Giskard and False Accusations

[Conner]

Wow, Samson, that's a huge cleaning tutorial. Nice to see that 'all Arthmoor mods' are listed as already not needing cleaning. ;) Okay, Fury, it must have been 'one of those days' this morning for you... :lol: Wait, so in summary, Giskard's flaking this badly primarily because someone didn't extend a common courtesy? All his mods mostly belong to Bethesda anyway and his noise is basically all about the fact that he granted permission to someone to upload cleaned up versions of his mods and then once it was already done he revoked that permission and flaked.. even though the mods are technically property of Bethesda anyway because they were created using the standard CS interface? :facepalm: Welcome aboard, Lord Saadus. :) Can't see me being the one to oblige you as requested. That tutorial Samson linked to for cleaning looks mildly complex. :shrug: As The_Fury & Dwip already pointed out, it's not misspelled if the author of the statement is using British English rather than American English and, given that Giskard lives in the U.K., it does seem likely that the British forms are entirely correct in this case. Bah Humbug! to the Oxford Dictionary, one must consult Merriam Webster for proper English. :P ;) (Let's face it, it's not like almost anyone even in the UK, let alone in Australia, actually uses The Queen's English properly anymore anyway. In fact, it's not really unlikely that the current Queen of England doesn't herself even. [i]Proper[/i] Queen's English is really based on Elizabethan speech which is mildly out of vogue anyway. Unless you go by the original definition of the phrase which was subject to extreme changes each time a new monarch took the throne. ;))

[Vorians]

Giskard has spelling problems. No need to make a big thing of it, most people I know have problems with spelling. As long as a modder gets his mod proof-read by someone who can spell before release, there's no reason to have a go at them just because they cannot spell words correctly. Lord Saadus said: [quote]if any one who can get the Elder Coucil mod mentioned above to work with anything, let me know[/quote] How is it not working? Did you try the Dragon Captions version on TESNexus? This version was cleaned by me when I was part of the DC team, back when they had permission from Giskard to update and release his mods. It also contains some enhancements and compatibility adjustments added by the DC team member who was made the scapegoat when Giskard revoked permission for DC to update and release his mods. The DC version isn't the most recent release of the mod, but it should work, and it's clean, and should have minimal conflicts compared to the non-DC versions. Lord Saadus also said: [quote]I used Filefront and got the Kvatch Aftermath. I am glad they kept it on there[/quote] No one knows who actually uploaded that file. The only released cleaned KA version I would trust is the one put onto TESNexus by Elminster, v6.1 or something like that, back when Giskard's licence said anyone may edit and upload his mods and [i]they don't need to ask for permission[/i]. I don't know whether that file is still on Nexus however. The DC version of KA would also have been trustworthy, as I cleaned it, and it had other enhancements and compatibility adjustments, but it never got released due to... well I already explained that :) Conner said: [quote]he granted permission to someone to upload cleaned up versions of his mods and then once it was already done he revoked that permission[/quote] Initially all his mod's readmes stated that anyone who wanted to, could edit his mods and reupload them, and there was no need to ask for permission. So when Elminster went ahead and did so with a cleaned but otherwise unchanged KA, Giskard got a little bit upset and reworded his licencing, strangely believing that doing this would make it retro-active. Later he formed the CUT modding team (Cyrodiil Upgrade Team) and they had permission to edit his mods and upload them while no one else did. Then he closed his website and forums, leaving nowhere for CUT to live. Another forum owner allowed CUT to have a new subforum on his site, and they renamed themselves Cyrodiil Knights. That forum owner soon regretted his friendly offer, as some members of CUT never moved across to CK (whether through choice, or because they didn't find out about the move, I don't know). These non-CK CUT members decided that they had been forced out of the modding team, so went crying to Giskard, complaining that they had ALL been given permission to edit his mods, but THEY weren't being allowed to (or more to the point, THEY weren't the ones in command and they wanted to be). So Giskard stormed the CK forums and decimated them, revoking permission for them to edit his mods as they were CK and not CUT. Next, CK moved to a new forum of their own, and became Dragon Captions. Giskard gave DC permission to edit his mods, and no one else (even though they were mostly the same people from CK, people he had referred to as "friends who had stabbed him in the back" - apparently all his friends do this to him eventually, he said so in one of his rants last year). Where was I? I've lost track... CUT, CK, DC... ah, DC. Okay, so DC now have permission to edit and upload their own versions of his mods, and start to do so. TEC gets released and is accepted by the community. DC are more friendly than Giskard and CUT were (CUT were abusive, CK never had a chance to reveal their attitude to the rest of the world - I'm guessing that the CUT members who didn't get into CK were the abusive people) so when they didn't act aggressively towards the modding community, the modding community didn't get defensive and retaliate. OMG and KA were both in the works for a DC overhaul, KA was very nearly released, when out of jealousy (I cannot think of any other reason), Giskard revoked permission from DC, stormed the forums, forced three of the four primary active modders to quit the team, and then stormed off again. And so we come to now. Giskard has rebuilt his site and forums, and has a new modding team (most likely the surviving members of CUT who weren't in CK), named The Engineering Guild. TEG have permission to work on his mods (though in one of his more recent rants he has stated that TEG aren't putting any effort in and it's all him on his own - do I hear a backstabber approaching?). There's a good chance that I might actually have missed a modding team somewhere in there, that's just what I know about. As for Queen's English, as far as I'm aware, Queen's English (aka King's English when she abdicates) is merely the way the present Queen/King speaks. If the current Queen included "like", "word", "dude" and other similar words in her speeches, that would be part of Queen's English (in my opinion). Many people in England still speak in the manner I consider to be Queen's English, myself included :)

