Just a random thought. Maybe mods should have specific licenses?
To avoid similar situations in future.
For example, i guess for Terrain Pack, most appropriate would be CC NC SA:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
(I'm not saying Hobbes should license his mods under this license, i'm just giving example)
It's not the first time I've considered such a license, but the issue has always been that I am not the author of all the assets in the TP since 4-5 were written by other UFO2000 authors.
Besides, if people want to abuse they don't care if it has a CC license or not. I've seen blatant theft such as my 700 page XCom fan fiction being posted in a site, chapter after chapter, by another guy claiming to be the author.
And the only thing that stops that kind of abuse is vigilance, licenses mean nothing, when the modder that is using my TP/A51 terrains has this kind of attitude when I tell him I don't accept donations.
And here's a few things that the person that created this whole issue said to me when I asked him for explanations and told him that I refuse my work to be used for donations without even asking for permission and exercised my rights as an author:
"You are credited, so if they want to send money as thanks for YOUR part of the job, they're free to do so."
"But if you want to, I question your motives on why you have entered the modding scene in the first place."
"you're basically trying to destroy the community. I will honor your request... up to the point where you can half-seriously claim "autorship", since most of your work is based on other people's work, let's not pretend."
"I don't throw away people's gifts because some lunatic whose work I used according to the free sharing traditions of the modding scene had a rabid bout of greed and envy."
"I will also personally no longer consider you a honorable member of the modding scene."
"No. If the modification/improvement outweights original work to the point it is no longer the same thing, I won't remove them. I will honor your request only to the reasonable extent."From this exchange I learned the following:
1) This person has ZERO appreciation for other people's work and thinks that other modders are there to serve his wishes.
2) This person has NO idea of the work I put into creating those terrains and thinks I just copied things around.
3) If left unchecked, this person will continue to use it in an abusive manner and against the author's wishes.
4) This person thinks he owns somebody's else's work just because he changed it.
And if it is inconvenient for every, this is what happens when trust is broken. I trusted modders in the community would respect my wishes, and I never needed licenses. Since I can't trust that anymore, because 1 person doesn't respect my rights as an author, then I will control my original files.
Otherwise, and after this incident, I have no doubt that one day I'd see a half-baked game being sold as an app that uses the terrains I created.
That's not how it works.
Hobbes cannot release a version compatible with other mods.
Other modders would need to release their mods compatible with terrain pack. But that's practically impossible (both by openxcom engine limitations and by practicality of the mod implementation and installation). Terrain pack is effectively a standalone mod incompatible with every other mod from now on.
Glad you joined in, since I have a few technical questions.
I've been working a lot in .json rulesets for another game and one of the things it allows is to perform merges across mods.
With .yaml is it possible to load the Terrain Pack first, and then modders perform whatever changes they want on it on their mods through rulesets?
Also, one of the things I'm thinking going to add to the .rul file are yaml anchors, so that other mods only need to specify the TP anchor (maps, mapDataSets) if they want to use those resources in derivative terrains.
