Is Refinements mod available anywhere?

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Doing a big reinstall and the Refinements mod doesn't appear downloadable from the Refinements site - all the links and mirrors are dead.

Any ideas if it is still obtainable?

 

Try donate 50$ to BWL and then you may be able to grap it from there

 

The refinements site is broken, but please don't go and donate a huge amount to somewhere completely unrelated. ShS lists various mirrors:
http://www.spellholdstudios.net/downloads/#refinements

Alternatively, here's a direct link that works:
http://mirror.spellholdstudios.net/refinements/Refinements-v3.02.exe

 

SHS, the home of the mod, is a good place to get the mod from -- their download site is relatively fast for me at the moment.

As for "somewhere completely unrelated", Dragon's Hoard has always been mirroring Refinements (just like every other big mod), so Shaitan's guess was right. Unfortunately, DHDC is currently offline, but I do hope we will be able to open it soon to provide free and high-speed downloads again for the player community. I would like to say many thanks to everyone, including Shaitan, who supported the re-opening so far.

Once DHDC is up & running again, I will make sure to update the DHDC thread to inform SP members.

 

And it would not hurt to donate to BWL, nevertheless. Even a lousy 1$ helps! There are lots of excellent mods there! (spesifically IA, its new version is the BEST mod for advanced BG2 players, from the things I heard.) And no one can download them till the servers are paid. Last time I checked they needed 90$ more, umm, last week IIRC.

 

While it would be a shame for DHDC to close completely, I think it does a great disservice to the people running other sites who put their own money into providing mod downloads and expect nothing in return when someone comes along and says, "okay, I want to run my own download site... please pay me to do so!"
It's one thing Tal running SP and then offering SPS accounts for some perks on the side, but quite another to say "if you want my mod, you're going to have to pay me to make it available" when there are plenty of other sites who would gladly host the download for free.

 

You don't have to pay Sim. Do you want to host BWL mods??

Well this is not on-topic, so I think we'll have to get beck on track

 

You do if you want to play Improved Anvil.

No, but there's IEGMC, which freely hosts any IE mod (it still solicits donations, but they aren't a requirement in the way that they are here). Sikret could easily send Improved Anvil over to TheWizard to put up there, and the amount of money that changed hands overall would be significantly diminished.
I mean, if you just see it as showing support, that's great. I'll add my address to all my mods so everyone can send me money. (Not really!) I'm just saying that "you HAVE to support us or no mods for you!" doesn't win me over. But you're right about getting back on topic, though, sorry. Angry Ding0 spaz attack over!

 

- sorry had to

 

Nobody is going to make any personal profit out of players' donations to BWL site. Once a player wanted to donate to my personal accout, but I declined. See this post.
BWL site's download page is the fastest and most comprehensive download center. More than one person are responsible for its maintenance and when they say that it requires a server upgrade, they are saying the truth.
Moreover, BWL always accepts to mirror all new mods in free. The site never asks for money in return for the services it offers.
Any one who helps BWL site, helps the entire modding community, for sure.

 

I don't understand SimDing0.

SimDing0, don't you get it? DHDC was overloaded because so many people were interested in it, were downloading tons of files every day. We want to keep the site available to them -- those who are happy with the speeds and services of IEGMC don't donate. I don't understand why is it such a pain in the *** for you that DHDC asks for help. If we had just said: hmm let's host them at IEGMC (provided TheWizard allows it), then all these DHDC visitors could say: "No, I want BWL because it's usually faster, and more user-friendly and so on. I would've donated, why did you give it up, guys?"

I don't understand your principle, Sim. Why do you envy the downloads from those players who want DHDC and not IEGMC?

It has many reasons why IA and other BWL mods can't be mirrored/hosted at IEGMC. Such as the morals and actions of the IEGMC owner, speed and reliability problems, the lack of direct FTP access to update mods etc. But enough of this.
Unfortunately, this topic has already been totally hijacked (so a moderator action is possible at any time), and I don't want to burden Sorcerer's Place with additional replies just because SimDing0 brought up IEGMC and related offtopic things, providing a basis for the topic to be hijacked. SimDing0, please send us a PM if you would like to continue this discussion or anything related, in any other SP topic, not just here. Thank you.

 

Well, thanks for all the help folks.

I didn't mean to raise all this fuss though.

NB: I'd never heard of IEGMC before now, except to note that the direct links to Refinements hosted on IEGMC were broken. Looking closer, I see the mod is mirrored there.

 

G3 mods, at least, are typically mirrored in around half a dozen locations (although admittedly two of these are run by the G3 admin). http://www.gibberlings3.net/downloads/index.php

We hope this means it is always easy to get hold of mods, even when the main site is down.

 

Since you say that this discussion doesn't exceed the limits of this topic, let me clarify a few things to those who are interested.

First of all, we need to distinguish BWL mods and DHDC mods. The latter ones are already mirrored e.g. by IEGMC, and to avoid any misunderstandings, it's not just BWL or myself who wants to keep them -- it just costs us no little money, and no little effort to maintain them. Primarily, the DHDC visitors are those who want the site -- the big number of donations we've got so far reflects this: they want DHDC, not IEGMC.