[Arthmoor]

His current downloads carry this license now, in the click-thru installer - as if he expects it to hold legal weight because someone is forced to hit an "I agree" button to install it. Good luck enforcing that in court. [quote=Giskard's License]License This mod was made for users of the Engineering Guild Website and many not be uploaded else where or edited by other people. This is a private file for members of the Engineering Guild of the rank Guild Master or higher to enjoy and is not intended for release outside of the Guilds website. If this is found on any site other than the Engineering guild, it must be removed immediately and the incident reported to me at the following address. Contact Email admin@theengineeringguild.co.uk Website URL http://www.theengineeringguild.co.uk/ Please note that this file is available for free to any regular user of the Guilds forum. All you need to do is sign up and start posting and in time this file will be available to you. Resources created for this mod. The loose resources found in this file may be used by any modder with my blessing providing the esp is left untouched and proper credit is given. Since the mod is only available to my site users, this means modders outside of my site that use these resources will be asked how they got them but not stopped from using them. By installing this mod you are confirming you are a guild member and eligable to use this mod. By Installing this mod you acknowledge its existance is no concern of any other Oblivion community and agree not to talk about it on other Oblivion sites. Should you break these conditions, you will lose download access to all my current and future releases.[/quote] One might note the legally unenforceable clause at the end which forbids discussion of the mods on sites other than his own. It would hold no legal weight whatsoever in the United States, and very likely would render the entire license null and void.

[Arthmoor]

TEC 2.5 has 274 dirty edits, some of which cross over into SI. Your guess is as good as mine as to why dirt shows up in SI when it's not even supposed to touch it. Of note, his new worldspace has been injected into Oblivion.esm which isn't possible using the CS alone. So while he rants on about tools breaking things, he's clearly using something other than the CS to edit his mods, at least in part. One wild water height would block a UOP fix for Faregyl Inn for people not using Bash to import cell names. Another wild edit sends Tavia to sleep in the IC Palace. The knowledgeable player will realize Tavia belongs in Kvatch, and they will also notice none of her other AI packs have been changed to send her halfway up the map for no apparent reason. Aside from that, there shouldn't be any real trouble making it work. Compatibility with other mods is another matter.

[The_Fury]

[quote] Initially all his mod's readmes stated that anyone who wanted to, could edit his mods and reupload them[/quote] Pretty simple then, get a copy of said license and use it, FTW and anyone who says you cant do what the license grants you permission to do and to what you agreed upon when initially downloading it. Let him whine about fakes all he likes then, just give credit where it is due and all is fine and dandy. Actually, i doubt there is anything enforceable at all in his license, it makes the Diku look like sound legal advice and written by a contract lawyer.

