Thanks to DavidW's post, I think I begin to see Baronius' main point about Fixpack - all of those fixes, questionable or not, mod-breakable or not, are good and welcome, but there is a difference between an add-on and a patch.

However there is an other side of coin as well - if we're going to refuse certain parts of FP as mod-breaking we could as well refuse an official patch (or even the entire ToB, can't remember which one of them does it).
I'm referring to unpatched SoA and Imoen's extra spell slot per level. Was it a bug? Technically it probably was, though one might say it was because of Imoen's being Bhaalspawn. Was it harmful? In absolutely no way. Now imagine a modder was going to build a mod for unpatched SoA. Imagine his disappointment when he discovers that the dialogue about Imoen's extra spells that he wrote for the mod makes no sense any longer since Imoen has her bonus slots no more. And what should our modder do now? Call the officail patch as "making unneccesary and undesireble changes", adjust his own code to "fix" what patch has done, state sheer incompatibility with it? Guess it's to the second one. But the third option is reasonable too.
This example is exaggerated a little and I intentionally do not highlight the fact that Imoen was attended by developers, not by outside modders. But you do get the idea nonetheless, don't you?

Sikret, if you have knowledge about serious and critical bugs in G3FP, could you please share your info with me (in PM if you prefer)? I'll be starting a new game within a month and I'm going to use FP this time. And I rather to be just a player, not a tester or reversive engineer as I used to earlier.

Ardanis, I think you might have missed one of the main points.

First of all, changes which fix real problems are acceptable, even if other third-party mods may be negatively affected by it. The justification is obvious. The consequences are acceptable: there aren't many such changes in a fixpack (compared to the huge number of cosmetic, subjective "fixes"), so it's not a big deal to prepare other mods for them. I will detail this point in my reply to DavidW and plainab, in a longer form.

Furthermore, let me quote something (from Sorcerer's Place):


In other words, Bioware is an authority in this case. G3 Fixpack isn't.

This is justified from a technical point of view as well. (One could say that G3 Fixpack could also be considered as an authority if everyone accepts it.)

(1) An official patch changes how many things -- not many. Very few things, compared to a large mod/fixpack.
(2) An official patch is released once or a few times at most, with few changes, as stated above.

To sum up, an official patch is strongly static, contains few changes compared to a big mod, and on top of it all, it's authoritative.


Perhaps exactly his credibility...

Furthermore, everyone can make judgements based on own research and experience. It isn't Sikret's task to spend a lot of time searching for bugs in someone else's work. That should be done by the authors of that work.

Sikret's statements are based on thorough experience, he doesn't need to find all bugs in a mod to realize that a mod is buggy. If you have proper skills and knowledge in a certain field, you can deduce many important statements from it. Nonetheless, the main point is what I've already said: everyone is free to check these things on his or her own. Everyone is free to check the older (and newer) posts of the G3 Fixpack forum and other forums, to find out what each release of the G3 Fixpack broke in the original game.


I think so, yes, but this point is special:

If it's intended to be a fixpack or anything which is supposed to offer a base for others' works, then it's reasonable to strongly expect your work not to break those third-party works, with changes that are subjective and not necessary. In other words, if you make a mod which adds new content or improves the game in a certain way, and this mod can be installed by players if they wish (according to its installation instructions), then supporting compatibility is your own choice. (One might argue that UB is exactly such a case, so why did Baronius bring it up? Well, the Crooked Crane change is a good example of what the G3 Fixpack does to a great degree. Furthermore, it's reasonable to expect compatibility-friendliness from non-fixpack mods too, but not as crucial as in case of fixpacks.) On the other hand, for fixpacks, being compatibility-friendly is a crucial expectation. On top of it all, if this fixpack is well-known and players believe they must install it (because that is what the advertisements imply too), the responsibility is ever bigger.

Thanks for the offer to direct me to literature of philosophy of physics, I will remember it if I ever get more interested in that field/topic.

@plainab:

Then we seem to agree in several things. This is what I've been trying to emphasize all the time (including our discussion with DavidW): if a fixpack has an objective, technically estabilished justification for a change, then the fixpack has right to monopolize an interface, touch a dependency etc. On the other hand, if a change is subjective and may affect third-party mods in a negative way, it is no way a fix. Put it to a tweakpack or "game improvement" pack, but not a fixpack.

The G3 Fixpack developers used to refuse such arguments of me by saying "who decides what is subjective" and similar questions. Furthermore, DavidW had a remark, where he expressed that deciding what is subjective can be itself a subjective decision. In my reply, I presented that for 99+% of changes, there is a reasonable way to classify whether they can be considered fixes or not. The rest <1%, even if incorrectly allocated, doesn't really influence the global impact a fixpack might cause, their role is marginal.

So the possible problems a fixpack may introduce for third-party mods can only be due to important, technically estabilished fixes. Since the number of such fixes isn't nearly as high as the count of comfort, cosmetic, subjective etc. changes, the number of problems of this nature will be low, and thus can be sorted out easily.

On a side note, I haven't emphasized it so far, but the correct categorization and revision of "fixes" (fixes and changes) has other advantages as well. It is because the tons of various subjective, cosmetic etc. changes increase the complexity of the "fixpack" (no matter how well-structured it is), and this results in more general bugs (G3 FP introduces game bugs in its every release, and this is one of its reasons). If the developers focused on the actual mission of a fixpack ( = correcting problems that have an actually negative, noticeable effect -- this is what Blucher suggested them too), there would also be many less bugs of the type mentioned by coaster too in his above post.

