Decline Mods could be much better

[SCO]

Topic was inspired by raging about Shadowrun Hong Kong and how it 'hides' the import character function the engine has behind a editor toggle because it simply won't work (items, cyberware missing etc).

And how if you create a custom item on Dragonfall, you have to replace a original game item for it to show on vendors and it will still not show on Hong Kong even if you place the file in the same places, any character import would lose the item - because the Dragonfall content pack is not there/is in a different location.

• 'game made for mods' that is actually trying to self-contain all content into a separate 'campaigns' and places a obstacle if you try to use content from one in another (import a character with items etc). Ex: Neverwinter Nights, all the new Shadowrun games, the user made Bloodlines mod loader etc.
  
• 'game made for mods' that tries to import all mods into the main campaign (eg: Bethesda games, Infinity Engine) and then doesn't bother to provide a programatically way to append or prepend script functions and data tables, or have a inbuilt expert system so the community can have a way to detail incompatibilities without doing it themselves.

Seems like every game holds a piece of the puzzle and no company bothers to put it together 'cause it's too much work' and 'not required to sell'. WEIDU Infinity Engine came closest to mod nirvana. A game engine where almost all of the rules were tabular, the scripts and conversations, linear and thus every table, every conversation node, every trap trigger every item could have behavior added or removed or changed with generalized script oriented programing. Only thing missing really is code changing behavior (ie: aspect oriented programming approaches not only to scripts - though you can get very far with that with many scripts hooks to the game engine).

Fuck this is a engine and user added programing language (WEIDU) that allowed people to hook into the 'tried to steal hook' and design per class/sex forced dialog to 'warn once' on detection.
Still, WEIDU misses a fundamental part of the picture in not having a expert system to manage mod incompatibilities (thus inflexible installer abominations like BG_Trilogy bat file).

The perfect game for moding would need imo:
1. stable engine, none of this Shadowrun Returns 'make a new game, break the old content so it won't run there'
2. tabular/linear everything or almost everything with a programmatic way to append or prepend to units of computations and change arguments or returns (ie: AOP, generalized hooks into the engine).
3. inbuilt from day 1 expert system to handle mod incompatibilities and requirements and also their install (ie: a standard file organization so morons don't sabotage automatization of mod install). This means no 'installers' no 'readme file popup', no 'run this exe/bat file after install', no 'extract this with this utility', no bullshit like that.
4. if character imports/exports are going to be a thing, please consider making the items and the behavior scripts they use part of the save, so there is no excuse to halfass the functionality.
5. A good editor, if the game is going to be the sort that uses user generated campaigns instead or in addition to adding to the main game (because mapping).

These things literally never happened in the history of gaming all at the same time.

 

[Prehistorik]

They should just release the source code. There is really not much of a competition is going on at this point, from a tech perspective.

 

[SCO]

Source code doesn't actually help if the engine is monolithic. I mean sure, it helps a bit to add new behavior or fix old one but there is no possibility of independent effort being combined without agreement. While for example, if i install 2 different weidu mods that change item rules, i can and they install. They might be broken, but the authors never had to agree to work around their bugs (ideally) and get bogged down in bureaucracy.

That's what the expert system is for, tell you you're being dumb to try to use both at the same time/in this order/without these dependencies. And not coincidently, this is the piece of mod machinery that companies never ever create, because it's only useful for 'chaotic', modular content, not theirs, that goes through harmonization and QA.

 

[Prehistorik]

Source code doesn't actually help if the engine is monolithic. I mean sure, it helps a bit to add new behavior or fix old one but there is no possibility of independent effort being combined without agreement. While for example, if i install 2 different weidu mods that change item rules, i can and they install. They might be broken, but the authors never had to agree to work around their bugs (ideally) and get bogged down in bureaucracy.

That's what the expert system is for, tell you you're being dumb to try to use both at the same time/in this order/without these dependencies. And not coincidently, this is the piece of mod machinery that companies never ever create, because it's only useful for 'chaotic', modular content, not theirs, that goes through harmonization and QA.

First of all it's natural nowadays to combine independent work in term of a source code, with github, version control etc. And if the game is good enough all necessary tools for modding would be added. Just imagine how much pain and frustration would be spared if we got Fallout, Arcanum, VTM etc source. With publishers loosing literally nothing.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

How does Nwn figure on the modding scale, SCO?

 

[SCO]

I never tried to mod NWN, but i believe it is quite good but it suffers from the usual failing of campaign oriented mod games, no tools for general modification. Much like i can't add a item to all vendors in Shadowrun Dragonfall without overwriting a existing object because there is no tool to modify all vendors programatically, there is also the assumption in NWN that all modifications are to be done in the editor to a single mod to a single object.

This sort of thing is generally caused by a phobia of programming scripts (even worse because this stuff requires meta-programing, based on first finding the appropriate objects then transforming them inplace). Game Editors never work this way because companies are extremely conservative and they prefer to have 20 separate medium story mods using their rules to 200 mini tweak mods + the 20 stories mod that the programmatic paradigm encourages.
Thing is, the programmatic paradigm works better for users as long as tools to manage the confusion exist (eg: mlox for morrowind).

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

'game made for mods' that is actually trying to self-contain all content into a separate 'campaigns' and places a obstacle if you try to use content from one in another (import a character with items etc). Ex: Neverwinter Nights, all the new Shadowrun games, the user made Bloodlines mod loader etc.

Well, custom items and character traits transitioning between user-made campaings would come with a of all custom coding, icons and database entries, etc etc
And considering that what you want is a rule-flexible game, you couldn't very well translate character traits that you have acquired in one game over to the other. So, that feature sounds actually completely fucking pointless in general.

