The idea came up in the All Natural thread. I liked it. To be honest I doubt it'll go anywhere, but it's worth a try.

What this is (as I see it while typing):

I: It's a thread where you can request help dealing with simple, monotonous, relatively non-creative tasks in the CS, TES4Edit, NifSkope, or other well known and free-to-use tools.

II: It's a thread where you can take a short break from your own simple, monotonous, relatively non-creative tasks and do something a bit different for an hour or two, help someone else, make friends, get kudos, earn favours, maybe get a little experience doing something you've not really done before.

What this isn't:

I: It's not a place to come and ask people to do something you're not capable of doing yourself. If you *can't* do something and want someone to do it for you, please post your request elsewhere.

II. It's also not a place to ask for help on "how do I do this?". There are http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Main_Page in http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/forum/81-the-enclave/ http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/forum/24-construction-set-oblivion/. If you don't know how to do something, please learn first before you ask for (or offer to) help here.

III. It's not a place to solicit "team members". While it's possible, if the idea takes off, that teams may be made out of this kind of co-operation, the work that gets advertised here should be the kind of work that can be accomplished by following directions alone and that if it requires any kind of extra creative thinking on the part of the person doing the work, and thus likely a sustained correspondence between the person making the request and the person(s) carrying out the task then it isn't appropriate. Many medium to large mods have boundless quantities of this kind of task and they can cause a real drain on the motivation of the mod creator.

IV. It's not a place for troubleshooting http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/forum/24-construction-set-oblivion/, http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/forum/77-the-bta-guild/.

V. It's not a place to sneakily get hold of pre-releases. :nono:

Current requests:
Use the snapback link in the quote header to see the full post, these are heavily edited versions.
Either post a reply to/query about the request in this thread or PM the person making the request directly. I'd appreciate it if people could tell me when the work they wanted help with has been finished, and the names of anyone who helped (if there was anyone).




Now, onto some discussion points ('cos no one's really talked about them yet).

I think it's better that work is not done on a direct reciprocation basis (I make 10 AI packages for you, you add weather boxes to 5 cells for me), rather that it works on some kind of kudos system. If you make a request you should be willing to do something to do something for aomeone else who has posted here asking for help. If you make a request, but don't give anything back, don't be surprised if you get little help while other people get lots. Of course, maybe no one gets any help at all, tough to say when the thread hasn't been posted. Is that ok? I could add a list of "people who have helped" to the OP, but I'm not sure whether that would make people really feel better. It would be a way of reminding people that if they want help, they should offer it too.

Credits should be given in your readme as usual for help given, specifying the general work the person did, and specifying each contributor individually. Additionally, I'd appreciate it if people who helped you out because of your request here got mentioned to me, so I can put their name in a list of "nice people who have helped".


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My idea of this is that people who are reasonably competent/well-knowledged can get some help from and give some help to other reasonably/well-knowledged people. If your task requires you to write out a tutorial beyond a few lines of guidance, it's too complex, if it requires a lot of thought, it's too complex. If you need a tutorial, you may need to learn more, the mod author may be willing to help you in exchange for assistance, but that's not the kind of interaction I'm interested in here.

Suggestions are welcome for the OP; if anything happens at all (I'm kinda sceptical, but it's worth trying), it'll be done by the community, such as it is, not just by me.

Finally, to give a few examples of what I think's not suitable for requesting from my own mods:

I have to make a couple of thousand loading screens for ALS. It's kinda tedious after the first few hundred, but the work sometimes requires tweaking in an image editing package, then careful framing, and a decision as to whether the shot should be used or not. All of these things require "creative input" that falls outside the realm of donkey-work.

I have to find the optimal set of parameters for a gravity node for medium-sized trees. This requires endless adjustment of just two parameters in Nifskope. Tweak, check the result in the CS, tweak, check the result, tweak... and so on endlessly. It's incredibly boring and frustrating. It's also quite trivial as basically everything else in the system has been finished and it's only two constants that need to be finalised. But it's also completely a judgement call as to when it's "good enough" to be released. It's also only a single task.

OK, feedback, suggestions? Requests?

Vac

Does someone feel like making me an interior?? I can do it but I don't have the will-power to do so. It's a small village on the border with Hammerfell. (Slightly across the border actually). At the moment it requires Onra's TWMP heightmap, but this will probably change due to the recent announcement that it is being discontinued. It also requires xULColovianHighlands_EV.esp (Unique Landscapes Colovian Highlands). Use the HouseLower02 interior. Design the interior with one or two people, it's up to you, I can work with either . Any takers?? To clarify, you don't actually need any mods installed, only vanilla Ob, and I'll just merge the interior .

