I can't see any point being secretive or being best by hiding something, it sounds very weird to me, like taking something without paying and claiming that I would own that, there is no honesty, honour or self respect in such, it is very fake illusion of being best, only by sharing all that is known one can reach better level, when other know the same and one still can better them, I would imagine that only then one would truly call himself best. Anyway life is so much simpler when one does not even attempt such things, doing today better than yesterday is all competition I desire, also if I learn something, I try to write it up and so that next guy don't need to hit head to wall as much, that way I find greater satisfaction than with any kind of competition. There should be option for modders to add whiner bans, so that those that whine from receiving free mods could not use those mods anymore, that way people might learn to respond with respect and in constructive manner to mods. Now they can whine all they want and we stupid modders just give them more stuff... I have stopped modding before and surely if whiners don't understand to behave I don't need to release anything, just showing off stuff whiners never will get and making sure they know that it is their fault, maybe something like that would put some thinking wheel rolling in their heads. Modder strike
I am sure that nobody whined about Croft release, but then again it is top quality. Maybe we just need to produce top quality.
There's little chance anyone new to modding could hope to match that level of quality within a year or two, even if the "documentation" (as far as such a thing exists for art stuff) exists. And realistically, how long will someone spend on a track? It has been a big endeavour when I started modding with GP2 and it has only grown bigger since then. Even with the basis of a rF1 track I spent three months getting Fuji to look better, to update it from 2007 to a 2012 "standard quality". I've been working on a small 1-mile oval on and off for months, mostly on weekends when my motivation for the primary projects was exhausted for the week. Even those will take up a fair bit of time if you're looking for something higher than just functional quality. My conclusion is that even very low quality tracks are okay to have. It's always better than nothing. If there's a better version available, great. Moaning and bitching about even the lowest quality tracks is exactly the way to prevent better tracks from being made by driving off those modders. In that regard it might be more effective for new modders to join existing teams to "help out" on projects and gain experience that way, with the added benefit of having people around who can help them out or teach them. But how many modding teams would be willing to pick up a new modder who has nothing to show he even understands what a poly or a shader is? Hen, egg. Ok, so where were we, ah yes. Sharing stuff. Who would include the helicopter that circles Mid-Ohio/Sebring if it were made available and who would build there own to have it? My guess is a lot more tracks would use it if it were available and most people just don't think it necessary to invest the time into producing one themselves...
The solution is a FUSION project between modding groups and artists to manage the new modding era/challenge...A thing that will never happen. I'm sure I do not have to explain why...
It is human nature to be competitive, either against others or against your self. Keeping secrets is one way to ensure that if you are better, you can stay ahead of the pack for a little bit. Yes this does hinder the others, but makes them think and makes them learn so they win in the end. If everything was handed to you by ISI for example, or a top modding group, including all the instruction to be able to put something together, what would you learn? You would learn how to ask for everything to be handed to you instead of learning how to get what you need when you need it. Those that have learned are capable of producing better stuff more consistently than those that are handed everything. In art and science, there are people that are better in some areas and worse in other areas. This is the reason that one person would have a tough time doing it all on their own. This is also why a modding group or company will always be able to put out superior original product. People who are better at art have a better creative mind and those that are better at science have a better logical mind. It is very tough to get those 2 to the same level unless you lower the level of the better half. All of the above just basically means that there will likely never be 100% disclosure on procedures, and there will never be 100% cooperation between people. Cooperation requires compromise and many find it difficult at best to compromise. The sad thing is that people today are getting more and more used to instant gratification and expect everything to be done right now or they will whine. They also feel that the more they whine, the more likely they will get their way. They do this because it has worked in the past and so they expect it to work again. To all you modders, keep up the great work and I hope you can find ways to still enjoy what you do. To all the whiners, get a life. To the rest of us, be patient and share what you want.
