Permission Issues to use Warcraft assets in other mods/sub-mods!

[DarkInterloper]

As for the whole credit thing, I want to make it clear I don't believe you're maliciously stealing other people's stuff. I think there's some confusion between literal interpretation and implied intent going on, but that may be the result of any number of factors ranging from cultural to linguistic differences ect. My advice is maybe work on conveying your intention for any content you are borrowing better.

[Mr_Nygren]

For the record, you *do* have neph's grumbling permission to use his stuff, as well as do the...whatever it is you're doing with 3.6 lol. If you want to resurrect obsolete versions with ugly models all to ya man XD Just stop asking for the Great Sea Zola it's not gonna happen.

All of Nephs models are Good. I do agree that the older Fairies, Gohma, Kokiri, Lanayru, Wizzrobe, Sheikah and Deku Tribes are inferior. But i don't want a mess of new and old. And there were some Great older rosters like the Labrynna Regime, the River Zola, the Zora Dominion and the Gerudo. The New Dominion is great but the old had a special charm when marching. New Gorons were too childish, new Labrynna less cool.

I guess tastes differ and why not have both? Also, it is supposed to be a more completed mod than it were in 2014. Everything should feel Legend of Zelda and most or all vanilla material replaced.

Ah, the Great Sea Zola were higher quality versions with cool armor- would have been perfect armour upgrades for the River Zola. Neph had Only to use them for the new River Zola roster. They were some of his best work. They weren't riged though.

[Mr_Nygren]

Fair enough. That's an internal thing between you and the other guy, I have no context. And yeah, I totally agree on the alternate version thing, wouldn't say ''dangerous'' but certainly dickish.
It sounds like you're trying to avoid a Third Age Total War scenario with its bajillion submods lol
Seriously, I know how freaking tedious any work in med2 is, and was not implying your work did not count. Why do you think HTW jumped ship to a different engine, the med2 engine is a hunk of junk held together with duct tape and chewing gum- and its *still* the best modding engine in the series. Your work sounds more like the stuff I did so I know how it feels.

I have nothing against submods like most of those for Third Age, on the contrary i want such for Warcraft - i am just worried about great submods such as Divide and Conquer if they could be seen as a rival.

I Think we are somewhat on the same page here.

Yes, Rome Total War is better in some areas but Med2 is the one i would choose.

Yes, coding is time consuming and tedious work. I never use editors neither.

[Mr_Nygren]

As for the whole credit thing, I want to make it clear I don't believe you're maliciously stealing other people's stuff. I think there's some confusion between literal interpretation and implied intent going on, but that may be the result of any number of factors ranging from cultural to linguistic differences ect. My advice is maybe work on conveying your intention for any content you are borrowing better.

I usually read things literally.

[Mr_Nygren]

As for the whole credit thing, I want to make it clear I don't believe you're maliciously stealing other people's stuff. I think there's some confusion between literal interpretation and implied intent going on, but that may be the result of any number of factors ranging from cultural to linguistic differences ect. My advice is maybe work on conveying your intention for any content you are borrowing better.

Being christmass when i answered this i only had my phone, and it is annoying to write long messages on the phone.

But what i meant with literally is i am not a native english speaker (American nor British etc) and i read letters word for word. I have a hard time understanding or reading any underlined messages. If i read a text then that text is what i see - not used to anything else really. Doesn't help that the psychiatry said i had some autistic similarities - like i used to be in a normal class with normal kids - but as a teenager they said during conflicts that i did have some similarities with autistic people. Not sure if that is true or not - but maybe i am bad with social interaction if it isn't direct.

You may be right about a confusion between literal interpretation and implied intent.


Conveying my intent how? Like before i use something i should have written about it to Neph? Despite his text about using any asset in his mod?

I wouldn't be as protective about any other sub-mod i've been working on. But Warcraft feels like a special case for me.

As for the Hyrule sub-mod the intent is just a better 3.6 for my own enjoyment. It's a bonus for anyone who wants such a version if it is released. But i did originally mod it for my own enjoyment.

[Mr_Nygren]

Yes, that was uncharacteristic of me. I apologize for my explosion, but I had to vent it out. I wish they would be more restrained (as in adding stuff and making sure that stuff works before adding more) and more professional in their modding. Calling the current version of the mod 1.5 considering everything that is unpolished and unfinished just leaves me with a very sour taste.

Other mods finish their campaigns first, add all the background fluff, scripts and so on, and then release it, and every 'update' brings a bunch of new content. Warcraft Total War right now is an alpha being called a full release to goad people into playing it, they do, and find a half-cooked mess which, save for some really enthusiastic folk, drives them away from the mod, as I've seen in countless comments on youtube for example. But they do not care. When I spoke of me and HappyC's original vision I mean we wanted to do a proper mod. They just want to do "A mod" uncaring about its quality.

Case in point, the recent unit description portraits. I did the portraits and descriptions for the Night Elves, Humans and Undead, and I had to stop there due to lack of time and losing interest in the mod. The least they could have done was keep in my style, which was as simple as taking a screenshot of the units in the battle map and messing the colors a bit. Really simple stuff. But instead they decide to add their own portraits which is just a singular unit without any background and it just looks... weird. You see my point? This is minor stuff of course, personally I wouldn't care much except that this mentality of "who cares if it looks good or is consistent? throw it in and see if it sticks!" is reflected in everything else and is why I am rightfully pissed off.

My goal was always to be able to play as one of the awesome Warcraft factions in a Warcraft: Total War mod - I did never care much about things like unit_info-cards, text and the like - I mostly only cared about the game-play because I've played many mods and many of them were unpolished but still fun due to having nice rosters, nice balance and I just enjoyed playing them - even if they had the roman peasant as their unit_info-card or lacked unit descriptions.