 

[SCO]

Couldn't is a very harsh word. I think it's very very possible as long as a definite item format (or format forwards compatible versions) between games exists. You pretty much need to scour all those item related stuff that references the item (including scripts, images, descriptions, models or 'translated' models). Of course, the main advantage of this over manual translation for selected items is that this won't leave either randomly generated or mod introduced items out and you won't need content packs or similar of the old game just to have some sort of continuity.

I'd say this shouldn't be on savegames, but in a dedicated export function, but with modern games with hundreds of mb savegames who knows wtf they're doing anyway.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Couldn't is a very harsh word. I think it's very very possible as long as a definite item format (or format forwards compatible versions) between games exists. You pretty much need to scour all those item related stuff that references the item (including scripts, images, descriptions models or models equivalence). Of course, the main advantage of this over manual translation for selected items is that this won't leave either randomly generated or mod introduced items out.

What is the practical advantage here? So you could freely import your red-haired bimbo that you've spent 5 hrs designing with 10 pages of fan-fic biography for larping reasons?
What you propose introduces issues with game balance, probably pacing and all that other jazz. Stupid and kinda pointless idea.

How does Nwn figure on the modding scale, SCO?

Having modded both, I can safely say that it's p. good. As for suffering from compatability between mods, the main culprit comes from outdated format of links and references in form of 2d arrays (2da files), it's a manually created table with all your shitty custom content referencing a row in another table and so on and so forth.
If done away entirely with that from both in-engine and in scripts, it could have been a pretty universal editor.

 

[SCO]

What is the practical advantage here? So you could freely import your red-haired bimbo that you've spent 5 hrs designing with 10 pages of fan-fic biography for larping reasons?
What you propose introduces issues with game balance, probably pacing and all that other jazz. Stupid and kinda pointless idea.

Game balance can go screw itself. Do you remember those times when you played through QFG1-2-3-4-5 and kept some items, some of which you could only have if you had done certain things? Or remember the goldbox games doing the same thing? Or even more ambitious, imagine a 'mod' that is a world that is segmented like Fabled Lands, with 3-6 authors all agreeing in the 'border crossings' telling their 'mini campaign' in the region and the player being able to move around to whatever region he wants whenever he wants, moving along to another without completing the one he's in etc. While some degree of coordination would be good for items with story functionality in this scenario ofc (don't one shot another mod super Kangax lich with your protection from undead scroll), it's not required like in a monolithic mod.

These are the things i can think for a seamless character export/import.

 

[Zetor]

Good discussion -- I used to be really into modding and content creation (MUD builder background...), but none of the modern RPG 'modding platforms' managed to get close.

IMO you can do two things to have a game that's well-suited for modding:

1. The unambitious approach: a super-streamlined editor that only allows for high-level design and no way to change anything about the engine or the "core gameplay" (City of Heroes Mission Architect, things like LittleBigPlanet or Mario Maker, games with generic 'map editors'). These can actually work surprisingly well if the systems are solid, but they're obviously not suitable for something like a RPG.
2. A modular system like the one outlined in the OP. Freedom Force comes close (except for the entire 'user friendly' thing), but mostly by accident -- coding the engine in Python will do that to ya.

Personally, if it were possible to patch a proper RPG character system and zone persistence into Shadowrun - via editor or otherwise - and allow for some actual scripting (again, you could code Freedom Force levels in python in 2002, what's so hard about this?), I'd probably waste spend several hundred hours in the editor... right now it feels like something that is 80% there but the last 20% of its features are probably never going to be possible to implement and you're just crippled without them. But then, I think that's not a fault of the editor itself, just the deeply unambitious design of the core game engine. I wonder if it's possible to generalize this requirement -- "expose your game systems in config files" maybe?

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

What is the practical advantage here? So you could freely import your red-haired bimbo that you've spent 5 hrs designing with 10 pages of fan-fic biography for larping reasons?
What you propose introduces issues with game balance, probably pacing and all that other jazz. Stupid and kinda pointless idea.

Game balance can go screw itself. Do you remember those times when you played through QFG1-2-3-4-5 and kept some items, some of which you could only have if you had done certain things? Or remember the goldbox games doing the same thing? Or even more ambitious, imagine a 'mod' that is a world that is segmented like Fabled Lands, with 3-6 authors all agreeing in the 'border crossings' telling their 'mini campaign' in the region and the player being able to move around to whatever region he wants whenever he wants, moving along to another without completing the one he's in etc. While some degree of coordination would be good for items with story functionality in this scenario ofc (don't one shot another mod super Kangax lich with your protection from undead scroll), it's not required like in a monolithic mod.

These are the things i can think for a seamless character export/import.

The idea has no merit and in itself is not worth the development and design time it would take to create & implement such unified system that would allow to account for all the custom content and mechanics.

Its goal is to please LARPers, all of whom can, quite frankly, hang themselves by the neck until sweet release of death.

Edgeposting is good and all, but tbh, I'd rather the discussion focus on less vapid low-impact fluff and more on resource structure and how it should be done.
To me, NWN almost came close to greatness in that regard only with manual tables being the thing that held it down. The override folder allowing for everything there is in campaing to be replaced, added or modified. If done right, it also allowed for custom mechanics to work across majority of modules. (see Kaedrin's PRC)

Can anyone comment on Divinity: OS editor?

 

[Severian Silk]

I've only modded Homeworld 2 and mixing mods together was always a PITA.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Mods will get even better when paid mods evolve. You will start seeing not only more "professional modders" and teams form, but I think you'll see more customer support as well.

 

[Luckmann]

It's OK, mods will fix it.