New Year Update (Patreon)

As of mid-December, ArtURL has decided to "rewrite" all MCCC functionality to use within his own mod.  I have quotes around the "rewrite" part of that as he has had the reputation in the past, of straight copy/pasting other developers code into his own mod and I feel like that is his definition of "rewriting".  TURBODRIVER from Wicked Whims is very familiar with this reputation as code for his miscarriage functionality was copied verbatim into PMM.  Taking non-active mods and updating them yourself is a necessary task for mod developers, and that role that he's filled for some mods is not the problem.  MCCC is very active.  I'm one of the first developers to do bug-fixes after EA does updates to break things.  I usually release a new version a month.

He's always claimed that legally, people don't do anything to protect their code so he has every right to do this "rewriting".  This is really just a justification for stealing other people's ideas as NOBODY in the mod world has a right to legally protect their code.  EA owns all mod code.  We have no rights when it comes to it.  We can't legally protect it even if we wanted to.  So yes, legally he is right, we are not protecting our code.  But this is less of a legal question and more of a moral question, to me, and morally it seems like he's fine with taking other people's intellectual property.

In the past versions of the Sims, there have been multiple "big mods" that allow players to change their world/story progression.  With the Sims 3, it was Twallan's Master Controller and AwesomeMod.  This is a very good example of two people with similar game-changing mods that have their own ideas and implement them in different ways.  To me, this is great!  Players have choices on which they want to use based on which one does which that they like.  The author of one of these mods did not just take all of the ideas from the other author and make their own version of the same functionality.  They had their own ideas and implemented them.  To me, it's a slap in the face for someone to say, "I'm just going to take all of DP's design and code-work for the last 3 years and use it in my own mod."

All that said, here's what I'm doing.  Missing features that are in PMM that are not in MCCC are going to be included.  If he wants to include all my functionality in his mod, I'll include his functionality in my mod.  I have been fine not including these features in the past as they were available from other mods and I like the players to have more choices in these matters, but again, I feel like I don't have a lot of options at this point.  These new features are coming to all of my users free of charge, just like all of my releases.  There are no "new goals" in Patreon or anything like that for me to do this.  All users of MCCC will get the missing features as part of MC Pregnancy and other modules.  It will be coming soon, as well.  I would imagine that all of these features will be in 6.1.0 or 6.2.0 at the latest.

Here's my planned list based on what I see I would need to add for parity:

• Teleport a Sim to selected Sim
• Pause Active Sim Pregnancy
• Pause all pregnancies in the game.
• Add/Remove buffs (Clear all moods/buffs from a Sim)
• In MCCC Relationships where a spouse can be defined for a Sim, I will allow multiple spouses to be defined if "Allow Polygamy" is enabled in MC Woohoo.  The Sims 4 allows multiple spouses to be defined through relationships, but in the core game's scripts when it asks for a Sim' spouse, it always returns only the latest spouse.  That's the way the core code has always worked with polygamy, though.
• Add a Divorce Sim Command to immediately break-up two married Sims.
• When changing to a career and then back again, player Sims will retain their previous career level.
• Change club member size.
• If there's a desire for the feature, I can add random pregnancy mood buffs that happen through-out pregnancy.  These can be turned on or off and a time can be set for how long in Sim time between mood changes.  With this functionality, the player would also be able to add one of these buffs to pregnant Sims if they want to alter the current pregnancy mood.

I am still not adding miscarriages to MC Pregnancy.  LMS has an excellent version of Miscarriage implemented with many options and buffs and is much better thought-out than anything I would do so I highly encourage people to use that mod over me trying to add something of my own: LMS Miscarriage Mod.

I am not adding a mosaic-remover to MCCC.  This is a graphic resource that graphic developers have created.  I'm not going to drag their resource into my package files just so their functionality is included in my mod, even though I did nothing in the creation of this functionality.  It's wrong.  I won't cross that line.  There are many versions of this freely available and, since they are graphic resources, they very rarely if ever break and need updating.

I am open to adding any other functionality in PMM that is not on the list above if it is not already available in the core game or MCCC.  Based on my understanding by reading the PMM docs on the features, the list above is what I currently do not have in MCCC that is in PMM that fill any gaps of missing features.  I could have always missed something, though.

I've always taken the high-road with Art and have actively encouraged users to choose PMM over MC Pregnancy if they liked the PMM functionality more.  MCCC itself has worked fine with PMM instead of MC Pregnancy.  With this decision to take all of my creativity and experience of three years of coding and "rewriting" it as his own, I am actively changing that.  

I will no longer let MCCC and PMM be compatible.  I have only blocked MC Pregnancy from running in the past when PMM runs because they directly conflict.  This was done intentionally to give players the choice on which they wanted to use.  With Art's choices, I am having to reconsider my open-mindedness and do this instead.  I know that he can just change his code so my code blocking will temporarily not work, but I will actively change my code as well each time he does.  It's not how I want to spend my time, and it's time that I should be spending on adding new features, but I don't feel like I have any alternatives from a moral standpoint.

Asking for donations from people for mod-work taken from other developers' intellectual property has always been a morally grey area that Art seems to have no problem living within.  That's his choice and he doesn't seem to have any problems sleeping at night with that decision.  All I can do is take a stance on it, myself, in whatever small way I can do.

Thanks, and happy new year to us all!  :)