Lucas

Yep, I know that. I was asked questions and so I answered (repeating myself and others again, if necessary). That's fine. In any case, I only came into the thread to state my view as it asked in the OP, whatever it is worth, If that is what it is, it would seem the criteria realistically might be TEW20 mods only - and this thread is asking for feedback, I'm assuming that's being read and taken into consideration. So I'm giving my take on it, given I have contributed to the community (and had more than one person trying to re-release work I've done for TEW20). Until a rule is laid down, we don't know what it is exactly. It's only being proposed at this stage and explicit statements seem to be required whether something is abandoned or not. So I'm just saying my work isn't. But the moderating team know how to easily contact me if need be anyway.

If it's good and people enjoy it, it doesn't matter to me so much. I just appreciate a certain level of courtesy and respect. There's a lot of mitigating factors into why you might put your name to something, or just your OK without attribution, whatever the case may be. If other mod makers have other wishes for their works, that's their right and I support that too. For me and my work, to keep it simple I'd just like to be asked and reserve the right to withhold consent or whether work is abandonware/freeware/fair use or whatever. That's it. Just like how the CV is fair usage but Adam wants a heads up if it's used elsewhere; my wish is that if I don't declare my work abandonware, it isn't. In terms of rights to reuse, redistribute etc, there's only one condition and that's to ask before you start. I just think that it's simpler to engage in a quick conversation / heads up than being needlessly restrictive and complicated about it.

So would you rather it was a blanket yes or no? I'm not really sure how that works and would be any good for the community. We have never shut the door right away to people, only when they've come to ask for permission after they've done their "work" on their version. That doesn't seem acceptable because we haven't worked with the author, in any way. We don't know them, don't know what work has gone into it, whether it is correct and works well. On the contrary, any one who has asked for permission, gets feedback and/or assistance with their mods, we work with them. That's still the case today. Some I know well, get an immediate yes. Others get a no, because they release it and then ask for permission Going even further back before even I worked on mods, permission was sought from the original creators to carry on the work, or for other people to come in and contribute to things like Venues, Title Histories, etc. That just seems fair and showing courtesy and decency to others. That was generally the forum rules here, and I think that was more than fair to everyone. We all do this stuff for free. So what this proposal is doing and fair play for letting people say whether or not they want their mods to be abandonware. I welcome that. Quite why though there needs to be a change to the rules, I'm not really sure. Why is there a suggestion of just declaring stuff abandonware? There is generally a lot of work (a ridiculous amount actually, by hand) in upgrading mods from one version to the next due to the scope of changes a TEW version usually brings. In some cases it might actually make sense to just redo them from scratch a lot of the time. When we did TEW16 mods, I actually developed tooling to facilitate new features' conversion in the game. We had thousands of workers with the (then new) based in regions, spread across at least half a dozen mods. Huge amount of work by hand. But we were apply to apply specific changes to multiple mods simultaneously. The problem we had in quality control of the mods, was without this, you had an email bomb when starting a new game with thousands of workers moving across the game. There were a lot of other parts of mod making this sort of work applied to Genadi's mods, Hive, Justin and more. Another example of lots of work - Personality changes in TEW20. To get something like this right is a lot of time of understanding it, researching it and then applying it as well (see above). You'll likely find some stuff can't be accurately researched so it might actually make sense to remove people from the mod for the sake of playability. The previous implementation worked differently, so the conversion wasn't going to be understandably perfect with personality traits. So you might find as a mod maker, to get this right you need to make wide ranging changes that affect the scope of the mod. It can be overwhelming, but at least starting from scratch can make things easier to build up, rather than revising every record in the game. So yeah sure, there's a reason I ask people to reach out. I'll help, if they are committed and dedicated to it and it can be finished to a good standard. I can't help or endorse someone's work if they come after the fact though, I won't just say yes or no, because it's not always that simple.

