Day Two: An Interesting Discovery

Last class, my group began looking over H/FOSS projects for this semester. There are plenty of websites that list hundreds of potential software projects. Finding a software project is not a problem; Sifting through the countless possibilities and agreeing upon a single project is the difficult part. Coming to a consensus is less of an issue with such a small group, but, even if only one person disagrees with the end decision, this conflicting interest could pose a hindrance to the entire group throughout the semester. We have until January 18 to come up with three project candidates. Rather than wasting time as a group, we decided to look for projects on our own and use the assigned exercise as the centerpiece for our discussion on Friday.

In my search for a candidate H/FOSS project, I was reminded of a section in chapter 2 from our reading last class. Section 2.5 mentions "climbing contributor mountain" and follows Alice on her journey from typical user to helpful contributor. The four steps listed are user, seeker, collaborator, and contributor. This flow seems natural to me, and I see a resemblance in the author's example with some of my own experiences. Replace Inkscape with Oblivion Mod Manager (OBMM) or Fallout Mod Manager (FOMM) and the story becomes very similar for me. This next section might seem like a tangent, but it is necessary in order to establish the background story for my initial project choice.

I am an avid video gamer and technology enthusiast. I get a thrill from modding boring vanilla products into personalized versions that offer a unique experience to the user based on individual preference. More and more games are headed in this direction with reactive gameplay and story elements, such as dialogue choices and detailed character creation tools. There are plenty of games out there that allow users to add their own content, but few companies are as supportive of their modding community as Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda releases toolkits for their Elder Scrolls and Fallout games that make it easier for the community to develop mods. I played Oblivion when it first came out and loved the game overall, but there are many bugs and nit-picky issues that I discovered in my playthrough. Bethesda patched the major bugs as they were discovered and reported by the community, but, as these open-world games become larger and more complex, it is increasingly more difficult to address every issue thoroughly.

By keeping games like Oblivion relatively open, Bethesda allows the community to participate in the software's maintenance. Tesnexus is one such community that provides users with a framework in which to release, download, and/or install unofficial patches, mods, and modding resources. I have worked my way up from a user to a seeker to collaborator within this community, but I have yet to contribute. Just recently, the Nexus community released the Nexus Mod Manager (NMM) in Open Beta. This software is open source, and it allows the user to download a file from the Nexus site and add it to a supported game. I used it to apply some high-res texture mods to Skyrim, and I was amazed by the relative simplicity of the process. This is something in which I am definitely interested, and I will report back in a later post with my findings.