I dont think reskin mods will kill off the community. Fact is, everyone has to start somewhere. I'll be honest and say that my first Em4 mod was a lame attempt at reskinning the LA mod units into the local units in my area. That mod has since been lost to the times, but I understand the beginners need to have a basis and a trail to go on. I too believe, it is the constant rehashing of the same old dead beaten horse that will do it in IMO. More importantly, this dead horse is labelled as being alive and well, so to speak. Remember that the only thing worse than beating a dead horse is betting on it.
It is kinda misleading for me when I see *name of mod here* and its basically just Mayberry with some textures swapped out and one or two units changed at the stations. I also find it partly offensive that the community at large considers these rehashes to be full mods by themselves, when in reality, they rely on Mayberry, which in turn relies on a mix of LA Mod, Brooklyn mod and some clan made scripts. Later versions of said mods also make use of my Montana mod volunteer FF script, although they were not able to implement it fully and some glitches occur. The retexture submods only exacerbate the existing problems the original mod had by often adding high poly, overlighted vehicles that further reduce performance and FPS of the game on weaker systems.
The problem lies in the fact that it seems as a community, save for a few people, we are stuck in making the same stuff over and over again. How tired are you people of seeing an EMS Ford Expedition, Ford Expedition Fire Chief, Pierce Arrow Tanker and a Ford F350 skid unit? I'm sure more than a few of you know what those vehicles look like, because they have been burned into their minds. NNico's F350 and bama's Topkick ambulance are also another pair ofold classics that I cant get out of mind, and I'm sure the community cant either.
We need to move forward from using the same stuff over and over again and actually try to learn the skills needed to create all new content. The reason no new content is popping up from those who do know how to create new content is because we dont see the demand for new stuff, nor do we have the security over our hard labored content.
To me, the real beef is that the mods with real originality hide in the shadows and their authors get called as being "evil, childish, *insert negative adjective here* while the reskin submods get all the praise and 25 minute YouTube gameplay videos. Secondly, these submod makers get the same, if not more credit as someone who makes a scratch model or skin.
If reskins can get as much recognition, respect, honor and praise as these....
....then there is no incentive to make them this good. Its very disappointing when I put hours into making these units as close to the real thing as possible,but then I'm branded as selfish and whatever excrement people have been flinging in my direction. It also feels disheartening when a 20 minute reskin job gets more recognition than a full model which took hours of trial and error to achieve. Problem is that people are content with the common denominator of mods. If it barely resembles an American theme, its good to go. Thats pretty much it really. There doesnt seem to be much in the form of actual critique and the people just blindly take what they find. Another common denominator is the guise of "realism". Its a word that I believe has been bastardized to the point that having a button to start the engine of a vehicle is considered realism, but the fact that the unit made in Em4 is far from the actual real life unit is outright ignored.
One more thing in this discussion is the lack of any non fiction mods out there. A vast majority of the mods are fictional and for one reason only. Because very few are willing to take the time to replicate an actual unit down to the specifics. Its a product of laziness and something which further stagnates the quality of things being pumped out. But I do not necessarily mean EmP is now coming up with bad things. Not at all, there are actually quite a number of promising and interesting mods that I would like to see released due to their originality and the determination, perseverance, good attitude and morals of the author.
As far as I can see, and as I've posted above, its become a competition to see who can make something with the lowest common denominator and show it off with the best PR as possible with their fancy FB pages and clan sites. Not to mention their oh-so-many YouTube videos. I mean, does a mod really need all of that? I could understand filming a video yourself and uploading it, but sending copies to multitudes of people is just furthering the attitude that copyright and ownership does not exist in any form, when in reality it actually does.
