[Phantom Hoover]

No, that would not solve anything. Every asset in MVPs is volatile, improvements are made all the time, and there's no telling what will change next.

Exactly. So don't use internal MVP assets in your mod.

[Droid803]

No, that would not solve anything. Every asset in MVPs is volatile, improvements are made all the time, and there's no telling what will change next.

Exactly. So don't use internal MVP assets in your mod.

So...don't use the mediaVPs at all as a mod dependency.

Unless you're doing a total-conversion, or are okay with retail ships, I don't see how you can do this.
Actually, even if you as the mod creator are okay with retail ships, doesn't mean that people playing the mod necessarily will - cue the endless "there's a hi-poly X why u no use???!"

Throwing away all the community-created graphical updates if you're making a freespace-setting mod for the sake of using "non-volatile assets" is not a sacrifice anyone should be willing to make.

The only viable alternative is to copy every asset you intend to use from the mediaVPs into the modpack itself, which as a result inflates your modpack's download size excessively, wasting everyone's bandwidth and hard drive space. I'm not willing to download a duplicate of the entire mediavps_3612 for every mod that uses it as a dependency, nothx, that's retarded.

[FrikgFeek]

are you suggesting to make the mediavps work like windows? XD all that backward compatibility is going to cause a lot of bugs, but I agree this is the best choice, it would be better to fix each other mod in a case by case basis until everything works with a single Mediavp system.

Personally I use the mediavps 2014 with all the mods, and rarely do I get crashes, mostly when stuff like shaders come up do I get some issue. tho I do remember having to edit one or 2 mods to make them work with this files.

It's not just about crashes, as Fury said, consistency of user experience is important. While the FSCRP has restored a lot of campaigns to modern-ish standards, there are still some of them out there that used original MediaVPS(the super obsolete ones) and the made-for-campaign assets reflect that quality. And when you put an original ship made in 2003 next to one from the most recent MVPs the difference in visual quality becomes blindingly obvious.
Forcing all mods to use the most recent MVPs could make some of the older ones uglier than they need to be. Being constantly reminded of how much better newer mods look while playing an older one could be a problem for new players, they'll just ignore some of the older campaigns. And that would be a real shame.

[Mongoose]

Ehhh, I'd say that particular line of reasoning is kind of a stretch.  I'd agree that user experience should be a concern, but by far the biggest disruption to said experience would be a mod refusing to load in the first place because of some (to the end-user) cryptic error message.  I'd say having a random asset or two be lower-poly than the rest would be far less disruptive, so long as the mission actually plays in the first place.  If people are going to ditch a campaign just because of a few lower-quality assets, then...well, that's just their loss.

[FrikgFeek]

I'm not saying I agree with it, but I still believe that mods that are entirely low poly(like say Wings of Dawn) look better than those that are simply inconsistent(like forcing MVPs 2014 on Inferno).

[Phantom Hoover]

No, that would not solve anything. Every asset in MVPs is volatile, improvements are made all the time, and there's no telling what will change next.

Exactly. So don't use internal MVP assets in your mod.

So...don't use the mediaVPs at all as a mod dependency.

Unless you're doing a total-conversion, or are okay with retail ships, I don't see how you can do this.
Actually, even if you as the mod creator are okay with retail ships, doesn't mean that people playing the mod necessarily will - cue the endless "there's a hi-poly X why u no use???!"

Throwing away all the community-created graphical updates if you're making a freespace-setting mod for the sake of using "non-volatile assets" is not a sacrifice anyone should be willing to make.

The only viable alternative is to copy every asset you intend to use from the mediaVPs into the modpack itself, which as a result inflates your modpack's download size excessively, wasting everyone's bandwidth and hard drive space. I'm not willing to download a duplicate of the entire mediavps_3612 for every mod that uses it as a dependency, nothx, that's retarded.

By 'internal assets' I mean reusing textures etc. on your own models. Using ships from the MVPs is obviously fine.

[Rodo]

You could resort to some kind of restriction to make moders use just "units" from the mvps, units that you know will be replaced/reworked as a whole on each version.
You won't be able to be 100% accurate on what an unit can be though, maybe tomorrow models are still being used as modes with textures, sounds, tables and all but music packs might be dropped in favour of single tracks or something like that.

[chief1983]

If there was decent documentation per mod/campaign of what MediaVPs/builds they are compatible with, it could be feasible to have some sort of installer that supports this, and it's in fact what I had hoped could come of wxLauncher 2.0.  However the feasibility really only works going forward as this would probably involve engine changes to even make it work well, and better indication of versions within the MediaVPs, etc, and thus only mods made to target the engine and MediaVPs after that point would be able to take advantage of such a system.  But I think the groundwork for that needs to be laid sooner than later, so that perhaps the work of the FSCRP team wouldn't have to be repeated over and over as time goes on, with every new release.

[Vidmaster]

...vidmaster agrees with this topic's title for reasons given in the first post...

[mjn.mixael]

Nice...

I hope you read the entire thread at least before posting that little necro.

[Zacam]

Fortunately, that necro brought it back to my attention as I'd been rather busy.

At a root level, FSU is (as noted earlier) intended to be an assets and visual upgrade to Retail. End of story.


Mods that Work: Any mod that has, say, a Myrmidon vs. Ulysses where they haven't tabled or textured anything fancy, they just want two ships/wings having a dog-fight. Regardless of MediaVPs version, that will always work and be "the latest" that the user has installed (or Retail if run with no mods).


Mods that Break: Same as the mod above, but now they've elected to change the glowmaps or textures or utilize team-colors, but they ONLY applied their changed maps and tbm edits into the mod. So if either of those two models get remade or remapped in the MediaVPs, they will now no longer work as intended in the mod because things will no longer be in alignment.


It'd be much easier for the mod to maintain its own model for such significant changes. At the very least, when such a breakage occurs (and model changes like that always have a thread or are announced (or will/should be) in the changelog), grab the previous model at THAT point in time as an over-ride compatibility patch for the mod to use until it can adapt to using the newer model. Assuming there hasn't already been enough of a community awareness that the relevant re-textures to upgrade the mod aren't already done. But it would be a change cycle that would have to be completely re-iterated on with each release one way or the other (either by including the model to go with the texture changes and bulk wholesale updating them later, or updating the textures each time the model changes).

Or reference that the mod is compatible with a version that maintains the intended behaviour.