Went ahead and edited this, seeing as the author has responded and will be taking the steps needed to correct the issues. Will actually give this a shot, I will make the attempt seeing as the author is too. Thank you and I hope I wasn't too harsh, I just wanted to save people the headache I had to deal with.
No it's file bloat. Some, I'd even say most but not all of this authors mods run non-stop all the time as the game is running and constantly add to the quest log of the game, play for long enough with his mods and the time it takes to save and load your game will go from few seconds to multiple minutes and eventually you won't be able to save and load.
I just went through every mod uploaded by this MA, looking through every comment and bug report and I found 1 bug report on 1 mod regarding bloat. It was not a bug report filed by you.
I did, however, find you spamming every comment section of his mods with the same comments of "Avoid this guy, etc etc"; yet again, no bug reports filed by YOU.
So to circle back to my question, please provide us (the DFU modding community) we something concrete beyond dire warnings. Otherwise it will be safely assumed this is slander, or a personal issue you need to settle elsewhere.
Thanks for your understanding. This is a great community and I'd hate to see it devolve to attacks and rumors.
To quote Jehuty, one of the people who knows the most about the DFU quest system and has been applying fixes to the original game's quests for years now:
I'm gonna be really honest, and this might sound mean, Imsobadatnicknames doesn't format the quests properly and you're going to see stuff like that happen. Stick with other peoples' quest packs, that's all.
Populated Buildings, Perform at Taverns, Tavern Games, Bard Guild Quests, Travelling Alchemists, Banditry and Travelling Merchants, Wilderness Herbalism and Captured are all known to cause save bloat issues, due to the poor way the mods' quests are designed.
I can personally attest that Bard Guild Quests almost bricked my original DFU playthrough back in 2021. You'll find more than a dozen people attesting save file bloat/broken saves/NPC spawn spam for the mods above by searching the Lysandus' Tomb Discord server https://discord.gg/NCrDfzSMpz - You can also check the DFU Known Mod Issues List for quick links to messages to some of DFU's most prolific mod authors confirming the same issues https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q35AGp4v7ARCliygZdG8kJUYsfE339teE5I4PANqq3g/edit?gid=657665941#gid=657665941
"So to circle back to my question, please provide us (the DFU modding community) we something concrete beyond dire warnings. Otherwise it will be safely assumed this is slander, or a personal issue you need to settle elsewhere." The proof is out there. I've had my Nexus pages reported and taken down for sharing it. Nexus will blindly side with pissy mod authors as long as they don't get a DMCA.
As for this mod in particular, Jehuty has tried/tested it briefly:
I decided to try it. Once you cross the boundary to a village/city/hamlet, it unpacks 22 quests simultaneously and plants them in buildings throughout the town. It doesn't look like it'll cause "Perform at Taverns" duplication, but it will restrict the number of quest locations available within a city. Probably not in a way that matters, after some testing. Also, it won't work on most occasions, because fast traveling to a city puts you within the town boundary, which will prevent the quests from launching. If you go out and back into the town, it'll launch the quests. So it'll happen each time for Travel Options users, and will be unreliable for vanilla fast travel. If you somehow manage to visit a hamlet and/or a city and/or a village in the same day, it'll launch the quests in each of them.
I really, really want to believe that ISBAN being back means he'll finally either take down or fix his old broken mods. But I'm not keeping my hopes too high until I see it happen.
I mean, it would've be super helpful to the rest of us if Jehuty and company had these discussions here where the mods are, and not on discord. There is no "paper trail" for serious issues on any of his mods. And the comment sections are filled with people liking and enjoying the mods. That's what we have to go on. And if there is a serious fatal issue here, more people ITK should have addressed it publicly instead of letting one lone guy scream into the void while others complained elsewhere. It kind of stinks to say "we only note problems on discord and let the Nexus users bork their games". Whatever.
Still, we can hope a modder improves his skills with time.
Weeeelllll they DID have public documentation available on the Nexus detailing all mods and their issues before Nexus took the page down. So they at least tried to put it out there.
It kind of stinks to say "we only note problems on discord and let the Nexus users bork their games".
Over the last two years I have spent hundreds of hours worth of my free time researching and putting together several community resources, finding bugs/mod incompatibilities, working with modders to playtest their work and helping users fix their saves/mod lists. More than once I've dedicated an entire weekend to walking a single person through every single possible cause for an error until it was fixed.
I've helped people on Discord, on r/daggerfall, on the comment sections of random YouTube videos. Every single time someone has attacked me, the community and the corresponding moderation teams have had my back.
NexusMods' moderation team has given me nothing but threats, deletions and deaf ears. I can only bash my head against the wall so many times before calling it quits. This is the price we pay for relying on soulless for-profit enterprises.
