The dreaded G3 Fixpack Options

[Arkain]

Hi.

Well, to make a long story short: why is it not recommended? I'm curious why this fixpack seems to be the reason for many bugs or other problems. Because it's poorly modded? Because of the methods used to actually "fix" things? Something else?

[Baronius]

By the way, the latest daily news, the (non-beta!) Fixpack breaking the Sheena NPC as well. Seems to cause memory leak. Poor Red Knight (the modder) would have been forced to spend hours trying to locate the problem -- if the player (the player!) didn't browse forums and report it that the fixpack breaks the modder's mod! Sikret's "prejudice" that things are not tested well is proved again. I understand that in such a size, it's hard to test everything, and they are trying to make it modular, but this isn't enough. (See my previous posts for suggestions.) And more testing is also needed (beside the things I proposed), as Sikret has said. Typical, well-defined tests. (And not such as: "I played the game twice with G3 FP and it worked fine" -- "OK, then let's move those components from the BETA group".)

P.S.: to some people, this thread might look as a massive attack against G3 FP creators. Well, problems have been gathering for a long time, and they didn't listen to us. Since Arkain asked it, and jastey accused us of prejudice, it was time to make things clear. I still appreciate the work of G3 FP developers (including the efforts of the head developers/coordinators), but now they can see that their concept isn't as seamless as they believed.

I'll gladly give them advice if they ask. First of all, my long post should be more or less understood (well, mainly the last parts, so the general theory), so everyone will know how dependencies influence compatibility between mods. (These things are obviously known by most modders, implicitly. The more abstract theory has the advantage that you can generalize, so you can avoid a big percent of bugs even before they would be created.)

When there are a lot of bugs, it would be time to ask "Why are these bugs?". To examine the methodology and guidelines. Instead of saying "This is normal. Every mod release has bugs". Instead of teaching people in a thread (especially in such a style) how to edit out the fixes of the G3 Fixpack in order to prevent G3 Fixpack from breaking their mods.

If they will refuse to consider the advice I already offered to them, it will just be pride. I believe we're all educated people here. The ability of a person to imagine and work with more abstract concepts gets improved at a young age. Ignoring my general advice or pretending to be unable to understand it (while demanding concrete examples) leads nowhere. If the machines in a factory malfunction, will you collect and fix the broken products forever?

[EDIT] The thread was moderated meanwhile due to the high number of off-topic posts, and some similar posts of mine were merged. Caedwyr's post (below) applies to what I said about the consumed keys. (Of course, it's obviously just a specific problem which doesn't help on our big main problem at all.)

This post has been edited by Baronius: Jul 30 2007, 07:54 AM