Developers are Anti-Modding (Full Version)

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MH-60Deuce -> Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 7:46:38 AM)

After one year we are still kept from doing mods for the game and only allowed to do visual modding and need to go along with the slow development without being allowed to add/customize content on our own.

Sooner or later this game will start to die and by that time there will be nobody around anymore to do mods or to keep the games alive. That is what also happened to the previous titles.

Donīt be so afraid that modders may take your ideas away. This would be a win win sutation for everybody but perhaps it is already late as much attention is gone and many talents left already because of this restrictions and they missed the opportunity again



Nsf665 -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 9:40:59 AM)

I'd think its more complex than that.
Vic stated number of times, he is not against modding, but the game is hardcoded?(I am not quoting him).
If he is for visual modding I dont think he would have anything against modding the game itself.

I would say this is more of an "aurora 4x" kind of thing. Where Steve was anti-modding because he would have to patch stuff which wasn't coming from his build...

If I remember correctly Vic said, the game will be moddable at some point, he just have to prepare it for the modding.

quote:

Sooner or later this game will start to die

but sooner or later, everything will die[:)]
right now, SE is far from dying I think



eddieballgame -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 11:24:55 AM)

It will be a year on June 4th.
I, too, look forward to when modding is allowed.
Admittedly, however, this is one game that has not needed it for me to date.
As is, this game will be good for years to come.



Twotribes -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 12:06:51 PM)

I would guess the op never played advanced Tactics Gold.



BlueTemplar -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 1:54:44 PM)

I guess that it's mostly that it takes some effort to properly take the various values "hardcoded" in the source files and put them into easily-modded text files ?

It is indeed concerning that there still (seems to be ?) no modding capabilities for the various game values. Taking Factorio as an example, Wube already started working on serious modding capabilities a mere 4 months after the first public alpha release (And I guess that modifying values was possible even earlier ?)
The longer until there are full-blown modding capabilities, the higher the risk that we never get them...

But then AFAIK Wube was already a multi-person team when they launched their Indiegogo crowdfunding. And Factorio had much more popular potential than SE will probably ever have (complexity !)
And 1 year is not *that* much time - it took 7.5 years for Factorio to go from that first public alpha to 1.0 !

And I indeed don't know anything about the previous VR games : did Advanced Tactics Gold have values modding right from the start, or was it added later ?




Nsf665 -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 2:50:53 PM)

quote:

Wube was already a multi-person team


This.
Even though, single person started the development at first.
Still, its a completely different game I think. I don't really know how long Vic was working on SE,
He stated even in interview, that he was working on it for a lot of years.
When one has a vision, he wants to execute that vision first, and doesn't look much on other stuff he could do (modding modules).
There are many, even big games, which don't have modding capabilities.
Personally I'm super happy with the game as it is, even more that I'm allowed to make visual changes,
but I know there are folks who wanted to mod the game almost day 1 to wh40k and others.



Vic -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 3:07:21 PM)

Doing the S&S editors is on my to-do list. It might be a couple of months though before I can get them to beta.

S&S= Stratagem and Story

I do want to experiment with opening parts of the game up. But as some above said, it is not that easy for this game to do.

best wishes,
Vic



zgrssd -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 3:27:29 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: MH-60Deuce

After one year we are still kept from doing mods for the game and only allowed to do visual modding and need to go along with the slow development without being allowed to add/customize content on our own.


How about you join the Beta. And then realize how ludicrously false the statement "slow development" was.
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4824133

Seriously, I wish he would chill a bit or at least fix that persistent "needs new savegame" issues. Having to start a new game every other beta/every week for new stuff is starting to get tiring.
But it is a good kind of being tired [:)]



ernieschwitz -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 3:49:22 PM)

quote:

Sooner or later this game will start to die and by that time there will be nobody around anymore to do mods or to keep the games alive. That is what also happened to the previous titles.


The previous titles were all very modable. There was an editor for each of them. So if they are "dead", not being modable was not one of the reasons. :)



newageofpower -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 4:13:08 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: ernieschwitz

The previous titles were all very modable. There was an editor for each of them. So if they are "dead", not being modable was not one of the reasons. :)
Modability extending the life/popularity of a game requires a critical mass in popularity in the first place.

I think Vic knows SE is his breakout.



BlueTemplar -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 5:10:28 PM)

Ah, also relevant, a FFF one year after Wube started working on improved modding capabilities :
https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-25
quote:


[...]
The big part of the work on the modding capabilities of Factorio was done during the days we were unsure about the its future. Working on something that could be used to extend the game that we were not sure anyone would play at all was looking useless. Hopefully we are still here, and new mods are arising. Some of the mods are simple but useful, like the TIme buttons, that is patching the lack of time speed configuration in-game, some are just tempting to be used because of the pictures, like Mocombat, for people that found the production chains not complex enough, there are the content-based mods like Dy tech, F-Mod and more. The growing variety of mods can only exist because modders pushed us to extend the moddability regulary and it proved more than once, that the extended interface was handy to have later even in the core Factorio, not mentioning that mods are also great incubators for new ideas that could grow into the vanilla game. So after all, we rate the time invested on modabbility to be well spent.
[...]



Mina -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 5:46:31 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: MH-60Deuce

After one year we are still kept from doing mods for the game and only allowed to do visual modding and need to go along with the slow development without being allowed to add/customize content on our own.