Hey everyone. After reading the discussion here and on a few of my other mod pages I'm just going to say I'm sorry for the issues with my mods. I was unaware of the problems people have with them because I really hadn't checked the discussion pages of my stuff for a long time (kinda lost interest in DFU for a while and stopped checking comments on my stuff) plus I don't really use the forum anymore and I'm not on the discord. I will be the first to admit that my approach to modding DFU is sloppy because everything I make is first and foremost for my own personal use, thinking about what would be fun for me and getting it done the best I can with my knowledge of DFU's quest scripting system. In hindsight, it's no surprise that a lot of it is not up to the standards of this community.
After considering the criticism I've been reading for the last few hours both here and on the pages of my other mods I've decided I will be taking down my mods that are prone to bloat, hoping to maybe sometime down the line post them again after I'm a more skilled modder and manage to improve them or reimplement them in a way that's up to the standards of the DFU community. Thanks for the criticism and sorry again for any issues I caused. (I'll leave this one up for a while so that the people in this discussion can see my reply)
Also, I consider any content I make for my mods to be free to re-use with or without attribution, so if anyone likes the idea of this mod and the letters and notes I wrote for it, and knows a less sloppy way to implement it or thinks they can be reused for something else, feel free to copy all the text I wrote for this and reuse it however you see fit.
ISBAN, I'd like to thank you deeply for this move. If you want to look into rewriting your mods into a better state to re-release them in the future, I highly recommend checking out the Lysandus' Tomb server linked a few posts above or the Daggerfall Workshop Forums (currently down for maintenance): https://forums.dfworkshop.net/index.php
Both contain a treasure trove of knowledge and there's plenty of modders who can guide you on how to best make your mods work. No hard feelings. Everyone's always agreed that you have great ideas, which is why so many people over the years have made mods inspired by yours (Games and Gambling, Jobs of the Thieves Guild, etc.) or re-implemented equivalent features into their own mods (see a lot of Warm Ashes' wilderness events).
There's also the option of donating assets from mods such as Docks of Daggerfall to the World of Daggerfall team (they've been working on ports, so it would be perfect timing).
Personally I would love to see mods like Captured and Pilgrimages come back, working in the way you envisioned them to.
I think I sent you a message on the forums about a year ago about bug testing your stuff and helping rewrite them. I'm still down to do it sometime. I'd just need a place to send you the files when done.
Yeah, no hard feelings for sure. Thank you for your understanding. And like anything I make, the dock and lighthouse assets I made are free for re-use (I was under the impression that some of them were already being used by the World of Daggerfall project, to be quite honest, but if that's not the case then feel free to use them)
Hey Kamer. Yeah, sorry if I didn't see it, I haven't logged into the forums for a couple years (I think around 2022 or 2023). I appreciate the offer, I might take you up on it later this year (when I graduate from grad school and have more free time to start working on fixing my old stuff). If there's anything you want to send me in the meantime, my email is [email protected], you can contact me there.
I want to re-iterate the feeling of no hard feelings. It probably feels terrible to come back and see all that feedback, so seeing you reply and face it is really big. I and a lot of other people have no issue if the problems get fixed (one way or another) and I hope grad school goes well for you. The community is willing to help, so let us know when the time comes.
I just want imsobadatnicknames to know that your mods have a great potential to become among the most popular mods for DFU. The ideas are great, it's just the implementation which went awry. Best of luck with grad school and I hope to be able to play your mods without issues in the future :)
I would just like to add to this thread by saying that there are some neat ideas behind your mods ISBAN. I tried most of them out in the past and while I can vaguely remember some issues, nothing major like not being able to save/load comes to mind (but being frank, I haven't used them for long periods at a time). I'm only still using 'captured' and other than having to tweak the health treshold for actualy waking up in another dungeon and not just dying as soon as teleporting, I haven't noticed any big problems. If there are flaws 'under the hood' (I'm too clueless to have noticed tbh) like the veteran modders here are reporting, I hope you take them up on their offers to help and keep making even better stuff in the future. All the best everyone!
Thanks for the nice comment, WaywardBadger! I actually had recently thought about fixing my Captured mod to fix that issue. When I first released the mod, there was no quest command to heal the player, so it teleports you to a random dungeon with whatever health you had when you were knocked unconscious, which is what creates the issues with immediately getting attacked and dying once you spawn in the dungeon if you're unlucky enough to get teleported next to an enemy. Some mods that add new quest actions have been released since then, including one that heals the player, so I was thinking of updating it to heal the player to 50% health before teleporting them to a dungeon.
The problem is that even if I did that it would still have the (much bigger) problem that Rodderick90 mentioned in this thread: like most of my mods, it works by having a quest constantly running and resetting itself in the background, which can eventually bloat your savefile (which is the reason I will probably keep it down until I find a better way to implement the whole thing, probably using C# and abandoning the quest-based implementation altogether). I think it only becomes a noticeable issue if you're using many of my mods at the same time, tho. In my experience it doesn't seem to cause any noticeable problems if you're only using one or two of them.
