Nothing was given away because, the fact is, there never WAS anything to give away. It was a sham built up in Daerk's mind, remember?

That's why I don't want any ultra-uber-secrecy bs.

"there never WAS anything to give away."
that is way not true..even if Daerk havent made anything for memod (which i still cant believe) the team was working on things and there was many things we could have given away..i bet most of you still dont know which city would have been included in beta..

Funny joke...

Do you realize that the entire timeline/storyline could have been released? In fact with the one of the screenshots some of the timeline info was released. We could have released every bit of concept art even though most of it was not how Suze or the other Devs envisioned it/how it was described in texts. We could have released every script done... hell we could of released the frecking unfinished buggy beta. There was plenty to release that we didn’t because it would have ruined the value of the game post-release.


I donno... that to was leaked accidentally for a short time as well before it was edited out of the post.

Don't flame me, I was only trying to make a point that the whole 'secrecy wait and see' stuff was just an added buffer to shield Daerk from revealing the truth behind his claims.

I'm suggesting that with PP, you DO release that timeline when you figure it out, that you DO release some of those art concepts when they're good and ready. I just don't want to be dragged along over the course of 2+ years being told 'wait and see' only to find out that none of the substantial work that had been claimed to have been done, never actually was. Note that when I was talking about the secrecy, it was the secrecy under Daerk's administration, not after Suzerain had taken over(although he also lied to us in a passive kind of way). For two years(the two years before Suzerain took over), I was pulled around with 'wait and see' and wild claims about things that never existed.

And I don't want to see claims that these things DID exist. Suzerain said himself(from the thread "ME Game"):
Daerk left MeMod in such a state that approximately 95% of the content which he was reputed to have produced was not evident.

Pixel-shaded grass. Landscape heightmaps. the entire design document. licence from the Tolkien estate, the Game story.
All non-existent.


And the 'frecking unfinished buggy beta' was, by Peregrine's account, "An absolute joke that I'd be embarassed to release with my name anywhere near it." That, to me, is as good as no beta.

As a final note, I must reiterate that I am attacking Daerk's policies of developing MEMod(secrecy) which carried over to Suzerain's leadership, not the people or actual work put into the development.

hehe...Daerk..could you sit down for a moment and explain the things to them? (j/k)

secrecy towards public cannot cause problems as long as the hidden things exists:)....the problems with memod was caused by the secrecy between D and the Devs(made everyone dream about things the world has 'n'ever seen:) ).. and between the DEvs and teamsters(slowered the speed of development)....
since (if everything is true(hehe) ) D lied to the devs, so we misinformed the public about some contents of the mod..

but that is getting off-topic..

Thank you so much. I really do appreciate being called a 'liar'.


When the storyline didn't materialize, Suzerain wrote one. You can read it - it's posted in the MEMod forums. When the design document didn't materialize, we started writing one - yes, it did slow down development because frequently we didn't have answers to the questions we were asked worked out yet ... but usually that just resulted in a redoubled effort to hammer out those answers.

Regarding the unfinished beta, do you really think that we didn't work on it since Peregrine saw the version he described?

As for what had or hadn't been done by the time MEMod ceased production, may I suggest waiting until some of the material is released? Even then, that will only give you an idea of what was and wasn't done - for instance, there's little point in releasing the linguistic framework for MEMod. Or the huge amount of research material. Or the concepts for character generation. The player/NPC interaction concepts. etc

Material exists - on the hard drives of the computers of the people who had been working on it.

However, since this discussion does seem to be veering towards discussing MEMod, I would like to request that the posts pertaining to MEMod be split into the 'General MEMod Discussion' forum.

you know how i meant it..hm....no?
*edits the post*
*runs from the flames*

*grins*


I think I know what you meant, yes. But 'lying' is a very strong word to use - to me that implies intent to deceive. And I didn't see such intent among the devs or the teamsters.

Note again, that I was referring to Daerk's time as leader, the 2+ years before Suzerain took the helm. I realize that much, much work was done during the final 6 months of production(I have read the storyline, heard about the designs, etc.)


I didn't bring up the point of the lack of work on MEMod simply to talk about MEMod, I brought it up to show the kind of PR that I DID NOT want to see with Project Phoenix. What I have talked about is my reasoning behind not taking a secretive, elusive stance on public relations regarding Project Phoenix. I merely wish to not be mislead, and that was the point of me bringing up the subject in the firstplace. Also, I do believe that Suzerain(and possibly others) DID in fact attempt deception, but only in an attempt to protect MEMod from crumbling.

Whatever the intention of your post, you were attacking MEMod and questioning the integrity of the people working on it.

For which the Phoenix forums are really not an appropriate place.

I said I liked the way the PR was done before - it would have to modified to be done right, though. I am referring to before the time when Daerk's deception was revealed. We got answers to questions, no spoilers, features, etc.... Not that they were all true, but it was a good job of PR, nonetheless. If the material actually exists, I think that this would be a great way to keep interest without spoiling anything.

Do you honestly believe that Daerk's integrity should not be questioned? However, you seem to not be grasping the intentions of my post. I was not attacking MEMod, I was merely pointing out the flaws in the PR policies of MEMod.

The way you were phrasing your posts was implicating all of us in this. And that's what I'm objecting to.

You could very easily have stated your PR preferences without resorting to this. You chose not to. I choose to object to being called a liar, and by implication, having my integrity questioned.

If you wanted to point out flaws in the MEMod PR policy, then you should have done so in the MEMod forums rather than carrying this forward to a new project.

I have already requested that the parts of this thread questioning the integrity of the people working on MEMod be moved through to the appropriate forum, and I'd like to repeat this request.

