Morroblivion Maintainer - Active Contributor Vote for DaggerfallTeam

Thanks so much for your post, DaggerfallTeam.  In my opinion, you have made a strong case that you are a very skilled modder, you have great enthusiasm and motivation, and you have the potential to being a maintainer of an Official Morroblivion Release.  Before we go further, I think we should all discuss what the role a maintainer should be, and what the goals of future Official Morroblivion Releases should be:

Goal of an Official Morroblivion Release:
In my opinion, the goal of an Official Morroblivion Release is to make it easy for new people to install an updated version of Morroblivion on their first-time.  To meet this goal:

• Official releases should be produced on a regular basis, no more than 1 year between official releases.
• To be released regularly, an official release should ONLY be a merger of all existing, community-approved bugfixes, improvements and additions to the previous official release.
• An official release should never contain content which has not already been published and approved by the Morroblivion Community.

Role of a Maintainer:
In my opinion, the role of a maintaner should be to focus on producing a working, bug-free merger of community-approved mods into the official release.  To meet this role, they need to perform these duties:

• To make timely releases, a maintainer must make a commitment to prioritize producing an official release over all other projects.
• To help track bugs, a maintainer must fully document all changes made to the official release.
• To make working mergers, a maintainer must learn how to properly merge all type of content including bugfixes, improvements, additions and all types of files including ESMs, ESPs, textures, meshes, music, sound effects and voice files.
• To keep the official releases community-approved, a maintainer must set aside personal preferences and fulfill the desire of the community with regards to approval of all changes.

In my opinion, the community is too small and the project is too large to place the responsibility of all future releases on a single, full-time maintainer.  Instead, I think a maintainer should be selected each year based on which person has the time, motivation and potential to become the maintainer.  I don't think they need to have all the skills and knowledge to do the merger when they begin, but they must make the commitment to learning everything necessary, listening to community members, making good documentation and prioritizing timely releases.

Additionally, I think we should publicly share and maintain all assets (ESMs, ESPs, textures, meshes, music, sound) on a public server like Github or a similar site.  This way, the community is not dependent on a single person, and everything is not lost if that person is no longer available for whatever reason.  I have already begun a proof-of-concept of what the Morroblivion Unofficial Patch and the Unified Hotfix Addon development files could look like here:

https://github.com/ponyrider0/Morroblivion-Unofficial-Patch-JSON
https://github.com/ponyrider0/Morroblivion-Unified-Hotfix-Addon-JSON

We will, of course, need to discuss any potential legal issues regarding publicly posting all asset files but that can be done in another thread.

So, DaggerfallTeam, I think you have the potential to be a maintainer for v065, but you must make the commitment to the community that you will fulfill all the above duties of a maintainer, and that you will produce a release that meets all the above goals.  Make that commitment to us and you will have my vote.  Thanks.

I am in complete agreement with everything ponyrider0 has posted. It will be nice to see this project maintained for the community. I also agree that all assets should be shared in order that other devs can better assist with this project. It will be a sad day for us indeed if we lose anyone who currently controls these assets and everything will have to be done over from scratch. My desire is to see this maintained by a team of members as opposed to only one member maintaining control over this project.

I agree with ponyrider0 and Diana TES...  Individual modders can go dark for many reasons, and it would be a great help to have the assets available to anyone who could improve the project.  For example, I would like to see the missing creatures, I think from Tribunal, added.  Skywind is still a ways away, and some will always prefer Oblivion's engine.

Yeah it's strictly imperative that Morroblivion wouldn't go dark for years anymore.

I would propose for the first release a shorter release term, to allow the project to be know as "still alive".

Regarding sharing assets: we should also publish the installer code, otherwise if for some reason the ones that have the code go silent, the new mantainer would have to rewrote an installer with risks of bugs and incompatibilties (for example wine)

Well, it looks unanimous :)

I can upload the installer code no problem. I didn't make it though, and have no idea how it works.

Not sure what you mean about the assets, aren't they already publicly available?

Probably he means sharing during in-process modification.

For example, the mantainer works in modifing meshes and textures. He change a lot of them, then he had to stop for some reasons.

If he was the only keeper of the modified bsa, then the release is stalled until he return.

If everytime he modify the BSA, this bsa is uploaded somewhere, then the release can progress even if he disappears.

It's the same reasons of continous workflows that is allowed by versioning controls tools for code.

That is kinda how it worked already, but the bsa was only packed before public release. Contributors uploaded modified assets as loose files here on the forums, then the maintainer compiled everything together.

Daggerfall Rebuilt Dev

     The release window should be dependent on the amount of work that has been done in a 6 month period, Example would be, Every 6 Months the Active Contributors should have a meeting to discuss the Progress and what direction the project is heading and what should be improved during the next 6 month cycle. If the desired amount of work hasn't been reached during that cycle, then the Plan would be a release at the 1 year mark despite the amount of work. So the project doesn't go dark.

That might work if Morroblivion becomes more organized and grows with more members who can dedicate more time.  Currently, I think it is more convenient for contributors to just work on whatever project they enjoy doing and on whatever timeline they are able to do it.  The official release would just work as a community-curated snapshot of the currently completed bugfixes, improvements and additions at the time of release.

     Version Control is definably something that would be great! with the state of this project, I don't think it's even feasible to Host it anywhere besides here, Unless we host all Custom Assets on Github with the eventual goal of Replacing all assets, It may be possible in the far future to release Morroblivion to mainstream sites like TESNexus along side Skywind and Skyblivion. with my previous project Morroblivion Improved that was the goal. But this is definitely up to discussion like ponyrider0 has stated.

To clarify my idea of publicly posting all assets online, if we unpack the BSA and post the individual files on a versioning site like Github, then we can take advantage of that site's built-in version tracking, team messaging and collaboration features.  People can submit modifications to files, other people can review and comment on those changes, and if community-approved, the modification can be merged into the master branch (aka official release branch).  These are things that we currently do on this forum, except that anyone who wants to create an up-to-date BSA must manually keep track of all the mod submissions, download them and merge the files themselves.  If I can figure out a good solution to posting ESM/ESPs in "source format", then we can extend the convenience of version tracking to ESM record changes and script changes too.

My biggest concern with the above approach is that posting all the assets outside of the BSA might attract the attention of Bethesda corporate-types who might want to look over each individually posted asset file to make sure the copyright lawyers approve.  However, eventually getting rid of all of those files with questionable copyright status let's us become more open-source.

For now, I will be working on creating an ESM/ESP "compiler/decompiler" tool-chain so that we can eventually host the ESM/ESPs on a code versioning website, and (hopefully) automate the building of a master ESM file like a "nightly snapshot".  I'll also try to work on the technical aspects of doing automated builds of the BSAs as well... if I get that working, then we can decide as a community whether or not it's worth it to post unpacked BSA files that way.

CLARIFICATION: Sorry, just to be clear, working on the ESM/ESP "compiler/decompiler" tool-chain will probably take me at least several months to get something that is testable.  I will probably not have anything ready for use with an official release until next year.