I've heard that sorts of thing from a few different sources now, and it confuses me a bit. Certainly you are right, there was already in-fighting by the time TS2 started, but as far as I know no TS2 modders have ever deliberately withheld information. In fact, most of the people who discovered new techniques were free creators who were more than happy to share the 'how to' when asked - Numenor, RGiles, Inge, Pescado, Delphy, Miche, Atavera, Wes, Twojeffs, Squinge, JWoods... And I know I've forgotten a whole lot of people. You just need to look in the Modding Discussion or Object Modding fora at MTS to see just how much information is out there and available to anyone who wants it. You just have to do a bit of wading through to get to the gems.

I think the only reason there are fewer advanced mods for TS2 than for TS1 is that getting something exciting to happen in a TS2 object was a whole lot harder. TS1 objects were flat images, and animating them was a matter of switching between flat images, like making an animated gif. For most non-technical modders, simply learning to mesh/texture an object for TS2 was pushing the boundaries of their understanding. It's little wonder that most TS2 BHAV modders and the like were capable mainstream computer programmers as well.

All that aside, if anyone has made it through the standard TS2 modding tutorials and wants to know any existing mod was done (and how to use that technique in their own project), they just need to ask the question on MTS. There are still several TS2 modders answering questions, and while I'm not actively creating any more I'm definitely still teaching. There will be no information hoarding if it can be helped!

Actually, most modders left because they either got bored, or the game had reached its limit, not because the modders reached their limit. There weren't many unsolved mysteries left in TS2 by the time TS3 came out. Most of it was decoded and understood, it's just that the amount of work required to take advantage of those discoveries was just too huge.

Also, EA hasn't really locked down animation any more than they did with TS2. In fact, they're using formats much closer to industry standards now (Granny3D), when in the past they used an invented format which had to be decoded painstakingly by (Wes_h's) hand over a very long time.

I don't believe Coconut is trying to mislead anyone. I believe that she is receiving a good deal of legitimate information (albeit second or third hand,) interpreting that information best that she can, and sharing the results as required by her sense of personal integrity. I also believe that she is operating from a position which is very anti-TSR, and writing for an audience who is equally anti-TSR, and as such it will be naturally inclined to believe the absolute worst of everything that comes across her virtual desk.

Assuming that one reads the blog with that understanding as a given, my only objection to the stuff presented in her blog is that it is frequently ambiguous whether the information presented is "as-is" or "with editorializing and personal interpretation". As such a great many people in her target audience assume that everything is truth, even those parts which are speculative.

I lurk at a lot of different places, including here. I have posted before as well, although admittedly not recently. I spoke this time I saw Johan behaving in what seemed like a fairly civil way, and then I saw ShanOw (a young man with whom I have worked in the past, and for whom I have a lot of respect) responding in a way which seemed out of character, bordering on obnoxious. I posted in response to that, everything else just... followed on.

The only stuff in that project which was actually mine was the eyebot and the animation for the extractor fan. I'm not really doing a lot of TS3 meshing, but you're more welcome to repack the eyebot mesh into a TS3 radio. (Anything of mine is public domain as far as I'm concerned.) The rest of the content was from Bonnie, SweetSwami (who I think has now retired, alas,) and PixelHate. They're all very lovely people, so you may have some luck asking them directly?

Well I don't know about johan, but I'm totally skiving off work.

And herein lies the problem. People keep reading interpretive statements, and touting them as facts.
"Coconut has a copy of a list of names which match the names and comments from an online petition." That is a fact.
"Thomas hacked the petition and distributed a copy amongst his FAs." That is an interpretation.
The fact has been proven conclusively, and lacking any counter-evidence, it stands. The interpretation is just theory. It is unproven. It may be correct, it may not be. It's hard to say without proof, and the important thing is to prove it is true, not that it isn't.

Then that makes even less sense... Aside from the fact that you're still asking someone to prove innocence rather than prove guilt (which, as several people have already pointed out, is not the way things work), why on Earth would someone unrelated to TSR or to Coconut need (or have the ability) to prove anything that either party did? I mean, can you prove that TSR did it? You and you alone? Without reference to something someone else said, or something they did in the past?

Photoshopping screenshots would be an incredibly stupid waste of time. Aside from any logical arguments about the merits of screenshots to begin with, you get much better results just editing the actual page with firebug and taking a screen shot of the end result. (For the record, I don't believe Coconut falsified screenshots.)

kenmtl, I agree wholeheartedly. That was, I suppose, the original point. There is a disturbing tendency to see something written by Coconut as gospel truth, when it is, realistically, an individual's interpretation of heresay. I don't doubt that Coconut has access to information that others do not - that much is quite evident. That does not make the information infallible. When you start with some Chinese whispers, then add authorial comment from a person with strong personal opinions against TSR, and the end result is something which should always be examined with a skeptical eye, not taken as absolute truth.

(And yes, I do remember, my name was on the 'collaborators' list you mention. )

Not sure where you got that impression, but I am most definitely not TSR.

Well this one in particular stands out in my memory:
http://tsr.mustbedestroyed.org/?p=824
Wes_H never had any intention of joining TSR, and I seriously doubt anyone involved would be under the impression that it was likely to change. He was especially unlikely to work on Merlin, given that (a) it's a package installer, and Wes has always been about the meshes and the animations, and (b) it's in Java, whereas Wes is firmly a C/C++ developer. The only thing even loosely related to this was that Wes relaxed the TOU on his Milkshape plugin, which is hardly surprising given that the TOU was pretty much ignored by everyone anyway.

