2017-04-02 Meeting Summary

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Atrayonis's picture
Atrayonis
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Proposed Agenda

  • Necrom Revamp (LondonRook/TemplarTribe)

  • NPC claims, including Andothren's current status

  • Further Discussion of House Redoran (Faction page overhaul)

  • Interior merges

  • Foul Murder

  • Ranks and Hierarchy

Meeting Summary

Foul Murder

As we will want to move Foul Murder to implementation as soon as possible, please take a look at the questline and help fill out the remaining plot holes, chiefly currying the favour of Boethiah and Mephala, the alternate Imperial Oracle route to acquiring the ringlets, and the ringlet involving the now depowered machine that powered the ghostfence.

Necrom Revamp

LondonRook has been commissioned to redo Necrom as a personal project for TemplarTribe. TemplarTribes intends to offer the result to Tamriel Rebuilt to use if we so desire. Whether we will be able to use the work is something that remains unclear.

This raised the problem of how to deal with commissions for Tamriel Rebuilt.

  1. To what degree can any individual person contract help from outside in the name of TR?
    People are naturally free to do with their money/time what they want, but TR is not obligated to incorporate whatever comes out of it. And commissioning something that doesn't get included just seems like a waste all around.

  2. Where we do pull the plug on "in the name of TR" as far as lead devs are concerned? Old TR was rather strict, things are going a very informal route right now. We might need to find something else in the short to medium term.
    There is no consensus on this yet.

  3. How do we enforce #2?
    There is no consensus on this yet.
     

NPC Claims

Here’s the rough (ideal) process of CS implementation: 1. exterior claims are created for an area, 2. interior claims are created for that area, 3. they're merged together into section files, 4. the section files are fixed up, (ideally mostly border matching, but with the current files the reality is different), 5. the section files are NPC'd and get quests, and 6. then are merged into TR_Mainland along with border matching where the section file meets TR_Mainland, and then we 7. all get a drink and call it a day.

Dialogue, NPC and quest planning can begin much earlier, but important quests and NPCs aside a lot of decisions and creativity should ultimately be left to the one implementing them in the CS.

As far as an interior or exterior developer coming up with ideas for NPCs to populate the interior, the preferred solution that was discussed was adding a feature by which the developer could flag the claim as containing an NPC idea, so that the NPCer would be able to find it.

More general quest and dialogue ideas should be posted as asset entries with the relevant filters.
 

Temple Hubs

Necrom would be a Temple quest hub for all things related to the Sacred Lands, Necrom, and the transportation of Dunmer remains to Necrom. Any function beyond that remains to be seen.

Akamora (later to become Umul) will be a Temple hub for the Mephalan Vales at the very least.

Almas-Thirr will be a Temple hub for all things Thirr River Conflict related and probably Aanthirin in general.

Almalexia will have the Temple headquarters.

The other quest hubs remain to be seen.

Rats's picture
Rats
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LondonRook has been commissioned to redo Necrom as a personal project for TemplarTribe. TemplarTribes intends to offer the result to Tamriel Rebuilt to use if we so desire. Whether we will be able to use the work is something that remains unclear.

This raised the problem of how to deal with commissions for Tamriel Rebuilt.

So long it stays as a personal project there's no problem, but TR can't use any commissions that some third party has paid for.

One of our core principles is that TR doesn't pay its modders for their work. This is all pro bono; people contributing on their free time. Including commissions would mean either of two things:

1) Even though TR itself doesn't commission or pay for the work we say that it's okay to pay to some modders while having the others work for free. For example let's imagine that someone offered to make this Dres plainstrider for 20$ and then some third party (probably one of our devs, but they have to be considered a third party since TR doesn't pay wages) stepped in to pay for it. Meanwhile another modder is making this Heron creature for free for their showcase. You can not equate the two by saying that in the former case the paying dev is simply "donating their money" while in the latter the modeler working for free is "donating their time". In the end both modelers' work is sanctioned by TR but one of them doesn't get paid. This is a disgraceful scenario.

2) TR relinquishes some of its creative liberties and design decisions and hands them to third parties to escape the previous scenario. Commissions will be included in the mod with no questions asked -- having any influence over the commissioned work (feedback of any kind) would bring us back to scenario #1. This too is a disgrace.

 

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Rats

2) TR relinquishes some of its creative liberties and design decisions and hands them to third parties to escape the previous scenario. Commissions will be included in the mod with no questions asked -- having any influence over the commissioned work (feedback of any kind) would bring us back to scenario #1. This too is a disgrace.

