Cj24

I can imagine who you're talking about, but no, they're not the ones I have in mind. I'm talking about people who are still releasing here. Honestly, would you be surprised if even more modders left LCPDFR.com now? People post a picture of a converted CVPI and get 3 pages of discussion why it's not going to be unlocked, although the author didn't even say anything about that. Then you get a thread like this, people who don't mod themselves are trying to tell you what to do with your mods, or even worse, people who don't mod but still actually earn money with mods. That's not a healthy atmosphere, probably causing even more modders to release on other websites with different users. I guess you're talking about a different San Andreas, then. When I started modding for IV, many of my skins were suddenly used in SA as well and the authors refused to credit at all. It was very common just to convert other models to SA without credits and many people then converted them back to IV, still without credits. Honestly, without that experience with SA, many modders probably wouldn't have locked their models in IV. We don't have just a few modding websites we had around the time of IV's release. Currently, there's no clear view on all mods released. If somebody doesn't want to credit, he's just releasing on some other website. Most major websites let you report mods, but not at all. You can't do anything about it, apart from preventing it, as far as possible. It's good we finally have a clear statement about this.

It's the point I am making. Usually, people don't even know the reasons why a mod wasn't released unlocked, and believe me, in many cases it's not the decision of the person releasing the car. However, the person releasing a car is considered selfish, yet another person, who created a car and is not going to release it, is not. People don't know it was created, and people don't know why another car is locked. I want people to understand that calling modders selfish because a model isn't unlocked won't change the fact that the model is locked. Instead, modders are going to withdraw from the community, either by not releasing models or by just giving them to friends. I've been talking to many different modders, and right now, many feel like they're not accepted here on LCPDFR.com at all. It's a good thing many modders don't care about locking. But as long as some do, people should respect that choice instead of acting like locked models completely ruin the community. Like probably every other modder I'd also wish I had access to every model ever created, but unfortunately that's just impossible. Trying to put pressure on modders isn't going to change that, it's even more likely that that's just going to chase them away from releasing at all. Everything else being unlocked is not exactly true. OpenFormats supported locking (in case people don't know, it's used for ped models) and, as LMS mentioned earlier, it's always possible to create obstacles to prevent people from editing a script mod.

Many modders don't just trust anybody, and I can understand why. They want to make sure a person is actually trustworthy if they give him access to their work. But I don't understand why that has to be bad. Why is it egoistical to release a mod "only" in a locked form? It's already more than anybody in this community is obliged to. If a modder never shows a mod, nobody even knows it exists. In that case he'd be considered less selfish than somebody who does release a mod, just not unlocked? That makes no sense to me.

For IV, locking was pretty safe, since there was no tool apart from ZModeler. If somebody managed to rip a model he always has to convert it again. As far as I've been told, the ripping tools often crashed, there were models that simply didn't work properly. In SA you had both ZModeler and 3ds Max. I think without further tools you couldn't even import cars created with one of those into the other one. There was an unlocker for ZModeler, however most people, out of respect for the the modders decision, would never use such a tool. So no, it does not take just a few minutes. But there's a difference between saying people may not edit this and actually implementing measures to prevent editing. Some people don't care about either one, you have no way to stop those. But since all GTA websites have the possibility to report, there're ways to have it removed. However, you will stop those people who don't even bother to look at the readme. They'll try to import it, see it's locked, and go download another model.

What's your point? Metaphors are bad so you should totally use them yourself? I did agree to that before. Yet you say, just because legally somebody doesn't own a model, he should basicly sacrifice his own work? Creating a polygon isn't the only thing important for a car mod. You make it sound like converting and editing is no valuable work, at least not valuable enough to let the person who did that work decide who gets access to it. You won't get far by just naming a model taken straight out of another game police.wft. A mod usually isn't something one person owns, especially in this community we usually have collaborations. The person who releases in the end doesn't just decide, everybody does. If people require all of their parts are released locked, the car will be locked. If somebody decides all of their parts need to be unlocked, it's that way. As soon as you release a model, new fights will start as well. You need to make sure people give correct credits and care about permissions. You need to handle the competition since some people always try to be better. The whole community is full of fights. Considering the size of the GTA community, we actually have quite an acceptable atmosphere. People don't even need to model themselves. There're tons of models available here on LCPDFR or on one of the many other websites. I think I do recognize the problem now, though: People want to create awesome models. It's very hard to create high quality work without understanding what you're doing. No matter how many unlocked parts there're available. No matter how much gain you might see, many modders don't believe they benefit from people using their models. I like to see people using my parts, even though I often look at the finished car and don't understand why people actually want to use that. I'd rather have 10 quality models instead of 1000 cars that look like they've been put together in two minutes, in the end it's only one car you'll use in your game. Many modders don't want to release just another model people download without even bothering to look at the author. They don't want their name in the credits of a car they don't like. Many people don't even manage to keep the original quality of a development part. They forget textures, remove LODs or ruin the mapping. I know many modders who rather want to see their model being used by only few people, but by people that actually appreciate it and know how to create a proper high quality car. I didn't miss that, I just didn't address it. Obviously, I agree with that. Apart from that though, it rarely affects me personally. We have so many unlocked models available that I usually don't need to model anything from scratch. It has been almost a year since I modeled something. I usually convert models or simply edit them until I'm satisfied.