MCCC and PMM have always had issues with compatibility. Both have similar pregnancy functionality and those tend to not work well together. As such, years back I added a compatiblity warning about PMM in my Troubleshooting documentation stating that users should not use it with MC Pregnancy. At that time, I stated that users should choose one or the other. It was always the user’s choice which to use, but both should not be used at the same time.
Following that, we continued to have over a year of problems where our support team would be helping people who claimed to have issues with MC Pregnancy not working correct only to find that they were using PMM. It was obvious to me the warning in the docs was not enough to verbalize the compatibility problems. Many people never go to the documentation when they are having issues, they come right to the support team so our team continued to spend hours wasted on issues that were not MC Pregnancy but were coming from incompatiblity issues with PMM.
Due to this, around the end of 2017, I added a notification when the game first launches if PMM was detected in the player’s game telling the player that MC Pregnancy would be disabled because it was incompatible with PMM. Note, I did nothing to PMM to prevent it from working when this happened. It has always been my stance that I would not prevent PMM from working if a player had it installed. MC Pregnancy, though, is my mod and I felt it was totally in my right to disable it from working if PMM was running to prevent my support team from wasting all the time they were spending due to these incompatibilities. I still firmly believed and stated that people were free to choose MC Pregnancy or PMM but both would not work. After I implemented this functionality, ArtUrl actively changed code in his mod so MCCC would not detect it running and the notification wouldn’t happen. As such, it didn’t work as well as I had hoped and my team still spent a lot of time on issues that were not from MC Pregnancy.
In December of 2018, ArtUrl posted on Patreon that he had decided to “rewrite MCCC functionality into his own mod”. I never really understood where this decision came from since, other than MC Pregnancy, the rest of MCCC worked perfectly fine with PMM installed. Art 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 from his mod script was copied verbatim into PMM. His name was even still in the script modules used in PMM. Taking non-active mods and updating them yourself is a necessary task for mod developers, and that role that ArtUrl has 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 that cause things to break. I usually release a new version a month in addition to the necessary hotfixes.
ArtUrl has 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 really has a right to legally protect their code. EA technically has all rights when it comes to our mod code. 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. To me, this was a slap in the face 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.”
With that said, I determined I would follow this path going forward. Missing features that are in PMM that are not in MCCC are going to be included in the MCCC modules. If he wants to include all my functionality in his mod, I’ll include these missing features in my modules. 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 will be available 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.
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. Alternatively for users of WickedWhims, there is basically the same version of miscarriage as what is in PMM since that was some of the “rewritten” code mentioned earlier. Also, in the 6.3.0 version of MCCC, I added some functions that other mod developers, like LMS, could use to support the addition of babies lost through miscarriage to still show-up on family trees. This was always a complaint of non-PMM implementations of miscarriage, so now it is available to any mod developer that wants to use it. I have communicated with her about this addition and I believe she will be implementing it in her miscarriage mod at some point going forward. TURBODRIVER also may implement it in the future in his own mod.
I am not adding a mosaic-remover to MCCC. This is a graphic resource that graphic mod 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’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. With this decision to take all of my creativity and experience of my years of coding and “rewriting” it as his own, I am actively changing that. Going forward I will actively prevent any MCCC modules from functioning if PMM is detected in the player’s game. Again, I will not prevent PMM from loading and running if players choose to use it, but with all the PMM functionality included in MCCC, there are even more opportunities for conflicts to occur and for people to come to our support team about issues that are not coming from MCCC. So if MCCC and PMM are both running, MCCC will not load and will not show-up on computers and Sims in the game.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some work is done to block my functionality around this again, and if it does, I will also work actively to fix it again. I feel like a line was crossed in December and this is really my only option since legally I have no alternatives. Thanks for the support!