Just a heads up the 2001 mods and 'Mod Squad' mods are absolutely not abandonware. We never want our mods to be abandonware, but more than happy to work with people who have ideas to improve them and contribute in some way. One issue is being associated with potential future works without notification, attribution and collaboration is not something we can endorse. It's something I'm particularly mindful of given I've not worked on these mods under a pseudonym. Likewise we don't think it is particularly fair on those that do work on mods honestly and with dedication, if other people's works are taken without permission and endorsement in some cases and rebranded, which just goes against the spirit of mod making. Best way to reach out to me and the team would be through Discord to discuss - though I will check in on my PMs here from time to time. Thanks.

If you mean does it use the same base so can you use imports, yes. But the mods going further back will contain data for YTDs, etc so you shouldn't need to.

Put the kettle on!

Well that's the thing. In more modern frameworks, you could have the coloured lists, and keep the scrolling. Can't say why that isn't possible in TEW, other than they've said it's a limitation (and so use "old style" lists) if you want the old scrolling back. I see where they are going with it, but it's just non-negotiable to me as a user to lose essential that functionality which is just normal just about everywhere.

<p>I'd really like to play this game but the text size being so tiny by default (size 8 in a lot of places), and the inability to scroll with the mouse wheel are big accessibility issues for me. </p><p> </p><p> Having even loaded up TEW2004 I can see the text size being size 8 has always been this way, but I was hoping with more screen space that this would have been utilised better for spacing of elements and font size. </p><p> </p><p> I still stand by my earlier comments and many others about other aspects of the UI, including the multiple layers of modal popup windows that you have to click a tiny X each time just to get back to the last screen. But the above two are the most important to me, and it feels very frustrating and a sense of being left out, due to poor design.</p><p> </p><p> I do see some things that I'd consider improvements in ways but these are pointless to my experience if I can't access the game.</p><p> </p><p> I had a long hiatus away from the EW/TEW series until coming back for the 2013 version but I don't think I can play this again until these issues are addressed. I will hang around to see if there's improvements etc but otherwise I think I'll find other things to do with my time.</p>

And very good it was too, even when some of his examples were based on real people, you might disagree with them sometimes. Mods should reflect the mods imo, otherwise you may as well just play the CVerse

It's not though because C-Verse itself has seen some drastic changes in the past to keep up with some of the issues raised with the game engine. Ergo, C-Verse can't really be wrong in a sense, because it's not real. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but that doesn't mean C-Verse is reflective of real life at all, regardless of the similarities or 'based on' real people that they are sometimes.

You realise CV is entirely fictional? The mod makers goal isn't to model the CV, it's to model real world or the time period as best as possible. Everyone has a subjective opinion about a real life subject, that is true. But that isn't the problem with real world mods. It's a very tired meme on the community, treating people with disdain and dismissal for using modded content. It's just as valid a way to play the game or there wouldn't be an editor to mod to begin with.

There was a new UI when the beta dropped and it was panned. If it has discovered a menu system, right click, and scrolling menus then it could be a huge improvement. However there’s about 400 screens in TEW alone with pop ups etc so I’d expect things to be roughly what they are now just easier on the eyes. Looking forward to seeing the full release and giving it another go at least.

It's a good idea and works well elsewhere imo.

It was the standard, about two years ago. It's changing however, as both Mac and Windows now have dark modes of their own for nearly all apps. Word Processors are the exception to this rule, but if you have apps like Notepad++, VS Code or IDEs for writing then you can write in a dark mode UI. Mobile and Tablet use dark mode for writing now. Think the issue isn't so much needing it to be dark, but it's high contrast against everything else. Only if you have visual accessibility conditions needing high contrast will the current work well. For most players you should consider what they are generally using all day and what they are writing in all day. Remember most people don't and won't change their monitor brightness to adjust for individual apps. A lot of the web is favouring dark UIs (even the forum), the game itself is mostly in dark, so having something that contrasts so much is leading to complaints that it's hurting people's eyes (which isn't a surprise to me).

It won't change, but just my view that having static settings (62 of them) each with their own hard set of rules, is more complicated to the old system which was at least easier to understand in the context of the game. This video explains the depth vs complexity game design argument very well, and something I don't think products achieves very well any more.