum has today except for the customizations that Fliggerty has there. There is also a reason why I mention Fliggerty in all this, because I once had my site hosted on GHF server and that was about 2-3 years ago I think. Today is Sovngarde hosted in Sweden.

Another positive side that I have is that I know how to document e.g picture(s) an issue in-game despite for not having a good English a least I can make myself understood in most cases.

I also have average knowledge about how some mod user tools e.g Wrye Mash, mlox, TESPCD works and what purpose each tools has.


Like I said earlier in this post about my site is that I both can and will open up Sovngarde and let it be accessible, or if so desire, also move Sovngarde to GHF as soon as possible if I got a green light from Fliggerty, so let say I could do that anytime Sovngarde will be up and running as a permanent home for UMP within 3 days.



Feel free to post your comments/suggestions in this thread about the future for the Unofficial Morrowind Patch. Thanks for reading.

[Blaine]

Well, I don't know how much time I can commit, and there's the issue of me not having any experience with the UMP, but I am a modder, I probably have most of the necessary skills for contributing to UMP, and English is my first language.

[Bereket Fekadu]

A central location for the UMP/MPP would certainly be a boon; having all of the information/discussion/versions in one place would alleviate a lot of the confusion a lot of us seem to be having.

Though, who should be put "in-charge" of the actual development?

EDIT: What I should probably be asking is: how are the unofficial patches for Oblivion and Skyrim organised in terms of development? Should we copy it?

Thanks for the answer!

[Charlotte Buckley]

We should summon Arthmoor into this thread, I'm sure he can shed some light on that.

[Jesus Duran]

That's why I posted this in the first place and Mistahtokyo sort of invited me to do just that to offer a permanent home for the Unofficial Morrowind Patch.

Well 'Who' is a delicate matter of importance.

The Unofficial Patches for both Oblivion and Skyrim have pretty the same organization. Indeed that we should.

You're welcome.

@Mistahtokyo: I agree.

[Andrew Perry]

Your ritual has succeeded

Before any kind of effort is made to centralize things and go forward from there, the first thing that needs to get decided is which version of the UMP is going to be considered the official one. That's part of the problem I have as a user - I can't tell. There are too many forks floating around out there. So somehow that needs to get resolved.

Second, obviously, a proper support thread here on the official forum needs to exist. I can't find one anywhere on the first 10 pages, and since the forum search for IPB software svcks, that's a problem.

Third, identify a primary download source and link to it heavily. People need to know where to get the actual files from.

Once those issues have been worked out, then settling on somewhere to host the project should be decided. It's a big enough and important enough project to warrant having at least a dedicated subsection of a community forum somewhere.

As for how the UOP/USKP work, I'll try and briefly explain that:

For Oblivion, it really wasn't that complex. One support thread on the OB forum. A permanent entry on Nexus to provide the primary download. A few mirror sites to ensure it couldn't fall victim to something bad happening to Nexus. That's pretty much it. Folks would post bug reports to the forum and/or Nexus comments, and Kivan would collect those for updates. Early on, Kivan also ran his own website where the changelogs were hosted and acted as the "official" place to download the files.

When he left and I took over management of the project, the system he had in place was retained. It seems to have worked out fine and that's how things continue to run. Though the official changelogs are now on my own domain instead of his.

For Skyrim, things are far more organized than that. When Kivan started up the USKP, he made the decision to get a bug tracker for it. It wasn't the world's best, but it did the job of providing a place to collect the bug reports and sort them out by priority and category. Plus the official support thread and permanent entry on Nexus.

The idea with the bug tracker was initially so that Bethesda could follow it and pick out things Kivan flagged for them - and this worked up until about Patch 1.6 or so. Then they stopped paying attention. Kivan left the project (and I'm assuming TES modding in general at this point) and control transitioned over to me.

The USKP went through a couple of bumps during the transition where the bug tracker was changed twice. Now, the USKP is being run from my site at http://afkmods.iguanadons.net/ where we are using the bug tracker software provided by IPB. The forum has an entire section devoted to the project, and we also provide the primary download site for the releases, as well as the site where beta test releases happen. This setup has allowed us to very quickly address numerous issues. In the 2 years since the project has started, we've grown changelogs that are larger than Oblivion's after 8 years time.

So basically it all depends on how sophisticated an effort is desired. After this much time, I'm not sure if a bug tracker would be of much benefit, but it's something to consider. We still aren't using a bug tracker or dedicated forum for Oblivion and things are working out just fine there.

[Andrew]

Thank you Arthmoor; I'll post my own thoughts once I've properly digested what you've had to day.

EDIT:

1 - For the UMP/MPP version to use, what I think we should do is to grab the most recent version by Quorn and combine it with the content from whatever version it is that's recommended to use with Quorn's version.

2 - I think download sites should at least cover: Nexus, TESAlliance, GHF, and possibly Morrowind Modding History. With the Nexus being the primary location as that's the site I think a lot of new player's will be most familiar with.

3 - A bug tracker? Hmm, might be worth giving it a go. It should help provide some direction.

That's all for now. Thanks again Arthmoor!

[Patrick Gordon]

And here you are.

quorn have a couple of times in the past suggested that the http://mw.modhistory.com/search-au-Thepal should be used, because IIRC quorn claimed that his MPP 1.6.4 and MPP 1.6.5 were a beta based on Thepal's MPP/UMP 1.6.3b version. He also mention that UMP should been used instead of MPP for the future updates.

As I said in the OP my offer still stands, but of course I won't object if anyone else will host such a project and they have my blessings to do so.