As far as your questions are concerned about creating a better and user-friendlier system than WeiDU, I think it's better to answer those in a different topic. I will do it now.

Okay - in that case (touch wood!) I feel we're at some kind of clarity point. The reason, I think, you'd be happy with "DavidW's developer-intent mod" and you're not happy with the Fixpack are:

1) you don't think "DavidW's developer-intent mod" ought to be called a "fixpack", because you don't think deduced developer intent is a good criterion for finding errors in the game.
2) you think that the Fixpack is inadequately tested
3) you think that the Fixpack is unethically marketed.

In addition,

4) you wouldn't be happy with "DavidW's developer-intent mod" if it was compatibility-unfriendly but was designed to be a base to other mods.

I'm continuing to avoid 2) and 3). I think 1) is a disagreement about sensible use of language. It seems a reasonable use of the word "fix" to me, so if different fluent speakers of English can disagree, I don't think there's much more to be said. (I obviously don't think you're being anything other than honest about what you think is a reasonable use of the word; I'm sure you think the same for me).

As for 4), I don't intrinsically think any modder has any particular responsibility to ensure compatibility (and I think you agree). If you advertise your mod as a base for all mods, of course, then you'd better make sure it works that way. If you advertise it as a base for some mods (e.g. those with the kind of dynamic WEIDU code that's friendly to being built on a dynamic base) then I don't think you have such an obligation. So we're back to 3).

That might actually be a civil point to stop (unless I'm still missing something important). But one PS: I do think it's unfortunate if the debate moves away from being evidence-based. It's been mooted on this thread that there are "serious, critical bugs" in the current version of FP, and that's not something I've seen suggested before; I think it would be a shame if we moved to a debate where examples weren't given for points like that.

Especially if the "fixes" to these "errors" may create severe problems for third-party mods that are based on the fixpack. If they don't create such problems, then from a technical point of view, the change is justified; the next step in that case would be examining if the change is reasonable enough to be a fix (i.e. is it a poorly estabilished guess of developer intent or not), but this isn't nearly as important as the technical aspect. Although the presence of strongly questionable changes isn't really acceptable in my opinion, their significance is much smaller if they don't introduce mod-breaking problems.


Exactly. I meant responsibility as some sort of "moral responsibility". I mean that if you KNOW your work might break third-party mods (i.e. you KNOW that it's strongly compatibility-unfriendly), it's unethical to spread it without a warning, and unethical to expect (or worse, manipulate) third-party developers to support it (while you know it's a source of severe problems). It's unethical to deny this, and imply instead that the others' work is flawed, non-modern, old or badly designed. It's unethical to state or imply that your methods are superior, and it's the other side who must always adjust its activities and works to yours.


Indeed. Especially if its developers were trying to put pressure on third-party mod developers to solve compatibility problems that the base mod shouldn't have created in the first place.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Crooked Crane issue related to Unfinished Business (and not the Fixpack)?

If you read the sentence before the one you highlighted, you'll see that reference was made to Unfinished Business (UB). I think he was just using a well-known bug in UB to show that ones just like it are present in G3FP.

Then without a corresponding example in the Fixpack that claim is pretty much baseless, regardless if it's the truth or not.

The subject of this topic hasn't been about whether the fixpack may break third-party mods, but about whether breaking them is justified or not (so no one really doubts it anymore than G3 FP breaks mods).

For example, there are lots of alignment "fixes" (they can break Improved Anvil's scripts and any other mod's scripts which rely on certain original alignments). Similarly, mods which use the now consumed keys (which weren't consumed in the original game) are also broken. What the Fixpack's authors answer in these cases that such mods rely on bugs (which the fixpack fixes). This is the problem: those "fixes" are not fixes, because they are subjective changes (with justifications such as "this is what the developers probably meant"). Regardless of what the developers meant, the game has the content it has, and if an element doesn't cause a real problem, touching it while violating a potential dependency is not a "fix".

Actually (he says, breaking his resolution to leave this conversation alone and do some work) can I check how strongly you mean that? What about the (rare) situations where you're not just guessing what the developers meant but actually asking them? So even if Gaider says "X is wrong" by email, that doesn't count?

Well, I at least don't have enough inventory room to carry all the keys in there, without cheating.
And about the dependencies... for example, the mod maker can make his mod use another item to be used in the recipe that can only be found in the area that the key opened... thus ensuring that the quest was actually competed. Or if it's as one said, a memorabilia, give the door a item replace function as it's opened, giving the party the used key...
As for the "Regardless of what the developers meant", we must remember that the developer had only so much time to develop the product... or can you say that the first computer(link) was the best, and the todays once are just cheap knockoffs?

Jarno Mikkola: on the other hand, Blucher and myself (and most likely many others) like to keep the keys as mementos of adventures. On a side note, have you ever heard about containers? If you need to cheat just because your inventory gets full, it's already a problem...

The analogy with computers is irrelevant, because we don't talk about distinct released games, we talk about the same game, possibly patched and modified by Bioware, and tried to be modified by a fan-made mod which calls itself a "fixpack" while it actually introduces many many problems.


I emphasized it several times that the significance of rare cases is marginal (since +-1 additional incompatibility risk doesn't really matter compared to the tons of risks introduced by G3 Fixpack). However, if you're wondering about my personal opinion in that particular case: Gaider can be considered as an authoritative source (Bioware), so yes, it would count. (Again, the impact of such rare cases is negligible on the significance of G3FP's problems.) Of course, it would be another matter if Gaider decided to designate a few hundred elements of the game as faulty, because it would be practically rewriting half the game -- in this case, I don't intend to share an opinion, because I would need to consider it more thoroughly.