I must say that I have slight disagreement there. Let's look it from more practical and common life example's point of view. You want to be a carpenter, but you can't have education or information from those that already are carpenters as you will get better when figuring it on your own. It does not work like that, imo. Only thing top modders and ISI can give are tools and ways to work, modder still has to develop skills to have that modding craft like carpenter has to practise his eyes and hands to be able to reach good level, but tools and methods to get one started can be given and it is not a free lunch. If thinking in community size, having all those tools and information would result more modders, more mods, more complex mods as average people don't need to spend 10 years figuring out how to do things and can actually start practising of doing it better in much shorter time. Only if you lack of talent, secretive ways can benefit you, but if you have talent and ability, sharing things will lead more new ways to do things and probably whole lot better end result. In business world, greed defines much more ways of doing things, every company is afraid of competition and how they may not be able to be in business if someone else knows what they know as they know they are not that good. With hobby like modding, we don't need to be greed and we will not go out of business as we can produce mods as much as we like.
Actually competitiveness isn't that big a part of human nature, if at all (which doesn't mean individuals can't be competitive). I know this type of argument comes up fairly often, so... Motivation has been shown to include "just" three main factors: Mastery, Purpose and Autonomy. There's a great animation based on a talk here. Economists in particular have shown that "social preferences" exist, like fairness and reciprocity. Humans generally are rational though (in the broader sense of the word, which would include goals like the above mentioned fairness, which isn't part of the traditional and pretty much dead-horse definition of homo oeconomicus' rationality), so put them into a position where they have to compete to satisfy basic or large enough needs and they'll exhibit behaviour you'd call competitiveness. Think prototypical early capitalism with men literally competing for the necessary goods to feed their families. Calling it part of human nature seems to me like saying it's part of a rat's nature to sniff walls, because that's what it does when you put it in a maze in a lab. Anyways... There will never be 100% disclosure because it's impractical and inefficient to do so. Heck, I'm not sure if it was practical and efficient to upload the pit perches! I don't know of a single mod maker who has used them, so as it stands it was a waste of my time until now. There will never be 100% cooperation between people because everyone is different. We can't even agree on how humans on a very general level work, let alone this sub-species called modders or those consuming mods! Cooperation is also difficult, requires coordination and requires those involved to give up some part of their autonomy. There's also simple communication issues. It requires trust. But we sure could benefit from 25% cooperation instead of the 5% we have now. And oh yeah, getting instructions most definitely is not the same as getting everything handed to you on a plate. How did you learn to read, write, mod or even install a mod if not through instructions? Instructions are even necessary for complex bits of the technology. You could spend years of trial and error to figure out how to enable the Real Road shader until you figure out to name the instances RaceSurface* and use enough polys for the mesh. Or how to set up AIW paths properly. There is a part of art to modding though, something you will have a hard time to replicate just through instructions, perhaps that's what Gearjammer meant.
Trying to fit building from forexample Monza to Botniaring might not also be best choice of action, even my poor eye can spot something different in track buildings... I was thinking here that some Golf games have really nice addon courses, I wonder if sharing from game type to another would be possible some day? Maybe we make sharing just to be more complicated than it is, this is just one guy sharing his awesome: http://texturemate.com/ Puts us shame really, he can make sharing site just like that and we struggle to make not much more than nice ideas
Much like the OP, I've always wanted to see a 'super' collaboration of great modders on one project. I'd just like to see what they'd come up with. The talk about folks bashing a project on release is real...I get that but we cannot let a few bad people deter guys from putting out work for the larger group. You guys need to ignore the trollers. We do.
from what i have read and seen to many modders with big heads that they wouldn't know how to work together, its the attitude look what i did. not the attitude on what we can to do together as a group. i dont mod but can bet your arse on this don't care what you got to say on my mod if i made 1, but how many dwn loads it gets. That is the most important thing whether ppl dwn load it the more the better for my EGO.