@ Vac, nice idea .

EDIT: I'm not sure if this is the sort of request you're talking about, but making an interior is fairly menial.

I am sorry but I don't quite understand...

We can't ask for help on anything or make requests for anything we can't do. But if we can do it go ahead and ask.

So basically if you are to lazy to do something you know how to do post here.

If you don't know how to or need help on doing something don't post here.

Whats the point?

Monotony is monotonous. People need breaks, and switching between activities is almost as good. If you've got several hundred interiors to place an object in, by the time you're half way through you'll probably try strangling the CS. The work still needs doing, and modders are generally the kind of people who can always come up with something else to do in order to avoid doing work that needs doing. So opening the work up for someone else to help out with is a pretty good idea. It gives everyone involved a stab at something different.

It's not if you're lazy, I think it's more if you have a very repetitive task to do, then you can ask someone to do a bit, so it's less repetitive. And in return you do someone else's repetitive task, but a different one to your own repetitive task, so overall it feels less repetitive, but the same amount of work gets done. Did I repeat myself too much?

Edit: Ninja'd

The idea is that if you've got your own mod that requires some really tedious, monotonous task, like oh, hand-placing weather boxes for precipitation effects outside of every single interior's window in the game, you can come here and request assistance. So if someone's got the free time and motivation, and you currently don't, the project can still be completed in a timely manner.

EDIT: Oh dear double ninja'd !!!!

:ninja:
:ninja:



:turtle: <-- me

Alright thank you (EDIT~~ three ) now it makes sense I can't work on my mod right now (computer crashed waiting on a new one) but I have the CS on here so I can help others! if it only requires loading Morrowind in the CS...

I am also confused as to the point of asking other people to help with monotonous tasks, when modders are trying to take a break from those tasks. However, I'll take a shot at this. I recently got permission to update and & clean an old gem. The mod adds new items to OOO chests & leveled lists, plus updates some of the magical equipment in OOO.

Alas, the mod also has hundreds of wild edits. i.e. Both OOO & the mod change a container contents. However, OOO does not change the open/close sound effect, and this mod adds the vanilla sound to it's own entry, thus creating an unnecessary reference. All of the wild edits are of a similar nature, and thus can be cleaned with the oh-so-handy TES4Edit. If somebody is looking for simple & easy work, I could certainly use a hand combing through all of changes.

I'm not completely sure it is either, but it's the only request that's been made so far in the thread! It wouldn't be menial for me, as I've never really made interiors, so if someone who has some experience with that kind of thing would care to pass comment whether they think it fits right in (or not), feel free!Summed up beautifully! :goodjob:

As pointed out by the previous posters, the point is that some projects involve large quantities of donkey-work. Anyone with the knowledge/skills *could* do it, but as there's typically only one person working on the mod, that one person has to do all of it. The idea here is to spread it around a little so anyone who wants could do something different for a bit, but still have progress made on their own mod.

It also has the possibility of making friendships, forming teams, engendering goodwill and all that good stuff? in the process, which is no bad thing at all.

Vac

The point is different monotonous tasks are less monotonous than your own monotonous task, as it's different, so it means everything monotonous is likely to get done faster.

EDIT: @ Vac, I'd consider it to be quite menial, in that if you're making more than a few it get get monotonous very quickly. I've only actually had to make three interiors, but that's enough to put me off progressing with the mod because I've had interior overload. At the moment I have very little modding time, so I'd rather not spend it on something repetitive, but rather some quest work for the mod, which is less repetitive .

That actually makes perfects sense the way you say it :thumbsup: So I guess my request stands.

AliTheLord and Immortal-D, your requests have been added to the OP.

Vac

I support this idea whole-heartedly. :foodndrink: As I and many of my modder friends already do this. I enjoy trading interior/exterior/clutter work with others. Gives me something other than my own mod to look at for a few hours. :lmao: Of course, I also often trade my skills to others for things I can't do in return for things they're not good at. For example, InsanitySorrow does most of my AI work as I'm rubbish with it still and in return I happily do any building/cluttering/landscaping he needs as he's rubbish with those. LOL

Let me get Strid Relliesel finished and you can add my name to list of willing participants.

