[VonHelsching]

Originally Posted by Stiebler

It's easy to sympathise with those who want just one or two mods for convenience. The difficulty is that there are so many divergent views on what constitutes an improvement, resulting in a proliferation of mods. A trivial example is the number of mods replacing the officers' icons at the bottom left of the SH3 screen. All perfectly worthy, but who is to say which is best?

A much more serious problem is exemplified by Rubini's Harbour Traffic mod and the Unified Campaign Files. It is obvious from posts in this forum that many people think that HT is wonderful, and want it in every campaign file. Others think that to take 10 minutes to get out of harbour, owing to the slowed frame rate, is too high a price to pay. How can these views be reconciled? The obvious solution is to make HT available only as an overlay for those who want it, but then Rubini has the serious practical problem of making overlays for every new release of a campaign file. Meanwhile, lots of users will be complaining that they can't get the overlay to work.

There really appears to be no good solution - unless people think that the organisers of the major mods should have a veto on which new mods can be released. I doubt if that would be very popular either. It certainly is not practical for the main organisers to keep up with every release of every mod and say whether or not they work with (for example) NYGM.

One really requires a good, but fairly simple, base on which to build. I personally think that Grey Wolves has made a mistake in adding uncritically every conceivable mod to itself, which must make it much harder for users to make changes. NYGM's leaner base is (I think) a much better platform for those who want to customise SH3. It provides better realism, too.

Stiebler.

Stiebler,

Although I agree in your first three paragraphs, I'm afraid I'm a little bit confused in your last paragraph. Can you please elaborate on the "uncritically every conceivable mod" part?