ShanOw, I think the point was that, at this point in the relationship, it wouldn't matter to most people here just how squeaky clean TSR is or isn't. Whether TSR is or isn't hacking or sharing personal info or whatever, it wouldn't matter. All it takes is for someone to say "ZOMG I was hacked it was TSR" and it is accepted as absolute truth with little to no evidence. There is a strong subscription to "truthiness" often to the detriment of actual truth. Coconut has made statements which have been completely disproved, but every word she says is still taken as gospel.

I don't think personal information about people should be passed around unless that information is made public by the person involved. I do prefer actual proof to heresay though, and most of what comes from PMBD reminds me of the DaVinci code - enough truth to sound legitimate, but also a lot of room for smoke and mirrors.

Most of the free community tools are open source:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/s3pi/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/sims3tools/
http://code.google.com/p/madscientistproductions
https://sourceforge.net/projects/postal-sims3

There are two main issues though;
1 - There are only a dozen or so programmers in the sims community with enough of an interest to actually work on tools, and
2 - Just because people *can* doesn't mean they *do*.

I do know that the Postal source has been used in at least two other tools which I had nothing to do with. Neither project looks anything like Postal though, so unless you read the fine print you wouldn't know. So open source on sims tools does actually work.

The "back-burnering" is not malicious, or even intentional. The problem is that all the developers of these tools only own and work with Windows machines. Most of them (myself included) don't even own a Mac. That means that we can't test anything we build on a Mac platform. As it stands, I've put quite a lot of effort into making my tools work on all Java-friendly environments, but there are always couple of gotchas which mean that some things don't quite work the way I expect on non-PC systems (mostly the 3d preview, really - 3d graphics isn't so easy to write in a platform independent way). Most of the problems are relatively easy to fix, but to do so we need reasonably technically proficient Mac users who are able to help us essentially "remote debug" those applications. I've had three different people help me with Mac testing of stuff at various points, but after a few weeks they tend to disappear or move on.

If there are some Mac users who were confident enough to install alpha software, review simple shell scripts, and report back with specific and detailed bug reports, and those users make themselves known to the current stock of tool developers, you'd probably find that the "back-burnering" wouldn't be anywhere near as significant a problem.

Alternatively, there are a few libraries out there which are Mac friendly - you can always use those to create new tools fairly quickly if you have some coding skills!

I assume it is the Squish DDS library. It's a library that lets you perform DXT compression and produce DDS images. Not sinister.

Like I said, the roaster is skirting the edges of rules, but not actually breaking them. I think the quote goes "it's a fine line he didn't cross". As a side note, there is a difference between violent and graphically violent. The line is normally to do with goriness; falling over and curling up != gory. Having guts fall out and spill all over the floor == gory. Being roasted "off screen" then sliced in a cartoony manner is... somewhere in the middle. We have had content moved to the adult site for being too gory. This download didn't quite cross that line.

So do most newspaper websites, personal blogs, heck, even charities! It's a common practice. Comparing MTS2 to TSR for deleting posts is a bit like saying "You like drinking cordial? Saddam Hussein likes drinking cordial! You should stop drinking cordial or else you're being like him!". Obviously that's exaggerated, but my point is this: Someone does something you don't like, so you compare them to the most unpleasant group you can think of which also does that thing. (I'm using 'you' in the general sense.) It's similar to those people who compare someone to Hitler just to disprove their basically unrelated point.

I'm not here in any sort of official capacity, just putting in a point of view.

- MTS2 does not normally allow anyone to post uploads which are not actually hosted on MTS2. Download threads without attachments are generally archived, so threads don't end up advertising something which can't be downloaded any more (especially as external sites move their files around, or disappear entirely). So in that sense the rules were stretched (but not broken!) to allow the roaster, 'cause it was just that cool, and 'cause Pescado is fairly likely to remember to maintain the offsite link.
- MTS2 does not normally allow content which has graphically violent imagery. I think the "serving" part of the roaster skirts the edge of rule pretty closely - it's not blood spurting, but it is severing limbs, which is getting close. So there was a slight stretch (again, not a break!) of the rules there as well, because it was just that cool.
- The requirements for "exceptionals" in creator challenges include a direct relevance to the theme. The theme was "fun stuff for kids". While thoroughly awesome, this download is stretching that definition quite a bit in spirit, at least.

The roaster is on MTS2, it is welcome on MTS2, and it's going to stay on MTS2 (as long as the creators are willing). But it's already done quite a bit of stretching to get it where it is.

All that said, I do find the comparisons to TSR a bit distasteful. MTS2 is a private forum, and when many people combine forces to derail a thread I think it is entirely legitimate to remove those posts. Staff didn't allow anti-roasters to derail support threads over the roaster, and we don't allow pro-roasters to derail voting threads over it. There is a big difference between that and TSR's habit of selling low-quality content, sharing users personal details, hacking sites and leaning on others to get them shut down. It seems to me as though saying "They're becoming like TSR" of any site less liberal than PMBD is almost worthy of some sort of Godwin's law meme these days. 

(As a side note, Phaenoh's stuff is fairly extensively modded, even if it's not immediately obvious to the downloader. She's enabled new clothing categories for toddlers, including underwear and swimwear, and created an object which remotely mirrors another sim's plumbob. It definitely fits better under modded objects than deco objects)

Well given that EA's idea of a "CC tool" is Homecrafter, and the Modders' idea of a CC tool is SimPE...