Devs: do you care about the modding scene anymore?

from Sins Forums
So, it's been a little over three months since release. The "beta" (unfinished) version of the mod tools were released nineteen days after the game's release, which was admittedly pretty good. Sins, from the early beta period, was advertised as a "data-driven", easily moddable game. At every point this was emphasized: there was even an icon used in a few avatars released that had the Sins logo with a wrench and MODS on it.

It seems, however, that Stardock and Ironclad aren't taking this promise, and therefore, the future of this game itself, very seriously.

My concern at this point is that with both companies working on separate projects that the modding scene has been abandoned. I can count on one hand the amount of posts from the devs in the modding section within the last couple months. I'm not asking why we don't have the "final" mod tools yet, though that's not an unreasonable question. I'm asking why at this point nobody seems to care anymore.

When DoV migrated from Empire at War, it was simply because of these early promises by SD/IC. We were tired of having no control over most of our ships abilities, behaviors, and so forth. At this point, we've been given a lot of neat stuff as far as buffs, abilities, particles and such go. But those are relatively specialized. You can't build a TC mod around particle effects.

Amplifying these concerns is the fact that many systems were designed quite differently from normal RTS games. Was it due to the rush to release? Probably not - they've been that way since the beta. Why are entity files parsed so oddly? Why, in a bizarre change from convention, are "classes" of ships linked to certain shipyards? Who thought this was a good idea when the classes themselves are hard-coded? It's OOP gone horribly wrong. Why can one shipyard have two pages but not three? Why can the other shipyard only have one and five ships? Is this a failure of how the UI was designed, or something deeper?

The fact that these parts of how the game works are so integral makes those who dismiss the problems as being possibly fixed in the "final mod tools" seem more than a little silly. Of course, the fact that we aren't hearing anything makes it anyone's guess.

So, in summary, the question is simply this: with all due respect, do you care? Should we give up expectations of "final mod tools", should we hold out waiting for you guys to even comment on what's going on? Should we continue planning and developing our mods, as if they'll never exist?

P.S.: This is not a new concern. I think I speak for most modders on this: we just want a straight up-or-down answer to this question. I know Haeso's been adamant about it in several posts, and of course many of those in the wishlist thread, as well as some private conversations I've had with other modders. It seems being subtle about it hasn't really worked, so don't take this thread as being as overly argumentative or dramatic, it's just necessary for all of our sake.
modding
61,994 views 69 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
If the game becomes too moddable I dont think anyone wants to buy the expansions. Maybe after some more money making ways they probably would have no choice and provide updated version of tools. Or the mod tools could be in expansion pack requiring you to buy the pack to make it more moddable. I dunno but hopefully will see something soon!
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
If the game becomes too moddable I dont think anyone wants to buy the expansions.


Doubt that. If anything it increases sales, esp. for the flagging MP community.

Or the mod tools could be in expansion pack requiring you to buy the pack to make it more moddable.


That would be a horrid decision and I know at least my team would cease development on pure principle in that case.
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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
They're probably waiting for 1.0 to release the tools.
This game is alot more moddable than other rtss. =/
The names for the variables in the ent files are easy to read and understand.

Sure, it isn't perfect. But maybe they'll release more content later on for modding. The mod tools might even let you create custom AI.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
This game is alot more moddable than other rtss. =/


No, it isn't. Have you seen the C&C3 SDK? Even EaW let you modify the AI.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
SoaSE lets you mod certain parts very easily, but other quite significant areas are seemingly hardcoded.

I am going to keep the faith by taking the view that its still early days and the developers are otherwise engaged in more beneficial tasks.

I also see where Carbon016 is coming from, and some straight answers would be most welcome.
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
I am going to keep the faith by taking the view that its still early days and the developers are otherwise engaged in more beneficial tasks.


That's the point of the OP, really. I'm fully fine with accepting that, and it makes sense, but we haven't got any word one way or the other, which is more concerning to me.
Reply #7 from Sins Forums Top
My main complaint is that there's a complete absence of a knowledge-base, wiki, or set of finished tutorials. I spent a bunch of time making a couple of ships and now I've almost spent just as much time trying to get that damn convertxsi program to actually find vertices and do its job instead of telling me there aren't any vertices. Before that it was a pain just to get files into the XSI format and now I'm learning that the format has to be set up in a very specific way to work. I've yet to get one of the ships I made imported into the game because of file format and conversion problems as well as unspecified requirements/specifications/expectations of the provided tools. It seems at every step of the process there's an unseen hurdle which is more frustrating and troublesome than on average.