[IsmeldaLasombra]

The fact is, like it was mentioned before by Samson and Vorians, the esp or esm are not his property at all but Bethesda. He can't enforce anything about them and we are free to do whatever we want with them. The person who does that though must be ready to see the same things happen to the mod he/she is working on. So it is courtesy to not do to others what you don't want other to do to yourself. Anything he says in his licensing is null and stupid as ever.

[Conner]

@[b]Vorians[/b]: Spelling is a petty enough thing unless it's in a released piece with really drastic issues. Are you sure it's about jealousy? It sounds like he's seriously power tripping through all this to me. Yes, as I'd closed there, the original definition of Queen's English is the way that the current ruling monarch speaks (including accent), but over the years it sure seems to be commonly held as Elizabethan English which has fallen out of vogue by a bit. Either way, my real point is that I don't think it's strictly a new thing that English, even in the UK and certainly in Australia, isn't the same anymore and now more closely follows the Webster, rather than Oxford, dictionary. But I also don't really see it as being our fault over here in the US either, I think it's far more just typical language evolution. @[b]Samson[/b]: I don't know about just that silly attempt at a non-disclosure clause in a license, but the entire license is a joke anyway considering how many other sites obviously already have his mods hosted, mainly with older versions of the license that don't include most of that nonsense to begin with. Ouch, sounds like he's got some really weird stuff thrown into that one. Are any of those lovely extras actually pertinent to the mod itself or just included because he could? @[b]The_Fury[/b]: I don't know, the license may be enforceable with regard to the distribution and such as long as you don't have a handy copy of the older license and got the file from his site to begin with, but yeah... @[b]IsmeldaLasombra[/b]: Maybe I'm not really clear on this. So, any mod you create automatically belongs to Bethesda except for files you create in support of the actual esm or esp itself? (So textures, new items/characters/etc, and so on are your own, right?) Then why would one need bother with a license at all in any form? (other than for the obvious stuff you've created outside the main file, that is.) I do understand the courtesy being commonly accepted/extended amongst modders facet, I'm just clarifying, I suppose...

[IsmeldaLasombra]

Yes Conner. We all agree to Beth EULA which clearly states they everything we do with for Oblivion with the CS belongs to them. It would be arguable that if you do something with some other tools you would pretend it is yours but Giskard claim to use only the CS (and I suspect he does, only taking the credit for others works on his mods like for the things which would require the use of other tools like TES4Gecko or TES4Edit). So everything he does is not his own but all belongs to Bethesda.

[Conner]

I suppose I really shoud've paid a bit more attention to the EULA for Oblivion when I installed it, but it looked pretty routine and I'm not really a modder anyway so... :shrug: But thanks, that does clear things up pretty nicely and I'm hopefully not the only one who can benefit from that clarification. :)

[Guest]

This guy reminds me of Mankar Cameron from the main story line. I thought this was a hoax at first due to the close similarity. Both guys believed what they are doing is right and both turned out insane. lol. I wished I was dead right in this being a hoax. I hate to see the world come done to fighting over mods to a [i]video game.[/i] It drives me nuts. Oh well. The guy has been taken care of and every1 knows he is a complete whack. Sorry for doubting you all to begin with!

[Arthmoor]

Looks like the next phase in the isolation cycle has begun - someone named Librapoet has just been kicked from the guild and all his mods purged from the site supposedly for violating resource licensing. Affected in this purging: Busy Roads Daedric War RIBO VampirismEmpoweredLite Librapoet's Blades Expanded The last 4 I have no idea about, but this "Busy Roads" mod is just a collection of NPCs, with no dependency on CURP or anything like that. So Giskard's reasoning appears to be entirely flawed. The cynic in me says he shitcanned this guy because he was liberal in his permission policies. Not because he couldn't prove he had permission to use resources. He also repeats his ranting about the BC team "violating his rights repeatedly" and has now added the OC "team" to his list of evil people. Neither the BC team nor the OC "team" has ever violated Giskard's rights since none of us use copies of his resources for any purpose. Easily proven by simply downloading the archives and looking for yourself. If he means violations of CURP, that would be laughable in the extreme since CURP is nothing more than a massive compilation of other modders' resources.