(It also has an occassional issue where it will sometimes teleport you to a dungeon when you get below the health treshold in a town or when you get arrested by guards, when it's only supposed to do so when you get below the health treshold while in the wilderness, but I think that's not an issue with the mod itself. The quest system sometimes seems to errouneously believe you're in the wilderness when you're resting or when you reload a save in a town, no idea why)
19 comments
Will actually give this a shot, I will make the attempt seeing as the author is too.
Thank you and I hope I wasn't too harsh, I just wanted to save people the headache I had to deal with.
Some, I'd even say most but not all of this authors mods run non-stop all the time as the game is running and constantly add to the quest log of the game, play for long enough with his mods and the time it takes to save and load your game will go from few seconds to multiple minutes and eventually you won't be able to save and load.
I just went through every mod uploaded by this MA, looking through every comment and bug report and I found 1 bug report on 1 mod regarding bloat. It was not a bug report filed by you.
I did, however, find you spamming every comment section of his mods with the same comments of "Avoid this guy, etc etc"; yet again, no bug reports filed by YOU.
So to circle back to my question, please provide us (the DFU modding community) we something concrete beyond dire warnings. Otherwise it will be safely assumed this is slander, or a personal issue you need to settle elsewhere.
Thanks for your understanding. This is a great community and I'd hate to see it devolve to attacks and rumors.
Populated Buildings, Perform at Taverns, Tavern Games, Bard Guild Quests, Travelling Alchemists, Banditry and Travelling Merchants, Wilderness Herbalism and Captured are all known to cause save bloat issues, due to the poor way the mods' quests are designed.
I can personally attest that Bard Guild Quests almost bricked my original DFU playthrough back in 2021. You'll find more than a dozen people attesting save file bloat/broken saves/NPC spawn spam for the mods above by searching the Lysandus' Tomb Discord server https://discord.gg/NCrDfzSMpz - You can also check the DFU Known Mod Issues List for quick links to messages to some of DFU's most prolific mod authors confirming the same issues https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q35AGp4v7ARCliygZdG8kJUYsfE339teE5I4PANqq3g/edit?gid=657665941#gid=657665941
"So to circle back to my question, please provide us (the DFU modding community) we something concrete beyond dire warnings. Otherwise it will be safely assumed this is slander, or a personal issue you need to settle elsewhere."
The proof is out there. I've had my Nexus pages reported and taken down for sharing it. Nexus will blindly side with pissy mod authors as long as they don't get a DMCA.
As for this mod in particular, Jehuty has tried/tested it briefly:
I really, really want to believe that ISBAN being back means he'll finally either take down or fix his old broken mods. But I'm not keeping my hopes too high until I see it happen.
Still, we can hope a modder improves his skills with time.
I've helped people on Discord, on r/daggerfall, on the comment sections of random YouTube videos. Every single time someone has attacked me, the community and the corresponding moderation teams have had my back.
NexusMods' moderation team has given me nothing but threats, deletions and deaf ears. I can only bash my head against the wall so many times before calling it quits. This is the price we pay for relying on soulless for-profit enterprises.
After considering the criticism I've been reading for the last few hours both here and on the pages of my other mods I've decided I will be taking down my mods that are prone to bloat, hoping to maybe sometime down the line post them again after I'm a more skilled modder and manage to improve them or reimplement them in a way that's up to the standards of the DFU community. Thanks for the criticism and sorry again for any issues I caused. (I'll leave this one up for a while so that the people in this discussion can see my reply)
Also, I consider any content I make for my mods to be free to re-use with or without attribution, so if anyone likes the idea of this mod and the letters and notes I wrote for it, and knows a less sloppy way to implement it or thinks they can be reused for something else, feel free to copy all the text I wrote for this and reuse it however you see fit.
Both contain a treasure trove of knowledge and there's plenty of modders who can guide you on how to best make your mods work. No hard feelings. Everyone's always agreed that you have great ideas, which is why so many people over the years have made mods inspired by yours (Games and Gambling, Jobs of the Thieves Guild, etc.) or re-implemented equivalent features into their own mods (see a lot of Warm Ashes' wilderness events).
There's also the option of donating assets from mods such as Docks of Daggerfall to the World of Daggerfall team (they've been working on ports, so it would be perfect timing).
Personally I would love to see mods like Captured and Pilgrimages come back, working in the way you envisioned them to.
The problem is that even if I did that it would still have the (much bigger) problem that Rodderick90 mentioned in this thread: like most of my mods, it works by having a quest constantly running and resetting itself in the background, which can eventually bloat your savefile (which is the reason I will probably keep it down until I find a better way to implement the whole thing, probably using C# and abandoning the quest-based implementation altogether). I think it only becomes a noticeable issue if you're using many of my mods at the same time, tho. In my experience it doesn't seem to cause any noticeable problems if you're only using one or two of them.
(It also has an occassional issue where it will sometimes teleport you to a dungeon when you get below the health treshold in a town or when you get arrested by guards, when it's only supposed to do so when you get below the health treshold while in the wilderness, but I think that's not an issue with the mod itself. The quest system sometimes seems to errouneously believe you're in the wilderness when you're resting or when you reload a save in a town, no idea why)