Take your foot out of your mouth and do some research instead of jumping to conclusions. This is not about dynamic linking or graphical enhancement, this is about functionality. A mod should not require the mediaVPs in order to work, and it should be so for several reasons, the most important two of which have been explained on this forum ad nauseam for years. First of all, if your mod has a bug that the SCP team is trying to track down, it's a lot easier to debug the mod by itself (with the mediavps disabled) than to debug the mod plus mediaVPs. Second of all, there are users who don't use the mediaVPs for whatever reason -- perhaps their computer can't handle them, perhaps they have retail nostalgia -- and they don't want to be forced to play a mod that requires the mediaVPs to always be turned on.
The mediavps are probably the most extensively tested and heavily used custom assets in the entire FreeSpace community. Any bugs they have
will get caught and fixed rather quickly due to the amount of use they get. They contain a
vast amount of content that forms a sort of common platform for mods to work on. It's a vast amount of content that
I don't have to bloat my own mod with because it's already there. And no, I will never, ever, ever,
ever support retail or "retail look" with
any of my projects. The graphical features are an integral component of my mods, and they are designed around them. Many other mods are like this too--Blue Planet: War in Heaven would be crippled without the new graphical features of 3.6.12 (which were not only meant to be there but created for the project). Video games are after all a visual experience above all--it's even in the name of the medium. Many people want their projects to look a certain way, and that way need not be the retail way.
You forget the primary purpose of the mediaVPs is to take existing assets and upgrade them. That means that your mod should work without the upgrade. If you want to use a high-res fancy texture that the mediaVPs supply, then your default mod sans-mediaVPs should supply the low-res, basic texture. It shouldn't supply the high-res fancy texture itself -- if you think I'm saying that the mod should provide exactly what is in the mediaVPs in all respects, then you obviously don't understand the concept. If your mod takes advantage of the mediaVPs' enhanced functionality, then you need to make sure it provides its own foundational functionality.
It's also meant to be a common platform for advanced mods, a sort of mod equivalent to a DLL that you can plug in and work off of instead of dumping it all into your mod ("statically linking" it, if you will), and increasing both the size of the mod and your workload (integrating it, maintaining it, updating it) tremendously if you wish to use its entire feature set (and I use its
entire feature set--any advancement made to the mediavps goes into Twist of Fate). And again, a lot of people
do not care about the "basic" functionality of retail. I'm not making FreeSpace 2 1.06 mods, I'm making FreeSpace2_Open 3.6.12 mods, and I'm going to make the most of what's available to me. I'm not interested in retail, I'm not interested in 640x480, and I'm not interested in the hypothetical complaints of someone who can't spare $50 to get a used graphics card that can run the basic mediavps, whose numbers must be getting rather small these days considering that performance requirements haven't increased significantly for the base mediavps in years. I wouldn't be surprised if using the mediavps this way was one of the reasons why the mod.ini format has the primarylist and secondarylist features.
And you also have several easily refutable misconceptions about TVWP. First of all, TVWP was developed independently -- and in a large part, actually before -- the mediaVPs, so it has very little in common with them. Second of all, TVWP shares almost no models or weapons in common with the Port or retail FS2, so there's very little there for the mediaVPs to upgrade. And finally, the core download of TVWP is only 32.1 megabytes. The other 82.4 megabytes -- consisting of the brand new high-res interface, the glow/shine/normal maps, the backgrounds, and the rendered cutscene -- is entirely optional, and clearly marked as such, and TVWP was designed to run perfectly fine without it.
And at least the backgrounds and some of the effects were already in the mediavps and their presence in a separate download was entirely unnecessary. You could cut quite a bit from the optional media and replace it with a mod.ini linking to mediavps. And now that the mediavps have versioned folders, you'll be sure that the version of the mediavps loaded is always the correct one.
But what about the older ones where the teams/leaders aren't around or don't care anymore. Am I supposed to sit and wait for FSCRP to get around to them while taking up precious HDD space with a lot of the same assets in 3.6.10 AND 3.6.12?
Well, not only are the mediavps moving, but the codebase is moving--unless you're developing without FSO at all, you're going to have to support your mod and test it with new builds occasionally because you never know when a code change might break your mod--and even then it could still happen (INFR1 is a notable example--out of the box it to my knowledge only works with retail). The only assets truly "safe" are the stock Volition materials and missions.