Here's the thing. I'll give you info through my perspective as I tried and failed and through that experience I know a lot about this. When I began modding and wanting to develop a group back in the days when RH and CTDP were the top notch (you veteran's will remember RH modding group), my desire was to unite big mod groups and talented people into one group, one home. Many called me crazy and that it would fail, others commended the effort to try. In essense, while the principle is a logical one, many with talent working together can produce more, the realism of it is that it can't work and I'll get into why. When established groups merge together before the merger even occurs there is the first hurdle to overcome. Who will be the main boss who'll make the decisions, what would the bosses of other groups merging into the one group have position and authority wise? Every boss doesn't want to let go of their ability to run things in their vision, and lets face it, visions defer. I tried to unite people but you always get the bad eggs that want to do their own thing and in most cases, instead of the bad egg being blamed, the leader is blamed. You then have the vision aspect that I mentioned above. When we were going to merge with FSOne, one of the biggest issues we faced back in those days was the quality factor. I was more chaotic then their leader when demanding quality, back then for them it was all about quantity rather then quality. But as time passed, they began making more quality rather then quantity. Some people want to do things fast and get it out for the fame, others want to spend the time to make it right with quality, and this offset's the group's members into two sides. When I stopped having partners in MMG/MAK-Corp, only then did we start having a unified team that developed a standard which everyone worked towards and anyone new who came into the group understood and agreed with before joining. The main thing is leadership. A group cannot work with more then one leader. Its not a matter of IF but WHEN they will disagree and throw the group into the chaos of taking sides. This destroys groups. By having the power alone doesn't mean I'm egotistical, but rather, wanting to protect the group from such drama's and everyone's work. Everyone comes in knowing exactly what we're about, everyone gets along with each other and learns from each other, and everyone works in a happy environment on the same goals. While EGO's can play a major part in modding many times, the fact is, many of the great leaders like RH and Andy (Neidryder) from CTDP understand this scenario which is something I didn't understand in my early years. At some point management will disagree and when that happens, chaos ensures and that benefits no one. That's not to say that groups and individuals cannot work and help each other, but it takes specific individuals with a specific mindset of a team success and not personal success to be able to work well within a group, and sadly, there are not many of those people due to EGO's. But those that do exist are testament to what can be achieved when the success of a group outweighs the success of an individual's ego. As this is also over the net, its hard to tell true intentions. Anyone can act nice on the net, but their true intentions can be vastly different. MAK-Corp has been screwed over by several people over the years, and I'm sure many other teams have been also. This makes groups even more closed minded and careful on who they hire, they instigate tougher joining methods, one of mine being the confidentiality agreement which many people don't want to go through. Its all about individual mentalities and it doesn't often fall under ego, but the fact that each individual has their own thoughts, goals, desires, expectations, and they often don't match, and that mismatch causes conflict. While a noble idea, its very hard to have happen. MAK-Corp has over 50 staff members working in the group now, from modelers to painters, and that is years upon years of hard work and a lot of suffering from bad eggs to find the right people who above everything that occurs, remain loyal to the cause the group has and to the group itself. That is the mentality individuals need to have for a group to succeed, that is the loyalty in members that they need. I guess I'm lucky in that sense, I have met some great people who I feel very blessed to know and very thankful that they share the same vision as I and are loyal and dedicated to it. I devote as much of my time to each of them as possible, I respect them and their work as much as possible, I don't just talk to them about work, I converse with them about normal topics too just like a normal friend. They are my second family. As a leader, you must know that without your staff, you are nothing. A group, a company without its workers, is nothing. A leader and a boss must know how to respect and care for their staff equally without prejudice. It works both ways, we can say individual's need to have less ego's, but the fact is, so do leaders/bosses.
You know, I was going to disagree with you vehemently until this part: That's the crux of it. If you work in a team, the goals have to align or you'll just have chaos and conflict. And what are the chances of having every modder wanting to work on the same project? And beyond that, agreeing on the vision behind it, the level of quality or completeness they want? What I disagree with (but which after all might not be the main point of your post) is that you need a strong leader or boss. At Virtua_LM we don't have a boss or a leader per se. We have different members who have different areas of expertise. People can still push for things, like getting Le Mans 91-96 finished for rF1, or for fixing some aspects, or for packaging up a mod for release. If having a strong leadership position works for you and your team, that's great. Some people work better in such structures. Others work better in other structures, which can produce great mods as well. There's a reason why the Valve system is regarded so highly, and why heavily-structured production-mill approaches are frowned upon generally (yet, they produce and people work there, so again it isn't like it's a case of black and white). Personally I have no intention to work in a strongly structured system in my free time. Modding is supposed to be fun to me, and I want sufficient autonomy in my hobby. I think most creative people are like that, but certainly not all. I guess in that we already have one reason why a unification project would be unlikely to work.
