To add: most mods work cross-platform. I only build windows versions and I have never gotten a report back that any mac/linux users have had problems.
There are specific functions that need mac/linux builds, I believe shaders is one of them, but other than that you can just use the windows build of the mod.

Nope, you're an awful person. You are a troll. The mods being free isn't the issue. It's been explained to you that modders get incentives, which makes it possible for it to be free.

You: "But, blah, blah, blah, mOdS aRe FrEe!!!!"

That doesn't cut it. The fact that they were free doesn't mean anything. The world doesn't work that way. If they actually charged for it and GOG did the same thing to bundle those mods whether GOG charged for it or not, that's a loss of revenue. Technically, the fact the mods are free doesn't mean they're not without value, and it is a loss of revenue for modders. They're only free for you to obtain them from their original place. They're not free for someone else like GOG to use them.

thanks for the information Ralzar. your post explains the cost/effect on creators well and puts a different slant on the situation for me. it was messy even if well meaning on GOG's behalf, but i hope the situation can be resolved so this can be turned into a good idea for the modders and giving a leg up on your work.

GOG has included mods without crediting the modders since day one. The free goodies you often see like manuals and such were also given to GOG by users and they released them without crediting the user in question. They aren't forced to do so as well. They are also not the only company that has done this. I mean, if we're getting serious about this, all of the dosbox builds used for dos games were bundled without explicit permission from the guys who made dosbox, and games like Arcanum are effectively cracked versions of the originals (but you have to do that, in order to jump over the drm).

I wonder why this is a problem now. I'd blame gog but modders are a weird bunch.

You're gonig to compare someone voluntarily providing a manual they have that came with a game to people having their own work taken without consent, something they actually created? Why would you necessarily credit a user who provided something that they didn't create, and did literally no additional work for versus someone who created the content in question?

What makes modders a weird bunch? Just curious how you can lump a disparate and diverse group into such a broad stroke as "weird bunch."

Goes from listing the things that make GOG look bad...

...to saying "modders are a weird bunch".

What? Are you just condoning what you're saying GOG did to victimize people, and you're gaslighting them?

Wow!

I'm sure GOG have noticed this discussion in the forum. It seems like it was a somewhat rushed release, but also a well intentioned one as it's a niche product that a GOG employee may have been a personal fan of. If the post continues to get bumped up, GOG would be encouraged to make a goodwill gesture that may ease some of the frustration. I don't think they need to bend backwards to fix things. They just need to show they have considered the other side's point of view.

Yeah, we all just want the best release of this on GOG really and it is such a damn shame it ended up with this. But when the DFU community (including the DFU developers) were not really involved in it, the odds of something going wrong was pretty high.

Btw, I think it is a bit weird that Good Old Games is the place to front a maximum graphics modded version of what is very much a pixel art game? I would expect a "GOG Cut" to really lean into the retro goodness of it and package it with mods to remove the bad and unfinished parts of the design.
DFU without the HD mods (or the GOG Cut settings) looks pretty much like vanilla Daggerfall, and if you activate DFUs Retro Mode it really gets those crunchy pixels and the feel of being back in the 90s.

Well, one of the features of Daggerfall Unity by design, as you know, is to enable and disable the mods. If someone prefers vanilla Daggerfall Unity I can disable everything or keep what I prefer.

The GOG cut quality is exactly the same quality my previous pack had, with the advantage of not having to spend hours looking different mods one by one or the hassle of update dozens of them.
in that pack of mine I hadn't all the mods I had downloaded necessarily enabled. Exactly the same in the GOG cut version.

Really, maybe it' me, but I an beginning to be a bit confused about the point of all of this. I don' get it.

Daggerfall Unity's best feature is been able to generate smaller dungeons if you toggle the setting, so it no longer takes hours of crawling through generic looking dungeons to complete a quest.

No one had their work "taken from them". Modders uploaded the mods with the intention of people downloading them for free and playing them. All GOG did was simplify the install process to make the game more accessible to new players. Modders are a "weird bunch" because they're getting mad that people are playing the free mods that they posted for people to freely download. This bullshit really makes the mod community just look like a bunch of assholes, even though it's only a minority who are being absurd about all of this. Those people really just need to be ignored by the community going forward if they're going to be jerks about people playing the mods they upload.

This is the point I was trying to make. You voluntarily wrote lines of code to modify a commercial software (which may or may not be illegal to do, depending on the situation) so it could be distributed for free (again, because if you charged money for it it could be an illegal action). You didn't make the game. Okay, maybe you could deserve some credit for your voluntary work, but other than that, you have to assume you just made something that was meant to be distributed and even modified with complete freedom.

Come on. Let's not be so categorical or biased. Things are not so simple. Modding is a peculiar situation where each one recognizes, feeds back each other and let things stay without the need to be unnecessarilly srict. And it is better let things stay in that way.

A mod is a derivative work and you own some limited copyrights in what you created but what you created is likely copyright infringement regarding the original software or work.

Arena & Daggerfall are missing from my account too. And I know I got those with Bethesda game purchase ages ago.

Edit: Had to re-add them to my account via store for free. Strange.