Topic: Make Menu only for Modded items = saving BAC and other large mods  (Read 16491 times)


Sami

  • UnReal World creator
  • Administrator
  • Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1268
  • Total likes: 3175
  • UnReal World creator
    • View Profile
    • UnReal World
« Reply #30 on: May 30, 2024, 11:39:32 AM »
Ok, so I want to address the "small bunch", and take it as you will. Modders are definitely a minority, and in some games those who use mods are also a majority.

Thank you for joining the converstation. Now firstly, like Erkka I'm also really confused why and how the small bunch gets people's attention. What I wrote was:
"In any case, separate menu seems to get support from this small bunch of thread participants."

I was referencing solely to how many people had participated in the conversation, as the wish was and still is for more opinions the better. There's no reference to the number of players, modders, downloads, cat owners or horse lovers, or whatever ;) - but just to the number of the thread participants. Had to clarify this first because it seem I may have been misunderstood.
(If we release a patch describing the content with terms like; few improvements to this-and-that, small additions regarding this-and-that, fisful of fixes here and there, etc. nobody jumps up the walls saying "what! just small additions and only fistful of fixes!")

Quote
This really isn't just a conversation about BAC, it's a question of how can we make the CREATION of mods easier and also make the USE of mods easier, to extend the playtime of the average player, isn't it?

Yes, I agree, the probable changes should be prone to inclusive thinking considering the modding as a whole.
And dearly hope this viewpoint has become clear also from my replies thorough the tread.

Quote
I agree that it doesn't solve all ills, but it seems like a good relatively low cost option compared with the alternatives and better design ideas (like having an item identifier system that allows preloading/overlapping/replacement as stated). Is it a good use of developer time? Well that's a question I think we'll disagree on, but I think the potential improvement to the average player engagement time might be worth it, not just for BAC and current mods, but for future users making new mods that may be easier to maintain and therefore longer lived. Things like BAC do not occur commonly in a lot of larger modding communities because of how difficult it becomes to maintain, so any barrier is a problem.

Well, the actual cost of additions, be it solely on time investment, is quite hard to define from outside the development chambers - and defining the average player is also quite tricky. ;) Those aside identifying of the overlapping mod entries (from separate mods tweaking the same items) is pretty much mandatory from my point of view, as and for the reasons described in the earlier replies.
Also, we have to constantly prioritize things and juggle with several different to-do branches and lists, and sometimes certain section of the game development gets frozen until another section is finished, so fear not if it comes up that things have to be considered carefully as the time and resources are limited. This has been the case long before modding even was introduced.

Quote
You're also likely not going to get a TON of interaction on this thread because a) a lot of people are interested but don't know enough to contribute to the discussion, even some modders since modding here is so simple they don't need to know any programming at all, and b) people ebb and flow to this game, picking it up and putting it down often so the number of active people isn't always high, I tend to look only when there's an update and if I like it I play it for a few months and I know others do to. Something to consider.

Heh, tons of interaction is not necessary, but I'm happy for you pitching in as well - and for everyone who took time to bring up their two cents or things of importance.
- Sami | UnReal World creator

Senthe

« Reply #31 on: August 17, 2024, 02:19:26 AM »
If the probable modders are counted in hundreds the players are nowadays counted in tens of thousands.

...And has it never occured to you why the community currently looks like that?

The current modding system is practically never getting updated, unfriendly, unwieldy, awfully incomplete, disregarded and just... not good.
No wonder the mod-liking part of the playerbase is being continously deterred from modding URW. I'd say it's impressive that BAC was ever implemented and maintained for so long despite seemingly zero effort from the base game dev cycle towards its general feasibility.

I never used BAC, I don't like it. However there are numerous mods I would most certainly use, if not for the fact that this game doesn't support them at all, and therefore nobody could've ever implemented them if they wanted.

Please reconsider the priority you assign to this overarching problem. So many games thrive largely thanks to their modding communities, and I don't just mean modern games, I also mean old classic games made eternal (like Heroes of Might and Magic III, or Gothic II, or old Infinity Engine games).

I don't see what could possibly be a downside of giving player more tools so that they can develop more content for your game that you perhaps don't have time to add or didn't come up with so far.
(Unless you literally don't want them to. Which would be fair, but for me personally pretty sad.)
« Last Edit: August 18, 2024, 02:51:35 AM by Senthe »

TheyCallMeSibs

« Reply #32 on: August 17, 2024, 12:58:06 PM »
Huh?
Of course, I also wish we could mod everything, but the fact that we have a developed modding language for recipes, cooking, building and plants that gets expanded every patch or two with new features (when they are implemented globally) is not nothing.

For an indie game of one to two devs, which is in a self built engine, what we have is honestly remarkable. 

Senthe

« Reply #33 on: August 17, 2024, 07:24:25 PM »
For an indie game of one to two devs, which is in a self built engine, what we have is honestly remarkable. 

(That's a complete tangent, but since it seems relevant to what you said, it so happens that I'm developing an indie game in a two-person team right now. I'm not comparing my work to maintaining a 30-years old project on a custom ancient engine, it's obviously completely different and my problems are way easier than what Sami has to deal with. But let's just say I'm not someone who's ignorant to the reality of indie dev either.)

