Embed Author in MDX

[Retera]

So I don't know how Reforged will format HD models, but it occurred to me that from all I understand, MDX models are accepted by the game even if they contain blocks with an unknown four-letter block ID. For example, I heard a rumor but have not researched the idea that MdlVis may store a block with some madeup ID such as "MDLV" (just an example) so that it can save program settings for that model into the model file itself.

This has the obvious problem that if you open that model in Magos or Matrix Eater and save it again, at least in my Matrix Eater code, any such block will be removed because the entire model is reconstructed based on the editor's understanding of its contents.

But this made me wonder. Could we as a community make a tag called AUTH in the MDX binary that is simply an array holding the names of every author who opened and modified a particular MDX model file? Could we then have software like my Matrix Eater editor ask for a username during the installation process, if users want to embed their AUTH tag to encode model authorship? This would also mean if I edit a model somebody else made, I could rest easy knowing I would be appended to the AUTH list but that author would still be credited.

This might be a crazy idea, but I was interested if people thought it might be reasonable, or if it was something they would want.

 

[Frotty]

Well it could be possible, but why?
To feed hivers' greed for "credit" and prevent modifications?
Seems a bit pointless to me in a "modding" environment and also seems very easy to circumvent.

I actually worked on doing the opposite, scrambling all models in a map so that hive doesn't detect them, as part of w3protect.

 

[Retera]

I guess to me it seems like having author embedded in the file would help to justify editing a larger number of model files without concern for the people who want to be credited, because it would cause them to be credited, just like they want.

Do you really think it would prevent modifications in some way to have an author list?

 

[Frotty]

No, but the mechanism doesn't really sound kosher to me, as it can be easily faked or removed by using any non compliant tool, as you already mentioned.
I expect the people, who would care enough to make use of it, to give credit anyway.
Of course some sort of "file history" feature would be a neat matrix eater addition in any case.

On the same topic, I think I would probably prefer some improvements done to the hive resource checker to better detect resources and ask for credit input for unknown resources.
Then such an author list could be generated.