Sooner or later this game will start to die and by that time there will be nobody around anymore to do mods or to keep the games alive. That is what also happened to the previous titles.

Donīt be so afraid that modders may take your ideas away. This would be a win win sutation for everybody but perhaps it is already late as much attention is gone and many talents left already because of this restrictions and they missed the opportunity again


You're a moron.

Nobody is being forbidden to create anything other than visual mods, there just isn't any support for modding in general, which given the nature of the game's engine and its one man dev team is not trivial to add in after the fact. Asset swapping and editing is just one of the simpler things to do in games broadly.

I want to know where you're coming from that makes a leap to "Vic is anti-modding and afraid people are going to steal his ideas" a sensible train of thought. It's going to be a stupid place but it's always worth trying to unpack things rather than throw the whole suitcase away.



Mina -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/2/2021 6:03:01 PM)

The idea that modding support is a necessity for long-term communities also flies in the face of games that still have significant modding communities in the total absence of any tools or documentation to do so. Mods get created when people want to create them, and official support is not a requirement for that to happen.



Nagabaron -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/3/2021 5:22:19 PM)

The issue is the game doesn't support any modding at all except some visual, graphical mods. It's currently locked.

I'm hoping that the entire game is moddable so I can mod it for my overhaul Fallout mod but I'm not optimistic the entire game will be available, ever.

I hope the scenario is open sometime this year but I don't think Vic is "anti modding". I think he just didn't anticipate that people would want to mod this game completely with such enthusiasm. But modding does keep games going for years and people are underestimating that here. I think its a small oversight and if he does decide to rectify it, I would go forward with my overhaul, that would be awesome.



newageofpower -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/3/2021 5:49:31 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: Mina

The idea that modding support is a necessity for long-term communities also flies in the face of games that still have significant modding communities in the total absence of any tools or documentation to do so. Mods get created when people want to create them, and official support is not a requirement for that to happen.

Reverse engineering hardcoded games without tools is *really really hard*. Games that have:

1. No official mod support
2. Obsfucated/spaghetti code

Do not get mods unless they're able attract high tier codemonkeys invest hundreds of man-hours into reverse engineering.

As someone who once worked with the RogueTech team before, one of them said "this is like sticking forks into a socket and seeing if twisting it gets what we want... And trying again and again."

Problem is, small games are less likely, simply by raw probability% to attract talented expert codemonkeys to throw away hundreds of their very valuable hours. So small games rarely get lots of mods unless they're very open architecture or have official support.

And as a big of a success Shadow Empire has been for Vic, it's still a small game.



OrnluWolfjarl -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/4/2021 1:16:04 PM)

I understand that implementing mod support takes quite some effort. I don't mind waiting, and I don't think this game will die out. The game is already quite popular among grand strategy and 4X communities. The people who play these kinds of games usually stick around for a long long time, and even if they leave, they will hear about the game having mod support and return to experiment with mods.

I do wish that Vic would make visual modding easier, by lifting the restrictions on the number of images that can be contained in a folder. For example, it's crazy that we only get 34 flag emblems and if we want to add more, we need to replace them with the old ones.



zgrssd -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/4/2021 2:54:01 PM)


quote:

ORIGINAL: OrnluWolfjarl

I understand that implementing mod support takes quite some effort. I don't mind waiting, and I don't think this game will die out. The game is already quite popular among grand strategy and 4X communities. The people who play these kinds of games usually stick around for a long long time, and even if they leave, they will hear about the game having mod support and return to experiment with mods.

I do wish that Vic would make visual modding easier, by lifting the restrictions on the number of images that can be contained in a folder. For example, it's crazy that we only get 34 flag emblems and if we want to add more, we need to replace them with the old ones.

I am surprised there is such a limit. There is no reason to have one when loading files from a folder. Usually it is just "give me all files of a specific ending, loop over them to load them".
My best guess is that the Flag selection UI was only designed to handle ~34 (extra) flags. So he would have to change the UI to support it, wich can be troublesome.



Daza99 -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/5/2021 12:52:21 AM)

My 2 cents. It would make sense to mod this game when it is finished, if Vic overhauls some aspects of the game in future like he has with logistics for example then that could throw a spanner in the works for someone working on a mod. If a whole lot of people jump on the mod bandwagon then he will have to try extra hard not to break their mods or at least deal with pressure of complaints about changes that affects modders having to rework their mods from scratch as well or for the most part. Also he would have to update any modding tools he makes to fit any overhauls and bug fix that, whilst at the same time trying to roll out new features. So he spends less time working on the game. Makes more sense to turn to modding when the game is 98-100% done. Even as a player installing a mod that breaks every few weeks is annoying, so players eventually wait until the game is stable enough and the mod can be played in a stable state for a long time.



MH-60Deuce -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (3/15/2021 4:40:06 PM)

quote:

ORIGINAL: OrnluWolfjarl
they will hear about the game having mod support and return to experiment with mods.

I hope this will become true



arvcran2 -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (4/7/2021 11:36:15 PM)

The difficulty with opening up to allow mods is it also restricts what changes can be made to the base game in terms of effort to be compatible V market pressure (fan base) wanting the significant mods to remain functional and relevant. It also opens doors to cheating for the multiplayer enabled games.



zgrssd -> RE: Developers are Anti-Modding (4/8/2021 4:57:34 AM)

Vic strongly hinted that he is working on a Scenario Editor as the the current major project.

Hopefully next beta, but might be a lot longer.



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