[Guest]

From what I hear, he doesn't need reasoning anymore. "Lets see, it says here I gave you permission. That can't be right. Let me use white out for you, get this outdated writing off this document. There, now its updated. Oh and look, your mods are now in violation of my mods. Bye bye." Feel sorry for the delusional people that still follow him. They stay loyal to the man they sacrificed the ability to even post their mods on popular sites and Giskard spits in their faces...

[Conner]

I think we've reasonably established already that Giskard's a whack job, Saadus. ;) I can't say that any of those five titles would've grabbed my attention from their names alone, but it's still pretty sad that he's purging even his own people. On the other hand, perhaps it'll expedite the matter of purging him from the community and getting some of those who would be his followers to wake up and become valuable to the community as a whole. :shrug: At least they're only delusional enough to be following him, they still have the glimmer of hope of waking up to reality once he purges them from his circle at which point their only recourses will be to resume the community at large and post their mods elsewhere or give up altogether. If any of them had any mods that were even decent, that could prove a good thing for everyone should they find they have to post them some place accessible. :cool:

[AnImpatientFan]

I reckon Giskard dropped Librapoet (Who was a Good Modder BTW) to lower the fees for his DL page. It seems to be timed just after the whole "I cant afford my DL Page" crap.

[Vorians]

Conner said: [quote]Are you sure it's about jealousy? It sounds like he's seriously power tripping through all this to me. [/quote] Same difference as far as I'm concerned. He wasn't the one in control any more, he was on the side-lines seeing his mods succeeding without him. So he wrested control away from DC so that they couldn't be accepted where his actions had caused him to be rejected. Samson said: [quote]someone named Librapoet has just been kicked from the guild and all his mods purged from the site supposedly for violating resource licensing. The cynic in me says he shitcanned this guy because he was liberal in his permission policies. Not because he couldn't prove he had permission to use resources.[/quote] And that less than 12 hours after I said "(though in one of his more recent rants he has stated that TEG aren't putting any effort in and it's all him on his own - [b]do I hear a backstabber approaching?[/b])." Seems I predicted that one. Drop a friend, blame the friend. Samson also said: [quote]If he means violations of CURP, that would be laughable in the extreme since CURP is nothing more than a massive compilation of other modders' resources.[/quote] Actually (unless this changed over the last 24 hours) Giskard allows any modder completely free usage of the resources from his mods, whether they be resources in CURP from other modders, or resources unique to his mods. The only parts of his mods which other modders are forbidden from editing and releasing are the ESMs and ESPs (which belong to Bethesda, as already discussed here).

[Vorians]

Oh and I see he's handing out more advice in his "Your Generation" blog post. [quote]When you do not know how to do something, spend a minute learning how.[/quote] If only he could learn to follow his own advice, he'd take the time to learn how to use TES4Edit instead of just posting repeated negative comments about TES4Edit and those who use it, as if he knew what he was talking about.

[Conner]

[quote=AnImpatientFan]I reckon Giskard dropped Librapoet (Who was a Good Modder BTW) to lower the fees for his DL page. It seems to be timed just after the whole "I cant afford my DL Page" crap.[/quote] Welcome to the fold, AnImpatientFan, it's always nice to see new people here, especially when they even create actual accounts. :biggrin: Hopefully, if he's a good modder, he'll rejoin the community now that he's no longer accepted among the Giskardians. ;) I can see the merit to your theory, but I fail to envision how his download page can be costing him more or less by adding or purging someone's mods unless they were generating more traffic than his own mods. :lol: [quote=Vorians]He wasn't the one in control any more, he was on the side-lines seeing his mods succeeding without him.[/quote] Right, power tripping control freak. Not that I can truly fault someone for being a control freak :innocent: ...but, still, in his case he's taking it to an extreme that's hurting others and that's a point where I draw a line, personally. (Btw, to put the person's name and said into the quote block you do quote=person's_name between the brackets for the opening quote tag.) [quote=Vorians]Seems I predicted that one. Drop a friend, blame the friend.[/quote] Yup, you called that one. Too bad for this Librapoet person though. [quote=Vorians]Actually (unless this changed over the last 24 hours) Giskard allows any modder completely free usage of the resources from his mods, whether they be resources in CURP from other modders, or resources unique to his mods. The only parts of his mods which other modders are forbidden from editing and releasing are the ESMs and ESPs (which belong to Bethesda, as already discussed here).[/quote] Then either something's changed in the last day or you've confirmed what Samson was saying about this being a totally arbitrary thing rather than some sort of legitimate grip about Librapoet misusing resources. [quote=Vorians]follow his own advice[/quote] It seems that this can be one of the hardest things for people to learn to do in general. Maybe it's not so surprising that this applies to him as well. :shrug:

[Vorians]

[quote=Conner]it's always nice to see new people here, especially when they even create actual accounts[/quote] Alright, alright. There, you happy? :biggrin: I give up trying to upload an icon though, clearly Samson has included some sneaky coding to always say "Errors" whenever I do so, regardless of icon size or file format. Damn you Samson!

[Conner]

Indeed, Vorians, I'm ecstatic! :biggrin: You got the quote right with in-line accreditation [b][i]and[/i][/b] you became a full fledged member who can now enjoy all the privileges of such rank. ;) What more could I have asked for? :lol: Oh, I think I remember running into that problem.. I think it's got to be a jpg or a png with 40x40 dimensions and smaller than 2k or some such. I'm certain Samson would know exactly though. Perhaps Samson should add a note there to indicate those requirements.

[Arthmoor]

When filing bug reports, one should endeavor to be as detailed as possible. Getting "errors" doesn't do me much good when I try the icon upload and it works. There is a 40x40 size restriction, which is mentioned, but the image does not need to start that way nor is there a restriction on how large the actual file can be. It's going to get forced into a really small one anyway.

[Hana]

I would agree Samson snuck in some sneaky code. He does that. And hey, wait till you get the special fatal errors. :lol: While I'm here, can someone help [url=http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1110366-game-crashes-after-i-load-a-saved-game/]this poor sod over at Beth[/url]. It's just getting painful to read. I mean, am I crazy or do BC and OCC not play well together (read: at all)? His BC load may be messed as well. Otherwise, I have nothing important to add to this thread. :)

[Guest]

My load order looks even worse lol.

[AnImpatientFan]

Sigh, He has recapped what he has been saying for the past year once AGAIN. He obviously is trying hard to get his point through. Jk.

[AnImpatientFan]

Sign In problems fixed, Now logged in.

[Vorians]

Well I wasn't reporting a bug, just grumbling loudly :) I felt that getting "Errors" didn't do [i]me[/i] much good either :lol: I started with an animated GIF 64x64 which displayed but gave "Errors" message Then I saved the first frame as a JPG 64x64 which displayed but gave "Errors" message Then I resaved as a JPG 40x40 which might have displayed (can't remember) but gave "Errors" message Then I resaved as a BMP 40x40 which did NOT display and gave "Errors" message Then I resaved as PNG which might have displayed but gave "Errors" message Then I got bored and decided that the suit and tie icon wasn't so bad. Samson (all these these different names; Scalonhulk, Arthmoor, Samson, all JUST to trick Giskard) has posted on that Beth thread Hanaisse mentioned, hopefully the poster will get a working game again now. EDIT I don't know who this Locke person is that some of you have mentioned, but it really does seem that Giskard follows the same pattern, except more like once a season instead of just once a year. Last night he posted another rant (rather a flat one this time) repeating his usual stuff. I always feel when reading his rants against others that he's describing himself really well: [quote]My opinions on mod cleaning and patching are well known, as are my opinions on the need for testing, but I would not deny people the right to edit my mods on those grounds. [b]My thoughts on that are if your dumb enough to do that to a quest mod, people are soon going to learn how bad at modding you are without any help from me and avoid you[/b].[/quote] Look who the majority of the TES modding community now avoid...