Oblivion Mod talk:Modding

Consolidation

We could use a little consolidation. Tools are mentioned on three pages now. This page, Tes4Mod:Mod Management and Oblivion Mod:Programmers. The programmers page is the most developed, so I think that should be the one place for tool listings. --Wrye 19:49, 2 May 2006 (EDT)

Vs. TESCS Wiki

In order to prevent duplication of effort, lets draw some boundary lines between UESP Wiki and the official TESCS Wiki. We've already been doing that without explicit guidelines, but with new editors coming online, its useful to make policy explicit.

Material that is purely about using TESCS, then TESCS Wiki is clearly the place to put it. As the official site for that sort of material, it will be seen by (and improved by) more people than material placed here. However, TESCS Wiki, like all of Bethsoft's products, is driven by Bethsoft's commercial interests. I trust them to support documentation of TESCS, but I don't trust them to support anything that Bethsoft might consider to be contrary to its commercial and legal interests. E.g., anything that goes outside of TESCS in any way. E.g., a tutorial on making nude models. So, guidelines...

TESCS Usage to TESCS Wiki

If it's about using the TESCS (scripting, tutorials, etc.) it goes to TESCS Wiki.

Meta-Modding to UESP Wiki

Anything about working outside of TESCS, or in any way that seems unofficial goes here. E.g., file formats, co-executables, etc.

No Duplication

Don't duplicate material between us and TESCS Wiki. If you need to refer to something in TESCS Wiki, just use a link. Vice versa, it may be useful to add links from TESCS Wiki to articles here.

--Wrye 12:18, 4 May 2006 (EDT)

Migrate CS Wiki?

TESCS Wiki is starting to suffer major vandalism problems. Problems like that are resolvable, but require active effort by people with high enough authority. Since Bethesda is devoting less and less resources to support these days, this seems unlikely to happen. This problem is only likely to worsen with time. Scenario: BGS won't allow ordinary users to be admins on their wiki site, but they don't have resources to fix the problem themselves. So... Site becomes spamalot. So they shut it down. (This is bound to happen anyway -- BGS is unlikely to devote resources to a non-profit money-drain (even one as simple as running some servers) for a prolonged period of time.)

Meanwhile, we've got spam pretty well under control here, plus an active community of editors and admins. Historically, of course, the site has a long pedigree (stretching back to Arena in earlier incarnations), and it has large amount of technical documentation. Even after ceding most TesCS 4 content to CS Wiki, it's still the site for deep technical info on mod and save file formats, and has a number of unique articles -- e.g. SI formid bug analysis, fundamental papers on formids, merging mods, etc.

So, I suggest that material from the CS wiki simply be migrated in whole to this site. As a MediaWiki site, the migration would be mostly cut and paste. Main problem is categories and namespaces -- Tes4 modding info would need to be placed in the Tes4Mod namespace here.

There is some ambiguity with copyright -- CS Wiki has an empty link for the copyright policy, and avoids explicitly stating their policy. I think that it is best not to ask for permission. Bethesda often operates by a "Don't ask and I won't have to tell you no." policy -- e.g., the "mature content" linkage requirements in January were instituted because someone asked. BGS is well aware of UESP and has a good historical relationship with the site owner (Dave Humphrey). If they ever do ask us/him to remove material which infringes on their IP, we'll certainly do so.

Advantages of moving here:

• Vastly reduced spam. We're pretty much on top of things here.
• Dedicated editors and patrollers are likely to be given more authority to do stuff. All admins and patrollers at the site started out as regular editors.
• Don't have to ask permission to change organization at high level. Relatively few pages are locked here. Many of the major areas have been reorganized several times since they were first created. Obviously consensus is required in the end, but you very rarely have wait for a sysop to do it for you.
• Style is a bit more standardized here.

Comments? (PS: Standard here is to sign comments at the end, not the beginning.) --Wrye 00:17, 11 June 2007 (EDT)

Hmm, more than a dozen spam IPs have had to be blocked this weekend, and that qualifies as being on top of the spam ;) Even though there are times when I feel like we're only just barely able to keep on top of it, checking recent history at CS Wiki shows that obviously things could be a lot worse. The spammer hitting CS Wiki today was also targeting UESP, but once his current websites were added to our Spam Blacklist it shut him down (at least until he takes over a new set of forums). In other words, we do have a few tools to help with the problem; if new, better tools were to be developed by the wikimedia folks, Daveh has been good about responding to requests for new tools.

To me, the main question seems to be whether the CS Wiki community is interested in the idea of moving. Even if there aren't any copyright issues, I'd like to know that the the active editors are OK with having their content moved to a different web site. Most of the page history would be lost in the move, so the editors will basically lose all record of who did what. From a UESP point of view, I don't see any problems with adding a new chunk of content and (hopefully) some new good editors.

In terms of the logistics of moving the content, it is something that NepheleBot could be set up to do. The bot could automatically take care of the basics of copying content and updating namespaces and categories on the copied pages (provided I can get some input on what they should be updated to). The bot could also extract a bit of the original page's history and automatically include that in the edit summary when creating the new page (i.e., the summary when creating the page could be something like "Article copied from CS Wiki, originally created by xxxx, edited by yyyy and zzzz"). I'm sure there'd still be some amount of work that would need to be done manually, but getting some of the tedious stuff out of the way first never hurts. --Nephele^Talk 01:06, 11 June 2007 (EDT)

Main discussion seems to be taking place on BGS Forums. (NepheleBot -- love that little electronic gal! That would be cool. Assuming that migration idea gets sufficient support.) --Wrye 01:13, 11 June 2007 (EDT)

Never Mind (for now). Bethsoft has cleaned up the spam, added an image check for new users (to prevent spambot registrations), and banned the known spambot accounts. Also, there's probably not sufficient support from current contributors to main CS Wiki, and Joel Burgess at Bethsoft seems committed to keeping cs wiki alive. Main discussion is still at BGS Forums. --Wrye 21:24, 11 June 2007 (EDT)

Oblivion Mod Manager link dead?

Is the obmm link dead for anyone else? The are many many links out there to timeslip.chorrol.com but I keep getting a url not available web. It's not a 404 error page but an error page from my ISP so I'm not sure if it's my ISP blocking the site or if it's actually, hence me asking others before I change the page.Djdelirius 00:41, 15 May 2010 (UTC)

Dead for me too, and there are a few comments on forums about others having trouble so I changed it to a TES Nexus link. Thanks for letting us know. rpeh •T•C•E• 10:12, 17 May 2010 (UTC)

Hex editing help?

Sorry if this is in the wrong spot, I didn't know where else to put it. So I'm on ps3 and am trying to get to the Testing Hall by hex editing, but every time I search for the line "3D 5C 01 00" which is the Abandoned Mine to replace it with the testing hall code (I don't remember what it is at the moment) the hex editor just says that there are no matching lines in the file (or something like that). I am in the Abandoned Mine, under the light, and facing west-just like all the guides say to do, but it won't find the line i search for. I'm not very good at doing things like this, but this seemed kind of easy, any help would be appreciated. — Unsigned comment by Sunitcaphix (talk • contribs) at 18:47 on 2 December 2012