Yes, Sins is more mod-friendly than other RTS games and I like that. It seems to me that things are mainly replacement and addition oriented instead of making major changes to gameplay. That in itself doesn't bother me, but the lack of information about how to go about doing some things and what all is possible is annoying.

Sins is one of the few games I bought because I found it fun and unique. Most games I buy these days are chosen because they can be modded.
Reply #8 from Sins Forums Top
I completely agree with Carbon016. I don't mind waiting, I would just like to know what to expect. It helps greatly with planning, knowing what you will or will not be able to do. Also, the hardcoded limits, not only in the ship counts but in seemingly strange places such as numbers of allowed explosion entries, numbers of weapon and particle hardpoints per ship, even numbers of particle emitters per effect, greatly box in the possible creativity of a mod. I already had to rethink some aspects of my work because of this - for example instead of every race having different explosions, I now have to keep all the explosions the same because someone thought no one will possibly want more than 10 entries in the explosions.explosiondata file.

So a few answers of clarifications about such things would definitely be welcome.
Reply #9 from Sins Forums Top
Yes some hardcoded quantity limitation is really annoying. I never saw such unresonable limitation in my entire MOD life. However Sins is still very mod-friendly for basic alternation and I think that is exactly most people(who demand mods not making one) want. I always love tricky way to solve problem in such limitation and my experience told me that there will be no "ALMIGHTY" full mod package forever  ;)
Reply #10 from Sins Forums Top
My concern at this point is that with both companies working on separate projects that the modding scene has been abandoned. I can count on one hand the amount of posts from the devs in the modding section within the last couple months. I'm not asking why we don't have the "final" mod tools yet, though that's not an unreasonable question. I'm asking why at this point nobody seems to care anymore.


The devs haven't been in evidence of late because they're slaving away at 1.1 and the Euro release. Once those are out of the way, the other less pressing things will follow.
Reply #11 from Sins Forums Top
Thank you Kryo for paying attention to us modders who are eagerly awaiting any help we can get. I am sure you will aprreciate that we are all holding our breath fro the final mod tools.

DANMAN
Reply #12 from Sins Forums Top
Hey all,

We have not forgotten about you :)

To clear things up a bit: at this point the community has access to pretty much all the tools the developers have - we're not holding anything back out of spite! Also, in certain situations you will come across hard-coded limits which may not make sense to you. Some of them may be limitations resulting from the engine design, but more often they are there to control the amount of memory usage and dynamic memory allocation - to keep the game running as smoothly as possible.

I'd like to get some idea of what would be most useful to the modding community at this point. What kind of tools are you hoping to see in a "full toolset release"? Or as ZJBDragon says, is the main requirement some centralized place to get information about how to mod each aspect of the game?

Cheers


Reply #13 from Sins Forums Top
As a follow up to Manshooter's comments:

The number of allowed explosion entries should be infinite, unless I misunderstand you. Some of the others (number of points on a ship, etc) were intentionally constrained as I said above.
Reply #14 from Sins Forums Top
What I would like to ... let's see.

- Have more then 1 type of figher/bomber class ships [ and ability to let them gain XP and use abilities. ]
- Have no limitations on amount of types of frigates/cruisers/capships

I think that these are main issues now for LOTS of modders out there, including me. I concur - sure, optimize the game. But please, let modders do the optimization process themselves - It wouldn't be Your fault our dear Dev's that someone else - let's say it clearly - screwed up the job.

So yes, let's destroy this Berlin Wall of SoaSE and perhaps put more variables in the engine, instead of hardcoding them!
Reply #15 from Sins Forums Top
I'd like to get some idea of what would be most useful to the modding community at this point. What kind of tools are you hoping to see in a "full toolset release"?


I think to sum it up, the "problem" that most serious modders face is that it's easy enough to modify and use existing things, but impossible to add new ones. A couple examples:

1) Additional pages to factories for more ship types. This likely falls under the engine hardcode, but for example a frigate factory uses both rows for frigates, but a capital ship factory can't be made to.

2) Entity types. Right now, there's no way for us to add new ones. We can't, for example, make a structure that has weapons *and* squadrons, because there's no entity type for one. Adding squadrons to the "weapondefense" entity crashes, adding weapons to "hangardefense" entity doesn't do anything. So we can't create a new entity, we can only modify existing ones with set parameters.

