I've just spent three hours going through some of the modding sites and downloading dozens of sets, backdrops, props and costumes that might be useful to my current production. I know from previous experience that at least some of these mods will be... less than useful to me. I also rejected a lot of mods based solely on the thumbnails provided - some of these may have been brilliant, but with no descriptions I have no way of knowing. This got me thinking about my experience with other games, namely Neverwinter Nights, and how the community handles modding so I thought I'd introduce you to the concept of the CEP. This may be familiar to some people but I'm sure it's totally new to others, so let me explain.

Neverwinter Nights is, like The Movies, a game with two parts. For those that don't know NWN is a Dungeons & Dragons game, and it shipped with a single adventure and a Toolset for making your own (actually there is a third part, the DM Client, but that's just an extension to the other parts allowing the DM to make things on the fly). It is the Toolset that has made NWN so popular as a D&D experience. Most people consider the three Official Campaigns to be "demos" of what can be done with the Toolset and the quality of a number of Mods far surpass those of the Official Campaigns.

As with anything of this kind, the Toolset was limited in what it offered the player and a modding community quickly grew around it, supplying Mod makers with new creatures, props, tilesets... in short new everything, many of which were a LOT more than simple reskins of existing content. As time went on more and more of this new content was released (mostly on the NWNVault ), first hundreds and then thousands of scripts, skins, placeables, items and tilesets. Some of the content was bad, some was useless, some was but in need of work, some was pretty decent and some was brilliant. Some of the new content was so that the mod-makers were hired by BioWare to make commercial mods for NWN called Premium Modules. Content made by community developers that ended up in the Premium Modules was recently made "official" standard NWN content when they were included in the latest patch, 1.69, released in July.

Because of the sheer amount of new content it became apparent a few years ago that something needed to be done, both to make things easier for people and to standardise community-made resources (there were cases where you would have to download the exact same thing twice to play on two different servers/mods because they were named differently), the Community Expansion Project was begun. The goal was to put all of the best community made content into one place and to fix all conflicts, thus standardising everything and making it available in one download. It was released as the Community Expansion Pack and it's sheer size qualifies it as an actual Expansion. The CEP is regularly updated with bug fixes as well as new content (the version of CEP that works with the latest patch was released almsot simultaneously with 1.69). The CEP team has a page on BioWare's website, here and another on the NWNVault, here which explains it much better than I can.

For those of you who are new to the CEP, this is a collection of hak packs from the previous six years of custom content, designed to work with BioWare's Neverwinter Nights. You'll find some of the best and most popular work available for NWN. Now, the CEP Team hasn't just sat back and mashed these haks into one huge collection of material. As you look through the content you'll notice model, animation and texture corrections, new scripts, and completely new content unique to the CEP itself. All of this has been designed to work alongside the official content of Neverwinter Nights and all patch updates by BioWare; so you will be able to enjoy their high quality with as little fuss as possible.

To give you an idea of the size of the latest CEP, the compressed download is 773mb and when uncompressed it is much larger than either of the official expansion packs released by BioWare. CEP is now considered a standard, some would say essential, download in the NWN community, without which you cannot play many mods or servers.

I am wondering if the modders at 8eyedbaby, Skinshack, DCMF, and any others would consider doing the same for The Movies and putting together a single download with all of the best mods. If Generic Set 1A and Generic Female Costume 2B are being downloaded by everyone anyway it makes sense for both to be available in a single download. It would also make sense to have full documentation of all the mods in one place so that users can know exactly what something is before installing it instead of having to rely on a thumbnail or a creator's justifiably biased comment ("download this mod, it's awesome! I made it!"), it would also make crediting someone easier when you use their work (for example, I've downloaded every sci fi backdrop I have so far found... and have no way of knowing when I actually make a movie who made what backdrop, especially when some of them seem to be the same thing).

I wouldn't be able to offer anything other than testing and quality control so I'm certainly not saying this is something I am going to do. I am suggesting it to the people that actually produce the mods. It would greatly help out people like myself who get lost spending hours on modding sites trying to find something, then having to judge it on a thumbnail or one-liner only to find it isn't very useful... on the flipside it would also help people in getting exposed to those brilliant mods that are undoubtedly out there but suffer from a lack of exposure (poor description/thumbnails etc.).

So... there's the seed of an idea, please discuss..

I think the idea is fantastic, the probem might be in that someone will have to spearhead it.

There are too many factions within the mod community here. It is not so much that there is feuding in the community as is territorial. I think you will see much resistance from groups not wanting to include their mods and thereby lose control of it.

I am not saying that is wrong, if someone creates something they should have the right to control it, but there has been too much mod stealing for The Movies. Where someone creates a mod and then someone uses it, or puts it on thier website, and gives no credit to the modder, and or they claim credit themselves for someone elses work. So some will be scared to lose thier identity after putting so much work into a mod and rightly so. 

