Daggerfall Unity on GOG

Discuss Daggerfall Unity and Daggerfall Tools for Unity.
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Interkarma
Posts: 7236
Joined: Sun Mar 22, 2015 1:51 am

Re: Daggerfall Unity on GOG

Post by Interkarma »

Hey Kilg0re! You've been streaming DFU for years now, I wouldn't see it any other way!

Speaking of which, I still remember dropping into the comments of one of your streams, not knowing you were having troll troubles at the time, and you were so sceptical it was actually me. :D

I try to be more aware of this kind of thing now.

imsobadatnicknames
Posts: 371
Joined: Sun Jun 02, 2019 4:28 pm
Location: Colombia

Re: Daggerfall Unity on GOG

Post by imsobadatnicknames »

Oh shit, looks like I completely missed this. I didn't find out about this until yesterday and I didn't find out that it included mods until later when I checked my Nexus private messages, as I haven't been paying much attention to DFU for almost a year.
Being one of the people whose mods got included in this pack and weren't asked for permission until later, I have very mixed feelings on this. I personally feel wronged by it because I tend to consider everything I put out on the internet to be Creative Commons, and thus allowed to be reused and redistributed without my explicit permission, and in a certain way it's kinda cool to see other people to take enough interest in something I made to make it more easily available to other people. However, that's only just me being an insane ancom, and it's clear to me that other modders SHOULD have been asked for explicit permission before redistributing any of their stuff like this, and it's terrible that corporations feel like they can just release it and then be like "we redistributed this thing you made btw but we can take it down if you want".

So, yeah... idk how to feel about this. On the one hand I feel like complaining on my behalf would be against my principles about the things I create, but I'm not a big fan of a corporation taking things other people made and repackaging them without getting permission first.
Released mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/users/5141135 ... files&BH=0
Daggerfall isn't the only ridiculously intrincate fantasy world simulator with the initials DF that I make mods for: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=177071.0

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Ralzar
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Location: Norway

Re: Daggerfall Unity on GOG

Post by Ralzar »

After reading through the announcement thread on GOG, and a bunch of frankly garbage hot takes, I decided to make a longer post there summing this up:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/get_y ... e7/post215
Having read through this thread I felt like weighing in as one of the mod creators involved.

* I made the mod "Darker Dungeons" which was included. I had no idea about the GOG Cut before it released and someone posted about it on the DFWorkshop forums. No one had contacted me. They did contact me the next day and blamed a limit on Nexusmods PM system which caused PMs to not be sent out to all mod creators.
I gave them permission to use my mod in their pack as I did not want to cause a fuss and honestly, being listed as a mod creator on GOG is pretty cool.

* I see a lot of claims about how the mods are free, with the implication that there is no cost to mod creators when their mods are re-hosted on other sites. I just want to point out that I earn points on Nexusmods based on download numbers. These can be used to buy stuff in their store, like the infinite premium subscription I used most of mine for, productkeys for a bunch of games or cashing out the points via PayPal into dollars. Also, more downloads mean higher ranking leading to more visibility and downloads.

* This modlist was made by GamerZach, which I and most other people in the DFU mod creator community have no idea who is. I am sure he is a nice guy and makes good vieos, but from a quick glance at his YT channel he seems like a guy that makes videos about applying graphical mods to elder scrolls games. The small community of mod creators for DFU has a lot of experience in creating mod lists and between us have an encylopaedic knowledge of what mods are incompatible or simply do not fit with eachother for visual or gameplay reasons. If asked, this community could have produced a mod list in a matter of an hour or two if GOG had asked us and given us some indication of what kind of result they wanted from it. Heck, mod lists for all kinds of different playstyles and graphical upgrades are already made and readily available.

* The GOG Cut is pre-loaded with not only mods but also settings. For game/graphics but also keybindings and mod settings. This makes it so if you try to change the setup of this build and then GOG updates it, stuff will revert back. You will probably keep new mods you added, but what if you updated a mod to a newer version that GOG does not have? They'll likely downgrade it back to their version. If you rebind key and update, they pop back.
This is not the case with regular Daggerfall Unity. However, regular DFU has one folder for all this info that is shared across all builds, which can mean that the GOG Cut will also affect regular Daggerfall Unity as it shares some of the same files.

* Daggerfall Unity is still in beta. It keeps churning out new versions fairly often, which breaks mods. Most active mod creators update to fix this, or update just to be sure, by rebuilding the mod for the new DFU version. Sometimes mods are left behind or two mods who used to be compatible no longer are.
How is GOG going to keep up with this? This is labour-of-love level of work to keep on top of. Not something where you can quickly check a website to get it all right.

* Nexusmods recently launched their Collections system, which is basically mod packs. So instead of selecting individual mods, you just select the collection. The difference between that and GOG Cut is obviously that the Collection just links to the mod files on Nexusmods and downloads them from there. If GOG Cut did something similar there would have been a lot less problems and probably not any need to contact mod creators for permission.

So to sum up: This could have been a great thing that would have benefitted GOG in exposure, mod creators in exposure and GOG users in getting to play Daggerfall Unity with mods. Instead GOG for some unfathomable reason were in an extreme rush to push out this mod pack which to the DFU community read like "a random gamer picked some mods he thought looked cool" and this was so prioritized they completely stumbled on the landing and created a bunch of bad feeling on all sides instead of us all just being happy fans of GOG, Daggerfall, DFU and the mods for it.

Edit: Oh yeah and I forgot: I see the argument "it is not illegal" bandied about in these discussions. We are not lawyers. This is not a court room. No one is suing eachother. This is at the moment purely a question of doing the decent thing and not offending people for no reason. The only time I see people use the argument "it is not illegal" is when they act like an asshole and the only defense they have is that they are not legally obliged to not act that way. It is about as good an argument as "it's just a prank bro" and makes you look about as sympathetic.

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BadLuckBurt
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Re: Daggerfall Unity on GOG

Post by BadLuckBurt »

Ralzar wrote: Mon Jun 20, 2022 3:20 pm After reading through the announcement thread on GOG, and a bunch of frankly garbage hot takes, I decided to make a longer post there summing this up:

*the wall*
You make very good points there, I hope GOG listens. I know I haven't been too positive about the entire situation but since XJDHDR and Magicono's mods have been removed, it's probably better to look on the bright side. Settings reversal is quite worrisome.

The 1-star reviews are kind of funny to read, some people will just not get what this game is about which is perfectly fine. There's probably been more than plenty people in the past with the same experience but since you'd actually have to register here or join Discord for something you don't even want to play, we just never got to hear about those. Now they have a platform to leave comments :lol:

I really don't pay much attention to the entitlement of certain users, because it doesn't fit their narrative they tend to brush aside that mods got pulled for a lack of respect on a human level, not legal. They are inconvenienced and whoever caused that inconvenience is wrong. Us modders have no idea how hard it is to be narcissistic.

I do hope that those that are serious about giving this game a try will find their way here because I did see a couple people just give up because they run into problems with the installation which is a shame. Maybe a dedicated FAQ thread might be a good idea in the future, guess time will tell.
DFU on UESP: https://en.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=T ... fall_Unity
DFU Nexus Mods: https://www.nexusmods.com/daggerfallunity
My github repositories with mostly DFU related stuff: https://github.com/BadLuckBurt

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