Calm down, I don't know all this technical stuff.
In my mind, I was calm. I simply meant to express that you are not alone. No one knows the technical stuff, because typically with computers we can invent any level of depth of technical stuff that we want. So, in my opinion, the problem with modding sometimes is
not that
you don't know, but rather that
no one knows. And perhaps that it was invented expressly to be that way.
The Frozen Throne game in 2005 released publicly the 3DS Max export script used to make the official game models. Blizzard was OK with providing modding the tools to do this.
But in 2020 instead of doing that, before Reforged Beta went live some Russian hackers got in and infiltrated the Activision servers and got the Reforged Beta in advance of it being published intentionally. Then they published it on a torrent, which was downloaded by some folks, who sent Reforged graphics model files to an Israeli man, who reverse engineered the files and then sent me the specifications, which I then incorporated into Retera Model Studio so that it was first to market editing Reforged models. That's why there's
a video of me making custom Reforged model files on my YouTube channel in 2019 at the same time as Blizzcon 2019, which doesn't make any sense chronologically.
Then when CSW wanted to make their project, they were reaching out to me asking if they could pay me to fix Retera Model Studio so it was less broken, expressing their suffering. I believe the phrase used was, "it is like trying to clean throat through the rear," or something like this. Maybe I am mis-remembering or mis-translating. But I was lazy and did not help them, and in the end, they paid someone who didn't even have Reforged on their computer to do software upgrades to my model editor, so that at great cost to themselves and their time they could eventually hack Reforged models to make decent graphics.
Meanwhile, Activision sat and squandered the knowledge and technology for how Reforged graphics were originally made, until 2022 when they released a patch that changed the format of all models in the entire Reforged game, even the classic models, breaking any program that would try to load them, including Retera Model Studio, at which point I did a big refactor to parse their new format. And almost nobody knows about that big refactor, because I designed the new version of Retera Model Studio to pretend as if nothing changed, so we could keep pretending that we have a modding community or that it was ever reasonable to make custom graphics on Reforged.
But I really think that the hostile levels of apathy of this company and its management is quite real. And so, I apologize if I come across as not calmed down, or as somehow unreasonable. I don't mean to stop anyone from calming down, and I don't mean to make you upset. But essentially I think that you are incorrect. You can look at CSW and tell yourself, "oh that's cool, these guys just used World Editor, and Activision would be crazy to break what they created." But under the hood I think it's a lot different than that. The Blizzard brand of people, like the ones who published Frozen Throne art tools in 2005 to support the modding, are gone from this company. And there's a financial incentive for them not to be like that, and maybe to hate us. There were some people working on Reforged who pushed back against this financial incentive, and caused Reforged to be as modular as it is and forced their managers to allow W3Champions, and some other things. Now, those people who cared in that form, have been sacked. They were sacked many years ago.
So, it's not really that I mean to be upset at all. But I think that CSW is going to be destroyed, along with other projects like it, with a high degree of likelihood. And I'm saying this without any insider information, so we can all hope that I am wrong, but it is what I believe. It is also what I have on my personal website
Warsmash.net, and I have had it on there for months or years mentioning CSW specifically - as something that would eventually be destroyed by Activision Microsoft, without them even thinking about it, no hard feelings, just because of the hostile levels of apathy.
This isn't really meant to be unsettling or to stop us from calming down. I hope that you have a very nice day. But this is how I see the world.
but seriously, maybe send me that suggestion again saturday after the award is unclaimed)