Also, I have seen some websites that just want to keep thier stuff on thier site only. I fear you will not find this task easy. The fact that I am the only one to answer in 2 days maybe an indication of the lack of, or at least slow support you will find.

It would take someone creating a website and making friends with all the other mod sights around to bring everyone together. Not something that can not be done, but as I said it will be much hard work.

I hope you do it and I hope it works.

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Sounds like a idea. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Sokar_Rostau:

I wouldn't be able to offer anything other than testing and quality control so I'm certainly not saying this is something I am going to do.

Skelch:

I hope you do it and I hope it works.

ubernewbie:

Sounds like a  idea. I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

 

As you can see, he/she doesn't plan on doing this.  They are just throwing the idea out there and are looking for someone else to do it. 

Personally, I would much prefer to pick and choose which mods I want to download instead of downloading a few massive packs.  As someone who runs the site with the largest collection of community created mods, I can say that it also helps a great deal in the bandwidth area as well.  If all of my visitors were only downloading 1gig packs instead of much much smaller mods, I'd quickly run into some issues. 

As for the need to depend on a thumbnail and description to judge a mod, in the case of 8EyedBaby, that's really up to the modder themselves.  If they put a lot of effort into a mod, I'd hope they would put some effort into the first things a potential downloader sees.  That is not always the case, but it should be. 

And I agree with Skelch that some modders are really territorial about their mods (which is their call if they made the mod) and won't want to share with someone else.  When I see new mods that aren't on 8EyedBaby, I often get in contact with that modder and offer up our server space for their use.  Most times they are more than happy to upload their work, but I get the occassional person who balks at the idea and feels they are losing some kind of control doing so (even though they have complete control on 8EyedBaby).  One of which has posted that this is a idea in this thread, which I find a bit confusing. 

So, for me personally, I prefer to keep mods to individual downloads with the potential for special packs when the situation warrants such a thing (such as the Medieval Modders Packs).  This would have been an easier thing to do much earlier in the history of The Movies.  As the community has shrunk, I think things work great the way they are now.  But that's just my opinion.  If there were a big call for it, I'd have no problems spearheading this project.

Oz

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My post was confusing? I think its a great idea for people who want to put their mods into a community mod pack, like the germans have done, to do so. What's so confusing about that?

Yes OZ I did see where he was not offering to do it, my comment was just friendly sarcasm. As I was saying the idea was sound, but there was no use putting it forth unless he plans to run with it, because it will be hard to get anyone with the desire needed to put the effort out that it would require to make it work.

I should have been more clear when said "I hope you do it" that I meant if he did not it probably would not happen.

As for picking your own mods that is great too, I think the community could have a large pack with many mods, and yet still have sites like yours where we can pick our own stuff.

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ubernewbie:

My post was confusing? I think its a great idea for people who want to put their mods into a community mod pack, like the germans have done, to do so. What's so confusing about that?

Yes, I found it confusing after the response I got regarding your individual mods.  I'm not the smartest person out there, so I am easily confused sometimes.    I figured if I got such a cold response on individual mods, there wasn't much difference in using them for a combined pack.  That's where my confusion came from. 

Skelch:

Yes OZ I did see where he was not offering to do it, my comment was just friendly sarcasm. As I was saying the idea was sound, but there was no use putting it forth unless he plans to run with it, because it will be hard to get anyone with the desire needed to put the effort out that it would require to make it work.

I should have been more clear when said "I hope you do it" that I meant if he did not it probably would not happen. 

As for picking your own mods that is great too, I think the community could have a large pack with many mods, and yet still have sites like yours where we can pick our own stuff.

LOL, see... I am easily confused.  I have thought of compiling some mods into packs in the past, but wasn't sure if there was a need for it.  As I said in my earlier post, if there was a larger desire for one, I would consider doing it again.  But having three people responding doesn't really make me think there is a huge call at this time.  If there are more responses or requests for this, I'd be more than happy to do it.

Oz

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Do it, PM the ones you would like to do it with for permission and do it.

I don't think I've posted here before, if so... maybe only one time. I'm not the only one. I had to really dig to find this thread (and pretty much on accident).

I know TMO is closed, the game isn't a huge success and so forth, however, there are plenty of people like myself that went ahead and grabbed a copy at the store, downloaded the expansion pack (Stunts), and are very interested in how far the community can go with it. WE don't post because it's new enough to us that we know that our problems or questions have been answered elsewhere if we can just dig far enough to find them.

