Thanks for summarizing this Coorbin, very appreciated.
Beside the infos provided already many devs here decided NOT to release the addons on multile pages as updating them on 1 page is time consuming enough already, + supporting it via esoui.com & official ESO forums.
To all: Please keep in mind this is done in our free time without any rewards or financial compensation.
Some ppl donate ingame gold or buy us a coffee, some say thank you (which often is enough
) but most just ask for "a fix" or "make it work"... Well, that said: Having 1 reliable source for the addons is enough, and this is and will be Esoui.com.
Nexus Mods can be used for many other games but do not expect any dev or staff here to support that, thanks for your understanding.
Originally Posted by Coorbin
As far as I am aware, Minion is closed source, proprietary software. The devs of mmoui/esoui retain copyright and control over the code. It is possible to modify the code without having the source, but it isn't recommended, and would not be a friendly or ethical way of working with the development team who built Minion.
In order for Minion to be well-maintained by others outside the original Minion dev team, its source code would need to be released under an open source license. This would help Minion to survive whether or not the developers continue to invest resources into the tool.
Of course, the backend for these websites is still maintained and kept online by a related development team, if not in fact the same team. They could decide to take their chips and go home at any time. Since Minion depends on downloading files hosted here, it sort of makes sense to link together the tool and the site. If the site dies, Minion the program is useless.
On the other hand, there is another modding community that provides a download service, but also makes their client open source. They are a larger operation that actively generates income from people paying to use the service, and they host mods for more games (and more mods in total). I don't think they really do anything for Elder Scrolls Online specifically, but their client is definitely in better hands because it is open source, even though it's connected to a proprietary service backend. That community's name is NexusMods.
The reason I don't use NexusMods personally is that Minion has a lot of addons that are only hosted here, and not on NexusMods. I am also an addon author, and I only host them here.
Oh, yeah: NexusMods' Vortex only works on Windows. So it wouldn't help us Mac users even if it had all the ESO addons.
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IMO, the long term solution for mod hosting should come in the form of a cross-platform client that uses Bittorrent on the backend to download mods. This allows everyone to "crowd source" the bandwidth to distribute the mods. There could still be a centralized website and repository for the mods, but the website would not have to really serve very much content with the community hosting a lot of it. Alternatively, they could have an HTTP "mirror" system similar to apache.org where cooperative mirrors can host cryptographically verified versions of the mods.
Still, Minion is pretty good for right now. My main suggestion is that they update the JAR on the download site to be the latest version of the tool, to improve out of the box Java compatibility. |