And some people just enjoy seeing other people enjoying themselves On that note, I have a community project proposition... My camp fire track is lacking cam and aiw, I just don't have the spare time to do it, some community input would be great, then I can finally release and share it. It also needs art such as loading screen, trackmap, icons, etc.
I agree with ethone on this one (and not just because we are team members ) At VLM everyone has their own lives and no one is considered a "boss". We work as a team, yes. However, that's where the structure stops. There is no "I" in team, meaning no one person has any higher say than anyone else. It's a "team" effort. When a subject or problem arises, we all discuss it and come to a mutual understanding on how to handle it. That's how it should be imo. When you structure a hobby as you would a job, it becomes a job. Nothing more. That's not something I'd want to be a part of. At the end of the day you are doing this for fun, right?
If you are happy with me driving around and hitting add tracking camera buttons at clever locations, I can then do cameras, I think, at least I found out that I could add cameras to one other track by that method and it looked fine to me, I have no idea where cameras are stored though, but let's not allow minor things to prevent something good from happening We at Finns on track are perhaps not a team in traditional sense, but then again what you have at VLM sounds closest to it. We are currently just two guys that happen to work on same project, we make cars that we want to drive, also we build them way we want to build them, if at the end someone else will like them it is nice, but not main purpose. Instead spending tens of thousands we can build virtual cars, put loud pipes and blowers without restrictions of modern day laws. However I think there are also more to it than what one might read first from message from Petros, he has seen lot of issues and has found way that is working best for him and others at his team, there are certainly many reasons for why he has chosen that path and probably there has been other paths that have been dead ends until he has found current one that has been working much better. It is true that people are different, so it is great that there are different kind of groups where different kind of people can find similar minded ones to work together efficiently, so I don't think there are one working solution when working as a group. However I think that in a future, there might be day when we can work together without any group, everyone just tags bit for himself and does it, of course it requires many things to happen before that.
It does boil down to the overall goals of the group. For us the goal has always been to build ourselves to a level to begin developing our own titles, following in the steps of simbin in a way. From modding to commercial. In this scenario, a leader/boss who can manage the group towards that goal is a necessary thing, so for us that works well as we all share that vision. Having said that, the modding side of things is indeed all about having fun in our spare time and producing things we love and things the community love to see. Whether you have a leader/boss or not, in some sense, you still have (whether they take those titles or not) people who determine the final quality. Whether it be one or a number of members. Of course it does depend on each group and what their goals and desires are. Even modding groups require leaders/bosses to help steer their group in the right direction. Not EVERY group is as mature as Virtua_LM where people can work individually and be loyal to each other. In many groups, you get the bad eggs I talked about earlier and there needs a structure to help protect those groups from those type of people. Someone as a leader will take the overall decision of bringing someone in or removing someone. When I say leader/boss in the modding scene, I don't mean it in the conventional term as you would for a company. In a modding group a leader/boss is just another person in the group who helps maintain the integrity and structure of the group more then the others. Lets face it, modelers have to concentrate on modeling, painters on painting, etc etc, there is always need for someone to manage the other parts the group needs to fulfill. But again as I said above and I don't want to repeat myself again, its all about the overall goals and desires, for us its to get commercial and as we do several commercial products and are a registered company, I am the leader/boss. Being that though doesn't give me a big head, I know full well that neither I, nor the company, nor the group as a whole can succeed if we don't work and respect one another equally. But as ethone said, that alone is what would negate groups working together from the get go. But don't misunderstand, having structure even in a hobby is not a bad thing. Even a hobby cannot succeed if you don't structure it correctly. We can't do everything alone, but in a team, with a sort of structure that works for those involved, we can do so much more. Call it what you will, everyone doing their own thing, or a leader leading his staff, at the end of the day, even you guys at Virtua_LM have structure, a structure where you all do your thing, understand and respect each other, and have developed a working atmosphere that appeals to your staff. That may not look like the conventional structure, but it is a structure nonetheless.
