But we all made our tools on the back of someone else.  Peter couldn't have written his tools without the hard work of Rick and Karybdis, and also Delphy helped with bits.   A couple of people were helped by some info from TSR - I saw it happen in chat.  Delphy has had to ask Tiger and Rick for help with compression, and so did Peter.   Peter has helped Delphy with some stuff. So on and so on.

TSR initially named the poeple who have been helping them like this, and I believe those names are still buried in an old news article somewhere.  They don't name their paid programmers but they may be on a staff list somewhere.

As far as ethics in general go, Thomas and Steve have their own karma to deal with.   I don't feel I have any obligation to help them realise their karma by spoiling my own fun or that of other perfectly innocent creators.

Looks like TSR did fix their rule about linking to MTS - See this thread: http://forums.thesimsresource.com/showthread.php?t=375039

I am sorry, I know it's irritating, but I have a personal policy not to divulge contents of private chats, so I have tried to give the information I can while stopping short of any detail that would identify the person who confided in me or the individuals involved.  I don't want to make unnecessary complications for anyone.  I just want to give whatever is necessary to stop everyone wasting their energy running off at the wrong angle.   If and when I find out I have been lied to, I will be very annoyed and have to apologise here.  Otherwise everyone will be told anyway, when and if the event comes to pass.


For an example, in Peter's case he's not interested in Sims and would rather be programming drumming sequencers.  "lost interest" is irrelevant, as he has already shown he is willing to do work he never had an interest in, as a gift to the simming community.   Should the need arise, he can force himself to do so again.


They could have done, I wouldn't necessarily know.  Usually people have other things they want to be doing, and if s3oc is "good enough" for the time being, probably no one has been motivated to do anything with it.  I am sure that would change in the worst case scenario.

s3oc will continue to be available, and can recommence active development any time.  If Peter can't or won't do it himself for any reason, it is all open source and any other capable programmer can take it on.

According to what I have been told, this is a completely untrue statement.  The actual event does not include any new person joining TSR's staff.  And it most certainly is nothing to do with Merlin.   Of course I can't guarantee I have been told the truth but it came via someone I get on ok with and hasn't been caught out lying to me before.

No, it's just a continuum of the information sharing that has already been going on from even before the game came out, from right back when we were able to get our hands on some snaffled files.   I guess Thomas just over-egged the situation, as usual, in front of coconut's informer.   Similar to when I was announced as being on the Workshop development team

I updated my last post BTW with something people may care to "debate"

Having done my research, I can now reveal that Coconut has correctly identified some smoke that belongs to a fire, but she has misidentified the details of the fire in quite a big way.

I absolutely have done that, on several occasions, in chat   As of about a week or two ago he confirmed that he had instructed his moderators to no longer delete links to MTS.   We thought he had taken far longer than necessary to make the changes, but in the end I and others put the pressure on him to honor his promise.   If for any reason that has still not been implemented in spite of his claims, I can assure you it's not because of silence on my part.

However, just to really post something inflammatory, I would ask everyone to consider the following:   There is no way Peter would have the time, and possibly even the ability, to create something as user-friendly as Workshop.  TSR are paying professional programmers to make their tool and it is being worked on as a full-time job.   This means that some of subscription money they took from us is going back into making something that is free for the community, and better and easier to use than anything the community is willing or able to make for itself at this time.   Like it or not, I think you'll find that the majority of creators both pay and free will switch to using Workshop once the version is out that has all these new features I am testing (NB many of them added at my direct suggestion).  Now I wonder how many anti-TSR players will refuse to download objects made with Workshop, on principle?   You're gonna have to think about boycotting those, if you want to put pressure on people not to support anything TSR does.

That's not quite the conclusion I was intending to result from my comment.  s3pe will be unaffected.   s3oc cloner presumably will just stay doing what it does, and be updated where necessary for EPs.  I was trying to say that there would be no need to continue developing it into a more fully featured modding tool.

I think it will be more fun for people to use Workshop as the beta I am testing has many features that will make creating easier, and surely most people play the game and create for fun, not for a political exercise?   

Wes probably doesn't go to Coconut.  I asked Johan (TSR) in chat if it was true and he didn't reply.  I haven't see Wes yet since reading about it myself today.

The bottom line is not a legal case; it's whether one's host is going to respond to the email (for whatever reason they read into it) by closing the hosting account, and/or whether one's ISP is going to to terminate one's internet access, perhaps just for an easy life.  So it does no good to discuss the academic merits of the legal threat, you just have to pick the right host or ISP, one who rolls their eyes at all the posturing and goes on taking your money and providing the service.

They're not supposed to have to.  They only need to alert the jury to possible reasons why it may not be valid proof you did it.  And they only need to do that because the jury may be gullible and won't be as well trained as a panel of judges would have been.  Judges watching the same video could probably work out for themselves whether the video was proof of guilt or not.

I don't see anything dodgy about those wireframes.  Anyone wanting to do a version of the maxis window without the bottom squares would have done it exactly the same way.  I hope the waters are not going to be muddied so that the *valid* complaints against TSR get discredited along with these rather more desperate ones

Maybe they've been hacked.

Maybe they've been bought out by Walt, but this time instead of coming out in a fanfare, he's decided it's easier to go on pretending he's still the old owners.

Well I think it's a fake.  Someone playing silly games.