Not exactly like that here, far as I understand TT is commissioning a mod so he can do whatever he wants without having to spend several meetings getting the quirks shot down (certainly understandable, if counterproductive in the long run) and then TR would be free to reuse it for resources.
If I misunderstood and it's a "take it all or leave it" kind of deal then that's all moot anyway because TT's changes aren't ok.

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I think differently. Not because I'm more pragmatic (just to nip that particular talking point in the bud), but because I disagree with the core principle.

"Time is money" is an often repeated phrase. In MW's context and with our aging audience, time is often not something people have.
What they do have, now fully in their professional lives, is disposable income.
If people literally cannot contribute to TR due to lack of time and expertise, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to contribue by paying others to do it in their stead.

Now, obviously, there are excesses that should be curbed in their bud. Holding off contributing to TR because you might get paid? No.
Complaining because others get paid while you do work for free? Tough.

There is no clean answer to these two problems, and I can't pretend that I have a solution. There is absolutely a shark that is being jumped here, but what I have in mind first and foremost is progress. Morrowind modding is on life support, and if people want to pay the few modders left to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise, I think we shouldn't stop them. Shouldn't encourage them either, but shouldn't stop them.

There is also the elephant is that is TR hosting, which will need to be addressed in Q2, as in really really soon. Money will need to happen there too.

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If anyone were to come forward with content -- whether a TR member or someone else -- and it is something we could use, and naturally if we have no reason to believe there's anything illegal going on, I would see no reason not to use it. If we were to discover money went into its making, I wouldn't really care, as it doesn't affect us; as far as we are concerned, the resource is being offered for free. I certainly don't think TR should encourage anyone to pay for commissioned work to be used in TR, and in this instance I only saw people advising TemplarTribes against it. This wasn't a case of a TR member saying 'I volunteer to pay up so that TR can have this thing', this is a case of a TR member saying 'I want to pay to have this thing and if you like you can have it as well'. To me the distinction is important; this isn't something done on behalf of TR. In fact, it's very doubtful if we will use it either way.

If there's a question here, I rather think it's whether TR is willing to implicitly support the practice of paid modding, but that's a rather different question. I personally think content creators are absolutely entitled to payment for their work, and the fact the vast majority don't ask for it is a very charitable circumstance that allows projects like TR to exist. If all content creators were to suddenly turn around and say 'I demand payment for what I create', that would be terrible for us, but I frankly don't think we could fault them for it. If there's a content creator working for free who thinks its unfair someone else is getting paid for their work, well, the option is always open for that content creator to join the marketplace, and if the content creator doesn't wish to do so for whatever reason, that's their decision.

I'm actually not completely clear if this is a 'take it as offered or leave it' sort of deal, but if it is, I'd tend to agree with Rot we'd probably leave it anyway; we will almost certainly want to make our own adjustments to whatever comes out even if we do decide to use it. But that's a moot point until we have a clear idea of what's being offered.

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Atrayonis
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After some careful deliberation, I'm reversing my position and will have to agree with Rats (and just in time to disgree with Gnomey cheeky).

Philosophy aside (and I did some real hard thinking about my position during the Skyrim Paid Mods affair and this one), Morrowind modding has to abide by an EULA with states two relevant things:

  1. Everything done for a Morrowind mod belongs to Bethesda (probably unenforcable),
  2. Morrowind modding must not be done for money unless Bethesday gives an agreement.

As such, the whole difficult question becomes moot.
Tamriel Rebuilt is one of the biggest remaining Morrowind mods in terms of visibility and we most abide by the EULA since we cannot afford legal action. In other words: no paid modding for TR.

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Rats
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^we are a funny bunch of people, aren't we? :D

Possible legal trouble is all the more reason to steer clear of paid stuff.

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afaik the person in question is only recieving payment for assets created in blender/nifskope

if there were illegal there would be a lot of artists out of work

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Redo Necrom? Why? Certainly, the city could use improvements, here and there, (perhaps cutting down on the number of touristy shrine locations), and the NPCing and dialogue was largely left unfinished back when we first released Sacred Lands, but the city itself is among our stronger works.

I suppose I can reserve final judgement until LondonRook and TemplarTribe post their work, but honestly, if they want to redo cities for us, there are plenty in the Telvanni lands that need it.