Sorry, hadn't read it to see your request yet. I've split what looked like the least Phoenix-related stuff, but the topic was so well mixed I didn't get all of it. PM me if there's other posts you wanted included in this.


That's exactly what I was talking about, in case anyone thinks I'm claiming that unfinished status continued. Daerk lied a year ago when he claimed the beta was "finished except for a few minor details". I'd been given a copy of the latest beta version to base models off (which is another disaster I've mentioned elsewhere), and it was embarassingly bad. There were no interiors, no NPCs, none of the realism scripts, no objects besides the basic buildings, and no landscape. Meanwhile, Daerk was still claiming to both the public and the team that the beta was nearly done.

But none of this applies to the beta under suzerain's leadership. Once the true state of things was revealed, a huge amount of work was done in an attempt to finish it. It hadn't been finished yet, but it was a lot closer than it had been a year ago.

Thanks for moving this over here, Peregrine


It would appear that some people seem to think that 'wait and see' was a smokescreen behind which the makers of MEMod were hiding, while not actually working on the mod at all, and that MEMod was nothing but a giant hoax...

Well - I know how much content I produced for MEMod, and I have seen content that others produced .... so work was definitely going on - as all those who were producing MEMod content can confirm.

Some mod secrets we didn't want to give away - to preserve the element of surprise. Things such as the timeline, for instance.

And for many features, there was no way of knowing whether it would be possible to include them - this is where 'wait and see' comes in.

As an example, take for instance a request to provide NPCs with individual schedules. As a dialogue writer, I know that it's well within my skills to write NPC dialogue such that appropriate responses will be given whatever the NPC is doing as part of the schedule. Simple enough. I also know that Wookiee's scripting skills will easily suffice to write NPC scheduling scripts.
So far, so good - no problems with implementing NPC scheduling.
Or are there?

Within a reasonable timeframe, how many NPCs can I write suitable customized dialogue for, and how many NPC schedules can Wookiee script? And the answer is - not enough. So whether we can have the feature or not depends on whether we have enough team members with the required skills. And that is something that is impossible to predict in a volunteer mod team.
But even assuming that there's enough staff to write the dialogue and the scripts, the next problem isn't far away.
How many of those NPCs and their scripts can the engine handle? That's not something we can know until we've actually made the cells the NPCs will be in - complete with the models, textures, animations etc, and see how the engine copes.

For every feature we'd have liked to include, we had to bear that in mind.


I can't say that I followed the development of Fable with any interest, but I seem to recall reading that they had to leave out several features they had promised to include (correct me if I'm wrong here). And that's a commercial game, produced in a commercial environment - which means that they can adapt the engine they are using to accommodate features, and they can predict their staffing levels far more accurately than we could ever hope to....

So... we ourselves had to 'wait and see' whether we'd be able to include a feature, and to do it well enough to meet our standards.

But we were trying our best to work out how to get the features we wanted to have working in MEMod - frequently cursing the engine for its limitations, then trying to find ways around those limitations.

I never called you a liar nor provided any implication that you were a liar, and would like you to refrain from finding these posts to be 'personal attacks', because that's simply ridiculous.


And when talking about Phoenix's PR, I was talking about the fact that I don't want them to promise features and claim to be doing things that aren't actually going to be included(see my post in the thread which this was split from).

The problem with MEMod's PR was that they didn't keep very many secrets...they made claims, but then failed to back them up with solid evidence. I produce your referenced "promised NPC Schedules" as exhibit A to this issue, which I would not like to see be carried over to Project Phoenix.

For cryin' out loud..

I for one am not suprised that the MEMod was cancelled because of something Daerk did or did not do, however I AM surprised about the amount of mistrust flying around about the circumstances.

As for myself, I'll apologize for ANYTHING I may have promised, knowing it was not true. To be fair, I've got a piss-poor memory, so if you know something I said on some messageboard God know's when ago when I was still "co-leader" for that month or four bring it on, and I'll try and explain it to the best of my ability.

I left the mod way before Suz took over, therefore I can speak exactly nill about anything they've done since.

But pleaaaase, everyone, take a chill-pill..

holy crap its the ent went moot...nice to see ya(its been awhile, to be sure).

Nice to hear from you again, Ent.

I distinctly remember testing stuff for you back in the olden days!


There certainly seems to be some logical fallacy being put about - along the lines of:

"Daerk made promises he didn't keep - ergo everything claimed by anyone on the MEMod team must have been a lie"

and

"Daerk claimed to have stuff which didn't materialize - ergo non of the assets MEMod claim to have can ever have existed"

There's one thing that the people jumping to these false conclusions don't seem to grasp - and that is that the equation

Daerk = MEMod

is not true, and that making this assumption is very insulting to everyone who spent time and effort working on MEMod.

I think the common misconception is that because Daerk was the leader of the MEMod Team, all the stuff he claimed that was false meant that the MEMod simply didn't exist. What is forgotten here is that, even back when Daerk was in charge, the MEMod Team was just that - a TEAM. A failing by the leader will kinda cock things up, but just because he failed to make all the things he claimed to make, etc, doesn't mean the rest of the team also did this.

I´m kinda confused

I remembered a video from Daerk(on irk). It showed the landscape of the Middle-Earth.
Was that all a hoax?

i´ve still got it on my computer but the link i got is broken......(http://darkelf.ca/artwork/middle-earth_lowres.wmv)


Viblo.....

That video was not of Daerk's work. It was stated at the time of posting the link that a separate party trying to create his own Middle Earth and this was a preview of the hight map he was planning to use.

ohh some shitt here........


delete...

Even though it's not MEMod, that landscape was pretty cool..... Anyone know if he's/they're still working on it?

At any rate, despite how much didn't exist [even though Daerk claimed they did], the MEMod team was able to create an insane amount of excellent work in the last 8 months.