I was thinking about this some more... How are you going to break that work up into manageable sections for people to help with? All Natural's weather boxes are easy, you've got the AN esm, just pick an undone cell and do the windows in that, AliTheLord's request is technically a little bigger, but arguably simpler, all the contributor needs is Oblivion.esm and Ali can merge the new cell in with Gecko. How are you going to assign/offer a chunk of work to another person if it's all a bunch of wild edits in a single plugin? Play tennis with the plugin? What happens if the contributor says they have done work, but doesn't send the plugin back to you? Are you going to wait for them indefinitely? Or are you going to give up and just keep going with your own copy and lose their work? The nice thing about the other ideas is that the work can be done in parallel; nobody gets held up waiting for the contributor to do something. As I understand your job, the work can't be done in parallel; removing wild edits can't be done in a Gecko-mergable patch for example.Well, that's good to hear. If something like this already happens, then it should be possible to expand it a little bit and make it a little more communal. Think it's worth my while opening a thread about this on TESAlliance too?Hmm, hadn't really thought about a list of participants to be honest, if you're meaning "people willing to help out". I was figuring people could take a look at the list of jobs and just decide whether they feel like doing one of those jobs for a bit. There's no pressure or expectation on you to say "yes" to a job that way. It could also (maybe) encourage people to volunteer in the first place? After all, if I have to put my name on a list as "willing to help" I may not bother, but if all I need to do is contact the author asking for help, that's not such a big deal and doesn't commit me to anything else.

I am considering whether a list of "people who have helped" would be worthwhile, but I'm not really sure about that. People will get credited in readmes (and hopefully threads and general discussions) anyway, and I don't want to make people feel there's any kind of competition or pressure in this.

Vac

Actually I think a list of people who voluntarily express their willingness to help with a project, along with very brief descriptions of each person's proficiencies, might motivate someone browsing the thread to request help they didn't really think they needed beforehand. If that makes any sense? Of course that's heavily relying on the volunteers to be accurate about their skills and availability since it'd just be added frustration to have people volunteer then not be available or misrepresent their proficiencies (ie. someone putting down "mad OBSE scripting skillz" which actually amount to being able to run obse_loader.exe). I don't know, it'd probably be difficult to make it work. Just a thought though.

As I stated already, I'm not particularly convinced this will work out in the longer run, but it seems worth a try.I think most people know when they need help from the tedium of doing much the same thing again. The idea isn't so much an "I need help with something I can't do well" as "I feel like doing something different for a bit, but don't want my own mod(s) to fall behind". Your example of scripts is definitely off; scripts are decidedly non-trivial, and the mod-creator's got to be able to understand/debug/rewrite them all by themself later.

Well, if people want to post and say what they're willing/able to do in terms of things like making interiors, doing pathgrids, cluttering, placing objects in cells, (or whatever other tedious-when-done-for-days-on-end tasks) then that's fine. If it seems useful, some kind of list can be added to the OP.

Vac

Sounds like a good idea, And I'll probably be helping some of you guys out I do have some skills with the CS but no motivation to go and make my own mods ( I often work for 2 to 3 days and give up )

Ha yeah I just wrote that real quick as an example of something someone might be proficient with, but it's obviously not appropriate in this case at all.

In retrospect it's probably not that great of an idea overall, you're right that most people probably have a good idea of what work needs to be done for their projects well ahead of coming across this thread. I tend to post if an idea pops into my head and then consider its reasonableness later, obviously haha

Of course my other idea is to make this into a wiki!

Another idea you'll probably realise isn't very reasonable soon . Better to focus on making the existing wiki awesomer .

@AliTheLord I'm willing to create an interior for you, I'll start tomorrow, Any more stuff I should take into account ?? I take it the inhabitants will be quite poor because its just a small village and it has a lowerhouse interior.

Awesome!!!! If you can't do the pathgridding, no worries. And yeah, just a nice humble Redguard family. If you're feeling creative you can give the house a bit of character, like indicate they have a job or are avid bowl collectors, or something like that , but that's entirelly up to you .

Yup I think it's worth making one there too

Which forum would it belong in? The Oblivion [WIPz] & [RELz] Mods one or the Oblivion User Mods one? It's inherently focused on making mods, not talking about mods.

Vac

Just to be Devil's advocate here:

Isn't this the sort of project that stops people from creating TOOLS to take away the tedium? If you can get someone else to share the work, you won't need to ask the computer to do it.

Despite a joke from a couple of years ago about an automated mod-making program ("No one makes their mods manually anymore, do they?"), there's no likelihood that tasks like creating interiors, cluttering, aligning effects meshes next to interior windows and so forth could be done by an automated system.
And I'd sooner go for more mods being completed, faster, because fewer modders got frustrated with the grinding bits, which has happened plenty, and plenty, and plenty of times since Oblivion got released.

Why? Are you going to make us some tools?

Vac