Of course, I also wish we could mod everything, but the fact that we have a developed modding language for recipes, cooking, building and plants that gets expanded every patch or two with new features (when they are implemented globally) is not nothing.

I try to be just direct, buy perhaps I've come off as too harsh. Of course that's not "nothing", it's very far from it. :)

I'm just trying to say that as long as the modding system isn't updated/improved further, it will remain impossible to mod a ton of things that aren't insignificant. For example to add new, or modify (in random order):

- biomes/terrain/map gen
- weather
- animals/enemies
- cultures
- NPC behaviours
- UI elements/keybindings
- sound effects/music
- quests
- rituals
- buildings/structures
- special events/spawns
- starting scenarios
etc.

IMHO it doesn't matter much if there is an entire player-friendly language that makes modding things like that easier. It can be complicated and only understandable to the most insane and determined wizards out there ;). Having any API for it would go a long way though, vs not having it at all.

As a sidenote, there's also no save edit tools or console commands. And they could come very handy for players who want to alter their world to e.g. create an additional challenge or roleplay opportunity ("spawn 10 aggressive wolves nearby as a punishment from the spirits for all my murders"), fix a bug ("delete this bugged item and give me a new non-bugged one"), or take back a weird immersion-breaking mistake they made ("oops my finger slipped and now I accidentally set fire to my heap of furs").

TheyCallMeSibs

« Reply #34 on: August 17, 2024, 11:47:55 PM »
No worries about being direct :)
Yeah, of course it would be nice to have access to the files to mod all these things.
But we both know that writing a full-access API or even exposing the game files of a game with 30 years of dev history and a port or two takes incredible amounts of work. And if I'm honest, I'm not sure the average player would prefer the Devs to spend a year or so refactoring and exposing everything instead of their normal updates.

On another note, I'd be very disappointed if I could dig through the files and figure out how the spirits work, for example. Some things are nice to keep mysterious.

Sami

  • UnReal World creator
  • Administrator
  • Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 1268
  • Total likes: 3175
  • UnReal World creator
    • View Profile
    • UnReal World
« Reply #35 on: August 19, 2024, 02:58:38 PM »
I try to be just direct, buy perhaps I've come off as too harsh. Of course that's not "nothing", it's very far from it. :)

I'm just trying to say that as long as the modding system isn't updated/improved further, it will remain impossible to mod a ton of things that aren't insignificant. For example to add new, or modify (in random order):

- biomes/terrain/map gen
- weather
- animals/enemies
- cultures
- NPC behaviours
- UI elements/keybindings
- sound effects/music
- quests
- rituals
- buildings/structures
- special events/spawns
- starting scenarios
etc.

IMHO it doesn't matter much if there is an entire player-friendly language that makes modding things like that easier. It can be complicated and only understandable to the most insane and determined wizards out there ;). Having any API for it would go a long way though, vs not having it at all.

Just a quick remark here, I've brought it up many times since the early days of modding capabilities that as a developer I'm more interested to develop the game than a modding engine/script. I think it repeat myself with this at least annually. As we speak the dev. plans list has no more modding goals added, even though impromevents sometimes come along.  Even though it would be super great to have super capable modding possibilities to create a world of your own - with quests, scenarios, terrain, rituals, and all that - that's just not going to be the case with UnReal World.  There are games that are crazy moddable, with that sort of deliberately chosen path of development from the start, and it's great - but it's also a different path of game development. I've got a different approach here. It's not news. And if the limited moddability is a restriction to roam the unreal world one can always pour their modding energy in the games that allow all their modding desires. There are games like that out there, a plenty of them, and good ones too.
- Sami | UnReal World creator

Senthe

« Reply #36 on: August 19, 2024, 10:54:11 PM »
Just a quick remark here, I've brought it up many times since the early days of modding capabilities that as a developer I'm more interested to develop the game than a modding engine/script. I think it repeat myself with this at least annually. As we speak the dev. plans list has no more modding goals added, even though impromevents sometimes come along.  Even though it would be super great to have super capable modding possibilities to create a world of your own - with quests, scenarios, terrain, rituals, and all that - that's just not going to be the case with UnReal World.  There are games that are crazy moddable, with that sort of deliberately chosen path of development from the start, and it's great - but it's also a different path of game development. I've got a different approach here. It's not news. And if the limited moddability is a restriction to roam the unreal world one can always pour their modding energy in the games that allow all their modding desires. There are games like that out there, a plenty of them, and good ones too.

Thanks for clarifying, apologies if I'm making you repeat yourself - it's hard to keep up with such a huge project and everything that's being said on the forums over the years.

I'm all for respecting dev's vision for their game, so if that's your path then there's nothing else to do or say I guess.

I just want you to know that as a player, I speak from a place of appreciation of URW's uniqueness rather than wanting it to be the same as every other generic survival game. It's special, and so I want it to be more moddable from a purely selfish perspective, to experience more of it. I don't have modding desires, I have playing-more-vanilla-adjacent-modded-content desires if you wish. I hope that makes sense. Anyways, I trust your decisions are what's best for the game. So I'll just do what I've been doing for the last couple years and wait for next patches. :)


 

anything