I also never had any history of modding prior to 2016 and prior to Warcraft: Total War hadn't done too much besides coding and creating unit cards. I always hoped that others would fill in the polishment later such as by adding the missing text, the unit_info-cards or new scripts - I just didn't want to do that work - it wasn't important for game-play as in I could enjoy a campaign as a faction even if those things were missing.

Of course I did want voices from Warcraft 3 but lacked the skills to implement that. There were a guy this year who previewed Night elves with WC3 voices but he never released his stuff. I do believe that he mentioned how he had fixed the issue with the files not re-creating properly so it might be worth it to try and implement the voices again if I can find his text. I had done the Humans but it failed to work.. He did the Night Elves, hopefully it could be released.

In 2021 I did focus om polishing the mod by adding 56 new strat-models but I'm not done. In 2022 the focus lay on just fixing gameplay issues and bugs while Abeam did almost all the missing unit_info-cards in your style and replaced mine. Thrugg added new family members and ancillaries. Yeah, not much were done this year compared to earlier years but you could say we only polished stuff this year. There are still more strat-map models to replace and improve.

The main problem with doing a Westeros 1.0 development cycle aiming for the perfect and 100% most polished mod ever is that bugs will happen and all of a sudden all that work was for nothing - because the mod is crashing. The better route in my opinion was to release many versions so that if for example the traits are rendered non-functional I could easily go back and fix them. Spending 10 years before a first release is also a big waste of time, especially since this is not paid work and is more of a hobby. I also have other mods too.

We wanted a great mod, and we do care about quality - but maybe quality in game-play is different from quality in aesthetics - I never cared much about the later that is true. When working on Hyrule Total War: Classic Ultimate I did take the time and polish such things because Neph had polished it so much that it felt like a disservice to not finish the rest of the cards and such. With Warcraft you have to realize that it was a bigger workload - and it's unpaid work. Maybe we just wanted to play the mod sooner and decided to skip that work because it's boring.

- Hoping that somebody else would come in later and finish it for the mod.

Or simply leave it unfinished but still fully playable. The goal was a playable mod, not a polished mod that can rival an official game - while that was the dream it was never really an important first goal. The important part was getting the mod playable from the unplayable alpha released in 2012-2017. We had a map and nothing more in 2012, and in 2017 we got some WC3 units and some fan-made human units - from there we wanted a fully playable mod set in Warcraft 3 - if all the polishing wasn't finished at the release that was of less importance as long as the mod is playable and stable.

- Stability was the most important thing, more important than traits and scripts.

- Without that you can't play it. Stability was my main number one focus

Yes, I agree that my cards were of bad quality and I didn't even bother to keep to one style because I were never much of an artistic guy. I had the mindset to just replace the roman peasant with a card but didn't care if it looked "uniform" - thankfully there are other people who care about such things and did fix that.

All I cared about was playing the mod, and I mostly end up fixing things I don't like while playing - the art just doesn't bother me too much - even though I agree that it looks much better with the cards than without them, but it didn't really affect game-play so I thought it was of less importance.

"who cares if it looks good or is consistent? throw it in and see if it sticks!"

The mentality was probably "Let's add new cards, but who cares if they're uniform".

Hopefully my strat-models are more uniform because there I actually cared.

I might not have had much else to do in 2018 other than modding - that goes for the entire period 2016-2020 - my situation just wasn't very good and could be compared with Britney Spears when she was controlled by her father for a decade. Needless to say I didn't work so I modded. I were also not the happiest human being on earth and still isn't - I'm a bit bitter because of certain life experiences.

[Mr_Nygren]

All the models of Warcraft: Total War were rigged by Bantu Chieftain, except the ones by Eoghan Wolfkin that are free to use by anyone.

- Bantu decides over the other models that he rigged, and the policy for any mod that isn't Warcraft-based is that you'd need to rig them yourself.

Yeah, I'm not a big fan of that - I think sharing is caring - but when people demand things like "You need to make your own animations if you want our units that have unique skeletons" then obviously that's the same as demanding someone to work on the models if they want to use them - the same was true with Sundering models where they demanded we'd rig them ourselves by taking them from Warhammer Online and re-doing all the rigging work (8-13 hours per model) when the most modder-friendly thing would be to share already created rigged models.

The only reason to have such demands is that they don't want others to get the units without doing said work.

- Imagine if the Warhammer: Beginning of the End Times - Alternative-Cut or Hyrule: Total War had done that - demanding us to make our own animations or find other animations - many units would be ed as all the animations are either vanilla, Hyrule or Warhammer BotET.

- It's because they shared animations that Warcraft has such good animations for the units.

- And Alternative-Cut (A sub-mod for Warhammer BotET) wasn't even released outside of Discord and was considered a really well made beta.

- So yeah, a mod that hasn't even been released and they'd allow others to use all their custom animations, their unique custom cities, their unique dragons and mammoths - that's impressive - credits to Kalla, the creator of said sub-mod.

- Unlike the Sundering team that demanded me to rig the same models from scratch, instead of allowing the release of a cool sub-mod where I had already added cool Warhammer Online units rigged by them.

As for TGC allowing people to use two rosters because their creator allowed the use, but refusing the unique animations of the units - forcing me and others to rework them before we can use them - that just sucks and in my opinion hurts the modding community.

That's why we won't share with other mods unless they do the rigging work themselves - with the exception of mods like Warhammer BotET or Hyrule of course.