If we were forced to find a location for our own BWL mods, we wouldn't choose IEGMC for these reasons:
1. There is no FTP access granted for the mod authors, so we couldn't update mods when needed, we would have to wait the IEGMC owner to do it. (Unlike e.g. in case of the mirror we provide to Gibberlings3, where we grant direct FTP access to CamDawg, so he can update mods with new versions instantly.)
2. IEGMC had been very unreliable before IEGMC America was estabilished. The other locations are still slow and one of them isn't even available to anyone except users from London. Sometimes IEGMC is called "better-estabilished" and "bigger" network than DHDC by certain people. It's not my task to judge this, but we wouldn't want our mods to be hosted on a network which consists of randomly "collected" personal/corporate servers, without any legal guarantee of uptime, reliability and speed. We want to offer a guaranteed download site to all players who have faith in us.
3. Based on past experiences, the IEGMC owner can't be considered to be reliable and honest. He is normally a nice and helpful guy, but try to run your own comprehensive download site, and see how he tries to prevent it and mire your reputation with any tool. I don't want to detail this any further because this would exceed the limits of this discussion, and I also don't have time for it.

On a side note, DHDC isn't the only service we would like to help the community with: Community Assets as well as BWL's smaller Resource Centre offers resources to all modders, they are visited by many modders every day.

In spite of these, BWL often receives attacks from several modders, and certain modders try to harm us. This "Don't help DHDC, go to IEGMC instead" attitude shown e.g. by SimDing0 at the moment (but other modders also do similar things) is also one of that. I'm not sure about the exact reason of these attacks and anti-campaigns, but I have a few guesses. Such as BWL not following the modding "mainstream" (i.e. not following what certain popular sites and modders try to dictate), and supporting brave, unusual ideas as well. Despite the fact that a player can play a mod without an other author's incompatible mod, and then during another game he can play the other mod while not installing ours. For example, here is something which can't be believed easily, to those who haven't heard of it yet: a group of modders who don't agree with Sikret's modding techniques, accused Sikret of building in incompatibilities deliberately to Improved Anvil, making undocumented changes to the game, trying to break (!!) others' mods, and so on. One of them is still trying to mislead players with very malicious lies on a certain IE forum, to prevent them from trying or playing Improved Anvil. I ask: why? Rivalry? Envy? Or something else? I may have gone off-topic, but actually I tried to introduce one aspect why BWL and DHDC gets these attacks. (Yes, Sim's not too strong statement in this thread isn't too special; on another IE forum, someone tried to mislead users that from now on, only those can download mods who pay to DHDC, and so on.)

Why can't we all just be in peace? It's about fun, eventually. A hobby.

[ December 16, 2006, 18:29: Message edited by: Baronius ]

 

As usual, that post was really long and I got bored reading when Baronius got to the usual stuff about how BWL is under attack by the evil forces of Ding0 because I'm jealous of something or other. (SP readers should of course be aware by now that I'm horrible to everybody indiscriminately and reserve no special treatment for his site. ) All I'm saying is that given the choice between "spending money on mods" and "not spending money on mods", my choice lies with the latter.

I'm also with Andy in that I like wide exposure and reliable mirrors for my mods. The problem is, as Baronius himself notes, it's not easy to keep things up to date without FTP access, and having released some disasterously bad stuff in the past, I'm always very wary of old versions lurking in unpleasent places. This isn't such a problem when approached from the mod homepage, because I can always keep the latest version prominently displayed, but given that some people will just fire up DHDC or whatever and download a ton of stuff without visitng the mod homepages, I feel that there's a risk of old versions getting out that I don't suffer by only maintaining one mirror. It's not really anything to do with any sort of daft "community pride".

 

Actually, DHDC treats this problem better than IEGMC. DHDC maintainers update mods with new versions by default, but if an author or a group of authors specifically requests own access, DHDC grants it. (IEGMC doesn't offer any modder access at all.) For example, Gibberlings Three mods, available on DHDC, are updated by CamDawg (and those who he gave the login details) directly. In the past, we offered a direct mirror to other sites as well which had no dedicated server (Chosen of Mystra, Pocketplane Group), which they refused.

Actually, it's not about you at all. You're just one person who often participates in such things, but there are many more who have hostile feelings towards BWL, in spite of the fact BWL never caused any harm to them. Usually, this either roots in BWL's conservative guidelines (no obscene speech, no spamming, no my-bicycle-pet-anime-uncle avatars), or in BWL's tendency to support modders who have original, innovative ideas which don't fit the expectations and standards of the (self-styled) modder "Kings" (word taken from a player's comment on an IE modding forum).

 

This is untrue. In fact, I extended the invitation to mirror my mods, but it seemed to get drowned out in talk about donations.

A bold claim! Every community I know of fosters original ideas. I think what you're trying to say is that you won't criticize modders doing daft things when other sites would. Vlad is putting no-CD cracks in his Baldurdash package. I'm pretty sure any other hosting site would have words over this, since it's clearly stupid, but BlackWyrm supports the original, innovative idea!

 

I have already collected a collection of "lies" an false things someone has said about Improved Anvil in SHS forums. No, he's not SimDing(0). Sim has also said some false things about my mod in the past to discourage players, but the person I was referring to is different and has said much worse lies and baseless things. For example, once he wrote that Sikret adds codes to Improved Anvil to deliberately break other mods, which is a disgusting lie, to say the least. I won't mention the person's name here, but I'm almost sure that he is mentally sick (to say the least).

How am I supposed to allow such people (or those others who know that these people say such lies but still support them) to mirror or host my mods?! I have not lost my wit to that extent yet.

I think DHDC will fortunately start to work again in the near future and players will be able to download my mods again, but even if it was to be closed forever, I would not leave my mods into such unreliable hands. I would either transfer them to this site (Sorcerer's Place) or I would rather make them available at my own personal site.

 

Last time I checked, Improved Anvil did break item upgrade (then again, the last time I checked was version 2)......


EDIT: Yes, yes, some of the upgrades from IU would disallow the use of similar upgrades from IA, (and vice versa) but that is hardly a reason to (purposely or not) code your mod to be incompatible with it when it is perfectly possible to code it so the mods work together just fine.