There is an overwhelming amount of content out there, and little "Special" efforts like you have described would save new (and I'm sure older) member's of this game alot of headache's. I know your sight as well.... and there is a ton of content there. I have downloaded and installed so much that I have a problem with some of the messages you get from actor's (Ex: ????????G). I can't reinstall the patch of the expansion pack because it's already installed on my computer, and reinstalling and trying to figure out where all this content come from bassically scares the heck out of me... pluss the game still works anyways.

My point is just because there isn't a huge amount of people commenting and going nuts over things like this doesn't mean it wouldn't be a huge success for the community. Look at it this way.... I didn't even hear of this game 'till  they already closed down the online portion of it. If I had known it was closed I probably wouldn't have purchased it, because I had no idea...... of course after realising the potential of the game, I would definately have purchased it no matter what.

So yeah, try what you suggested. Not the huge undertaking of making gigabytes worth of content in an "expansion", but perhaps getting the better mods that work well together (Sci-Fi stuff with one, Super-hero stuff with another, etc.), as smaller but just about guarrenteed without flaws, downloads.

Your bassically a legend in this community, and people trust your judgement. You have a greater fanbase (that goes for several of you out there) then you realise. There are those of us that might retexture a costume or try small things (tiny steps) that you will never hear from, yet we exist. There are those of us that have never done any modding at all, yet we are fans. We just don't have anything to add, or do not feel we have anything to contribute, and so let those that do represent us. 

The support for something like this would be huge if people thought it was definately going to have a 100% effort behind it. Most people wouldn't complain if it didn't happen, as long as the effort was legit. I only bring this up because of the failure in another thread to do something similar. That and the idea you have is quite a bit different.

 

Sorry for the first post (I think) being so large. 

   Ok, i think its a great idea and during this communitys years there has been many attemps at user created expansion packs, only one group of modders actually came through and did it, they were the Medieval Modders. All the other ones either the person just said they were doing it to try and get thier name out there or they quit half way through. Now im not saying not to do, cuz if you really think you can pull it off give it try, but there are many diferences from The Movies and NWN.

1) NWN had an official modding tool released by the company, the movies modding is fan based. So what differnce does it make, alot of mods out there may be corrupt or just simply not work becuase of inproper testing done before released. Also many mods will overwrite eachother when they have the same file name.

2) There are many different ways to get mods in the game depending on how they were turned into a zip or rar file. For example if you have a mod that when in the extracter is Helmet1 folder you are going to have to exract that somwhere than copy the data folder from within into the movies. If you have a folder named data in the extracter you can just extract it straight to the movies. So in the end if you get all these mods in the pack the person is going to have to individually install each depending on this.

3) NWN is a Dungeon Crawler people wouldnt mind having all the mods in the game for them to go use. The movies is different we here are very picky with our mods and need the right one to make our movie right so we prefer just surfing through the mod sites looking for what we need.

So in the end it might turn out ok but it would be a pain in the ass to make. So as a suggestion why not try and spend a few weeks at DCMF learn how to mod stuff then start going public with an expansion pack idea get modders to help and programmers and simply make your own expasion pack. And with some determination and a skillfull group of people it can be done.

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http://modsrus.weebly.com/

Reminds me of AdamRCook's expansion pack idea; which was decimated by community members, such as myself. Bet this will never happen since this was posted a long time ago.

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ozman69:

I attempted to hug you, but with 8 eyes, I have a problem with depth perception.

moviekit06:

Reminds me of AdamRCook's expansion pack idea; which was decimated by community members, such as myself. Bet this will never happen since this was posted a long time ago.

Your probably right. What I liked was the idea of it though. Instead of tackling a huge expansion pack, that would rival Stunts and Effects (For example), the idea was to release smaller packs.

I just think that idea is solid. The OP had expressed a great idea, at least in my opinion.

It reminded me of something similar, in Everquest. Everquest is not Modable, but the Maps are (kind of). Mapfiend and other places that hosted the maps, you could download one zone, or one expansion, or the whole world in one download, depending. It started small, but as people added to it, it become bigger and bigger.

EXAMPLE: You can go and download a map for the zone your looking for. Or you can download all the maps for that expansion/continent. OR you can just download all the workable maps for the game.

I can see how working it out in small increments like that, would make it less of a task then that other thread you mentioned. I'm sure someone could make a huge expansion pack, but most would start and find out how much work it is, get a bit (or alot) overwhelmed, and burn out very quickly. Doing it in smaller increments would not be so overwhelming. Whomever knew what they were doing well enough to do something like this, could work at their own pace, since the individual ones would be there anyways. However, as they go through the individual mods, adding more and more to the expansion, they could easily just make a new "Expansion" each time a new mod is added, rather then trying to get everything all at once. Do it slowly, and make sure that they compliment each other, rather then replacing.