August 2021 Update

Hi all!

Those of you following Lexy's Patreon know that she does monthly updates which I thought was pretty neat. Basically I'm trying to do the same now.

The last week of the holidays has now begun and as you may have noticed from my Discord update, I did not particularly enjoy my six weeks without school. It was about as bad as I had feared. I'm so spaced out I might as well be asleep and dreaming. Holidays are bad in general for me, and this year combined the "anniversary" of a bad break-up with the news of my father's cancer diagnosis plus my looming finals and the absolute nothingness that comes after that. I feel like I've been holding my breath for about three months now.

The reason I'm telling you this is mostly to justify my complete lack of productivity lately. I have no idea when I'll get back to working on the beginner's guide (I swear it's not vaporware), it feels utterly impossible at the moment.

Before we get into the happier news (TPF update soon!), I want to take the opportunity and give a huge shoutout to our moderator Slim who has been holding the fort on the TPF Discord with Umgak and the other moderators in my absence. He has expanded our repertoire of useful Carl bot commands as well as maintained the #tpf-known-issues channel and helped a ton of users with various issues. You're awesome and we're lucky to have you!

TPF Update

I am back at work on TPF. I had seriously considered dropping the manual guide and then changed my mind again, but still managed to confuse everyone with a comment on how I was rebuilding it from scratch. My personal favourite modding-thing to do is starting from scratch and work through rebuilding the setup all over again, but it would not have meant major changes. Ultimately I didn't end up rebuilding TPF anyway and started working on a regular update for the manual guide.

TPF 4.7 is going to be a major update (meaning it requires a new save), but relatively small in comparison. I largely focused on updating a bunch of mods and removing whatever didn't survive the recent Nexus drama. Yes, I added Apothecary.

But more importantly, I removed a lot of mods. With 4.7, TPF is reverting to a pure V+ state with very little additional content because of an upcoming update for TPF-X:

TPF-X Update

Up until now, TPF-X was just another manual TPF addon. In my last post, I talked about wanting a WJ-only setup to experiment with stuff and that is exactly what TPF-X is becoming. Honestly, the reason I'm updating TPF right now is mostly because I'm genuinely excited to try some mods I'd never put into TPF such as Nordic UI and all the stuff the amazing Tate Taylor (aka Pierre Despereaux) has put out lately.

TPF-X will essentially be TPF with extras, an expanded setup where I don't worry quite as much about "purity" and v+. It will likely never stray too far from the original concept, but I miss being more flexible and able to try stuff out.

ETAs

TPF 4.7 is going to be up within a few days.

TPF-X 2.0 has no ETA. I will work on that after 4.7 is out, really looking forward to that.

WTP 1.6.3 has no ETA. Some mods were removed, the installer is down. Soon tm?

Mod Suggestions

I'm currently in the process of reviewing the issue reports on Github of which many are mod suggestions. I did ask people to leave suggestions on Github in the past, however, going forward I no longer take random mod suggestions. The reason for that is because many people simply drop a bunch of links to mods they think look cool with no regard for how well they might fit into TPF.

If you have a fix that TPF is missing or a texture combination that you tried and found to be an improvement over current TPF, you may still suggest these and going forward you may do so in #tpf-feedback. However, I expect an actual explanation as to why you suggest the mod and that you considered the concept behind TPF and whether your suggestion fits. I reserve the right to simply delete link dumps.

Please also note that I have a huge list of potential additions myself and scour the Nexus daily. It is very rare that a mod slips my net, so you don't have to worry about that too much.

The RAID Article

Some of you may have noticed the lovely article posted by the author of Realistic AI Detection a few weeks ago. I was pretty devastated when I first saw it because of the completely unwarranted hostility. Apparently there are more records factoring into detection than we had previously been aware of and somebody complained to the RAID author about it. We have an explicit rule about approaching us first before contacting mod authors so under different circumstances I would apologise to the RAID author for receiving an unwarranted complaint.

However:

"foreverphoenix" (who makes that mod list) seems to think xEdit conflict resolution patches are enough to make sure a large amount of mods work well together. While I acknowledge conflict resolution patches are  useful, I consider extensive playtesting and careful mod selection to be  more important in ensuring a mod list will play well. Often, only  extensive playtesting can find the kind of problem described above, as  it does not take the form of a record conflict in xEdit. foreverphoenix  and their groupies harassed me on Reddit when we disagreed on this. But if they would spend less time on attacking me and other users, and more time on playtesting their guide, this problem could have been avoided.

Here is the reddit post in question. 

The short version is that the author of RAID also wrote a modding guide which they posted on reddit about. The guide has zero conflict resolution. I checked the included mods and, unsurprisingly, a bunch of them absolutely will conflict with each other in a way that requires patches and not simply load order adjustments. I pointed out that ingame mod testing is pretty inefficient and that patching with xEdit is absolutely necessary. I don't think my comment constituted "harrassment", but read it for yourself (I linked the post above).

To be clear, the RAID guy is probably completely right about TPF's sneak detection being off because of (apparently?) bad light balancing in Luminosity and Cathedral Weathers. I know fuck all about light balancing. I really cannot remember ever having acted as if I knew anything there ever was to know about modding though.

Under different circumstances, I would have approached the mod author in DMs to ask for their help in improving the sneak detection in TPF. This is what we do with plenty of other mod authors whose mods are part of TPF. But since the RAID guy is obviously very offended by aforementioned reddit comments by yours truly, that won't be an option. I'll likely just remove the mod.

(By the way, RAID guy also claimed that they closed the comments "due to hostile and deceptive remarks about me and my work". If you're curious, you can still read the comments on the forum. What better way to bolster your argument than completely shutting down any discussion about it?)

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So with this generous helping of cringy modding drama I conclude this month's update post. Hope you are all doing reasonably well and enjoying your summer!

Happy modding,

Phoenix