Nope. He dropped the files on me about a year and a half ago ago and I haven't seen or heard of him since. You might be able to find him via FileFront. The one email address I had was via FF. It no longer works.HDD failures
are unusual. Unless one is a modder apparently, lol. Lots of folks around the
A2 Community have also had this peculiar mishap occur to them as well. Allows one to stop working on a mod without having all those guilty feelings about screwing people out of something one has loudly and publicly promised for a long while.
Most people are simply unaware of how much effort and time modding takes. Especially when one is doing something from scratch. People will dive off into modding ODFs, say. Then they will allow their ambitions and desires to get the better of them. They will publicly announce they are working on the "Blah Blah" Mod V2.55. There will be a website with really cool pics and everything! There will be a team, with credits for moving a comma from one side of the page to the other gushed out onto every fan site possible. Including the one just made up for the Team. The rest of us will be treated to a neverending parade of screenshots and updates breathlessly posted one on top the other. There will be FanBoys. Whose sole reason for existence is the Blah Blah Mod v2.55. These will kneel and worship at the feet of Team Blah Blah. All us mere mortals whom have made things like the Art of War or the Physics Project in the past are now definitely relegated to steerage class for the rest of our miserable lives. Team Blah Blah, the
real modders, are now on the scene making everything right. Children will eat
all their vegetables wthout prompting from parents. The whole human race will have So Cali weather, no matter where one lives. World peace will be achieved at last!
Then there is the other side of this. Someone comes into the Community and likes something which was released incomplete or not done very well in the first place. This person likes the show/book/genre/film the release is based upon and then decides he/she wants more of the same. Said release occurred about five years ago, Real Time. Which is equal to at least one, possibly two Ice Ages ago in InterWebs Time. This person will begin diligently searching for mods for their other favorite games to adapt to their new found fave. The meshes and coding for the other game will be in a different format from
A2 and require extensive conversions and changes before they will begin to work. At some point someone will comment/speculate on what a shame it is no one is working on this "Reeely Kewel Schtuff" any more and how upsetting it is people no longer work on this material because I bet there are at least one or two more diehard fans out there who would D/L this in a New York second.
Translation: How come you modders are on your lazy butts not doing something about this when I want it?! Aren't you people aware of how badly me and my three or four friends need this?! So we can place the new MegaGodShip, MkII into our games which will then be unable to be played online. How sad you let Real Life get in the way when someone like myself wants this. Guess I'll have to do it all myself! As usual! *sighs* BTW, can someone show me how to move one pixel from the other side of the ship to this side? I know there are tons of tutorials out there and all kinds of stickies full of advice and help. But I cannot be bothered with ackshually taking the time to read all that stuff because I am far too busy doing things and breaking my game repeatedly. Yeah, yeah. I know the people who put all that advice and help together are really trying to get me into modding as painlessly as possible so I do not repeat all the mistakes they made while learning. However
I want that half finished MegaGodShip Right Frakkin' Now!
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It is, because we've seen it all before. And doubtless, we'll see it again in the future. People ought to do things the way Doca Cola and the FLOPs group did them. Or the way Maj and Syf did way back when they first started working on YesterYears
(Sorry, YY still gets me a little fired up, lol).
Make a website so everyone working on the mod has a place to meet and upload stuff to each other.
Then, mod/test everything before saying anything to anyone anywhere.