Is it useless at this time to create mods?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I know development continue for core game, so this is not critique of development. Do not take it that way.

 

My question is if it is better to wait on making mods for this game. Right now because of all the changes probably 50% of my modding time is fixing thing to be compatible with new core game changes. I feel like I am wasting my time. If I had critique of official team it would be to ask why they put the effort to support modding so early in the development. But can't undo that of courese, lol.  

 

I don't post this to discourage, but I think modder need to understand what thy are getting into. Stick with graphical mods for now if you do not want to spend a LOT of time keeping track of game changes and monkeying around in Notepad++. Just one commit from core team can set you back a hour or more.

[sanderd17]

I can understand it's hard work when you're making a mod that doesn't only add features (like adding a new civ), but also modifies features. Certainly modifying templates currently means that you have to copy a lot of data over, and keep the things you want unchanged synched with the main game.

I hope we can find some solution for #4076 soonish, which would certainly help maintainability of mods by reducing the amount of data that has to be copied from the start.

So I agree that modders need to know what they're getting into, but it's only thanks to modders that we know what's still lacking in our game wrt moddability. So we really appreciate your effort and the effort of other modders.

PS. if a single commit sets you back an hour or more, it's likely someone on our side also worked an hour or more on related data changes. Ofc, our team is a bit bigger, so I agree it's harder for modders.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Yeah, I am not critique the team's work. A lot of things will change between now and beta and thing will change with beta too. I was just voicing my frustration and I would like modders to know how much things will change. For instance, all of the line endings in all of the template files in the game were recently change, lol. I know it might not be a critical thing to maintain for my mod, but it could easily have been something critical that take many hours to sync(if it was something I had to do manual). I just want modder to know this and plan according to these probabilities. Tooltips deleted, so have to go back through and elet your own tooltips, things like this, that are ultimately good changes, but take a lot of time and effort.

Edited July 1, 2016 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[Lion.Kanzen]

Probably the solution is get more team members to acces your mod code, and the excessive gameplay differences.

I like those differences but you need keep updated to work under SVN.

[niektb]

This is actually a very nice page to keep track of changes that might break your mod: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Alpha21 (it lags a few days behind though)

[sanderd17]

When we reach a more stable state (like beta), we should make such a page specifically for modders though. F.e. stating what schemas changed in what way, or listing changes to our engine that depreciate old component code.

[Karamel]

I am currently trying to figure out a solution for #4076, there would be too much to do on Sibyllae Vox too after each new release if I can't/don't update frequently. Appart from errors with new/removed tags in templates, it would sad to miss some art enhancements with new models or sounds for example.

Before posting a proposal on the ticket, I'm trying to figure out how to do, to find what could work and what won't and discover some side effects. http://creativekara.fr/doku.php?id=0adsv:merge#extend_a_template_from_an_other_mod

 

By the way an other obstacle for mods is (at least for me) is the lack of players and probably the "hard" thing of finding and installing a mod (for a non technician nor involved member). Just as a idea on the fly, could it be possible for certain mods to follow the release process (feature freeze, commit freeze, release) to include a working version of some active mods right in the main data (I'm thinking about mainly Delenda Est, Ponies Ascendant, Millenium A.D. and Sibyllae Vox, sorry if I miss someone, I haven't checked every one)? I know it would require some big work for modders to follow the schedule and for team members for validation, keeping track of who is ready and tracking packaging in a period that is already time-stressing for the whole team.

[Stan`]

In the council of modders at least, when we make a release we follow the process. So do you mean do it at the same time of the releases ?

I think that mods should be downloadble from the main game, not necesserally bundled with it.

[sphyrth]

Modding is very frustrating, but not useless at all. Kudos to the core team for making your engine modifiable, and kudos to the modders who put it to great uses.

The only thng I could suggest to Modders is that you stick to an Alpha that you're comfy with.

[Stan`]

@sphyrth I think that'd be dumb, else a few mods that still exist today would be dead, because unplayable and unmaintaneable ^^

[sphyrth]

Fair enough. I never modded myself so I didn't actually know what I was talking about. Moving targets are a real frustration for modders, but I still don't think it's really useless to do so.

[Stan`]

@sphyrth well it's true they are and we lost a few people along the way (@agentx if you hear me), but it gives new abilities to people, see @niektb who was recently recognized as a team artist  And also we find bugs more often cause we are fiddling with the code ^^ 

[Karamel]

19 hours ago, stanislas69 said:

In the council of modders at least, when we make a release we follow the process. So do you mean do it at the same time of the releases ?

I think that mods should be downloadble from the main game, not necesserally bundled with it.

If the release process from the mods and the regular game are done at the same time, there could be a release for the mods that is ready to be shipped with the game, so that even if you don't know how to install a mod, you know it exists and can play it and discover a few things.

That said some features may be missing not to add a big mess, like preventing players to start a multiplayer game without the same mods activated (which would cause a big out of sync error at startup and people thinking the game does not work). And if the modders are not reactive enough, some mods may skip an alpha or two and that's a big mess too.

[Stan`]

@Karamel agreed some mods could definitely be bundled into release, IE ROTE, cause unless the games breaks compatibility with entities, there is no reason not to do it. ROTE is a special case though, they were plans to include it into the main game... but someone correct me if I'm wrong that didn't happen, because we need to showcase mods potentials.

Now I think your, and @wowgetoffyourcellphone's mods are special, since they are likely to break at each release sometime contain code that is not reviewed by devs, and I still believe that their main goal eventually is to improve the main game, so the changes should be included, not bundled, don't know if I'm clear on that one.

Now I don't think a mod not being bundled for this or that reason is gonna cause issues, as long as mods bundled stay mods, and don't become part of the game. I think, each release could have ONE mod highlight to give visibility to it, and not bundle all it can.

 

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Mod Selection screen can have "browse online mods" button that load a list of approved mods compatible with release orr something like this.

[sanderd17]

Sure, we can start with having a wiki page where everyone can put his mods.

If someone here starts such a page, it should be easy to add a button linking to it.

[av93]

Something like a pop-up window that minimize the game? Seems a good and easy way until a in-game repo

[sanderd17]

We already have such buttons to "Translate the game" or "Report a bug". That's why I know such a button would be easy

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

4 hours ago, sanderd17 said:

We already have such buttons to "Translate the game" or "Report a bug". That's why I know such a button would be easy

I was think in-game browser, but your idea can be easy stand-in until (maybe) browser added.

[sanderd17]

We certainly won't write a complete html engine in the game (even including one as a dependency would already be a big job). At most, we can generate a gui from data in the mod.json, even for mods that aren't downloaded yet. And a webpage could also be generated from that data.

[Stan`]

@sanderd17

Can't we use the Js engine to dowload mods ? 

Or execute a python script ?

[niektb]

I suppose that we could bundle mod.json files with the game of some 'approved' mods. They should be marked as downloadable and with a button that opens the download page in a browser. Now that doesn't solve possible installation difficulties but it does give some additional attention to mods... 

[Lion.Kanzen]

Con be nice, work in some   layout, based in similar needs.

[sanderd17]

@stanislas69, we're talking about an intermediate solution here: showing a button to a webpage that has a list of mods.

To improve moddability further, the first thing we need to do is make an installer: the player downloads the mod from that page, opens it with 0 A.D. and the mod gets installed. Instead of manually following a process of unzipping and copying files.

Only after that, the in-game gui can be expanded to allow downloads directly from the game.

That button can get included against by the next release (if the modders want to make and maintain such a page on our wiki), the other tasks will cost too much work to be included in the next release.