Okay here’s the deal. I got 10/10 on the last 5 blog post. There are 8 blog posts in total. The bottom 3 are going to get dropped. We all know where this is going.
I was tempted not to write this at all, but that felt kind of dirty. On the other hand, the little demon in me will not let me invent another paragraph about our project because frankly, I’m doing fine, my team is good and everything is going well. There is nothing to say other then things are solid.
So I’m just going to write about mildly code related things that I think are fun now. This might have been okay from the start, but I didn’t want to risk it. Now, who cares! I made a Mod for Morrowind and had an interesting experience so let’s talk about it!
Morrowind (The Elder Scrolls 3 as it’s known by dweebs) employs a reputation system that’s fairly underutilized in the game. It can have a major effect on the main quest if you get enough, and it changes NPC greetings, but overall it doesn’t change much. You gain this reputation by doing quests, and each faction/guild quest line general gives somewhere around 15 reputation total if you complete all their quests.
There general uselessness of reputation is probably why the developers didn’t notice that the Fighters Guild, Imperial Legion and Thieves Guild give between 0 and 1 point of reputation. I thought this was a little odd and wouldn’t take too long to fix so I found the command that ups reputation in the Morrowind Construction Kit docs, decided which quests were most deserving of reputation, and pasted that line where you turn in the quest. It took a few hours, but nothing too bad. Since I had put the work in, I decided to put it on the popular modding site nexusmods.com for people to use if they cared about this little fix.
It got a modest number of downloads for a 20 year old game (109 at the time of writing), but what was actually interesting to me was some guy who swooped down in the comments section, had taken my script, fixed an error I had made with some late-game murder quests, and forwarded some fixes implemented by a popular bug-fixing mod, saying “go ahead an update your file with this fixes if you want” and leaving a link for me. This attitude is something that fairly common in modding circles, but I’d never experienced it first hand like this. I think it extends beyond modding into free open-source projects as well. I think it’s interesting the computer-science and software coding specifically often promotes a philosophy of building on one another’s work and not worrying much about your own personal recognition for it. In some ways it’s a beautiful selfless act, in another way it’s a little bit of a creepy hive-mind mentality, but I do find it curious that it seems at least fairly unique to the world of coding.
Not to say that I haven’t seen a fair share of ego-maniacs in the coding world, but it’s still nice to know there’s a subset of people out there who just like to make things. I feel like monetization/capitalism can often erode the joy of creation, hell it’s why I left the theatre world and went to go get this degree. I’m all about being paid for your work obviously, but it’s nice to know not 100% of everything I do needs to go towards profit, and there are enough people out there willing to work together to create nonsense that’s bigger than a lone individual can achieve.