3) Abilities. Here we're also limited to only what exists. If we have a capital ship with 3 different weapons, and we want to make an ability to give one of them increased rate of fire, well, we're out of luck. The only thing that exists is "EnergyWeaponCooldown" and that's it. There's nothing for "PhysicalWeaponCooldown", there's nothing for any specific weapon type (BeamWeaponCooldown, MissileWeaponCooldown, PlasmaWeaponCooldown, etc), and we can't add our own.

I don't think anyone is looking for fancy GUIs or anything like that. Most people would be quite happy if we could actually add our own things rather than just recycling existing. There are some neat things possible to do with recycling, as evidenced for example by Uzii's mod and derelict ship graveyards and such, but it's still fairly limited.
Reply #16 from Sins Forums Top
Which is what I wanted to say above :)
Reply #17 from Sins Forums Top
1.
the ability to use more than 3 weapon types per ship might be nice even one or two additional would very handy.

2.
the ability to debug something properly. ( specific errors )

3.
GUIs are nice but really not necessary, I agree totally.

4.
and least importantly I'm sure for most of the good modders but would be nice for noobs like me would be a demonstration of someone actually using the "xsi modtool" to create from top to bottom a ship nothing fancy even a simple elongated cube with all the hard points, textures and blagh blagh necessary to make an acceptable ship... and demonstrate how the "dds" file is generated and edited to make it look good with only a 512x512 image file I have all sorts of imaging programs and still cant get one to export to the game correctly ( at least a month of trial and mostly error. ) I've seen some really cool ships all textured pretty and stuff but I don't think any of them use XSI MODTOOL.

and don't tell me I have to go buy "Photoshop CS3" for around $900 to do a proper skin cuse I'll burn sins first.

btw I'm not hating, I love sins but am very frustrated.

ds

Reply #18 from Sins Forums Top
As a follow up to Manshooter's comments:The number of allowed explosion entries should be infinite, unless I misunderstand you. Some of the others (number of points on a ship, etc) were intentionally constrained as I said above.


If that is so, then I apologise for sowing misinformation! :) My comment was based on reading up on the Bailknight's thread:

As I said before current Sins only support 10 explosion entries and making race-specific explosions need at LEAST 3 entries for each race (Big for capships and structures, Medium for frigates and Small for fighters) and everything should blowout in same boom effect. I can accept this however, add new race and it`s own explosion is impossible because they need another 3entries and game will crash anytime. I choice class-specific explosion rather then race-specific one for my new race in ver 2.0

Which can be found here.

Since I am working on a race-specific explosion&debris mini-mod alongside my main project, this particular issue is of a considerable interest to me. So its good to hear that it *is* possible to have more than 10 entries in the .explosiondata file! :)

As to what I would like to see in the form of mod tools, a particle editor would be nice, so we can experiment and play with particle animations without having to load up a game and set up props.
Also, a detailed guide on editing accessible files would be nice (as in, what controls what and so on). For example I would like to change the way shield hit effects are displayed, but I don't know if that's possible or not.
And last but not least, the (I think) biggest issue around - new entity types; will we ever be able to create them, or are they hardcoded with no way to make that part of the engine modable? Anyway, Annatar said it all!
Reply #19 from Stardock Forums Top
All I really want right now is more information about convertxsi, what it's expecting, why it keeps telling me 0 vertices, and just more information about the actual conversion inputs and outputs in general. I can't work with a black box piece of software if I don't know how to talk to it, and that's what's driving me up a wall. See https://forums.stardock.com/311258.

Otherwise, a bit more flexibility like people are mentioning above would be welcome . Nothing has to be unlimited as it looks like more wiggle room is desired, especially on slots for weapons, abilities, hangars, factory icon slots, as well as more flexible entities.
Reply #20 from Sins Forums Top
I would like to see in SoaSE

not necessarily in proirity:

1 randomization of home planets type/staring resources in maps/game info.

2 get planets & ships about to be destroyed to surrender to victor but stll partial count against loser total (depends on influence levels)

3 ability to add conquering and back/reengineer other races techs

4 if person hosting uses mod, other online players can use it too in game.

5 how ofetn oyher players have played together (serial not handle)



Reply #22 from Sins Forums Top
One thing I would find incredibly useful is a .mesh to text file converter. Being able to use a text editor to edit/debug meshes would be very nice for getting things done easily, such as switching/fixing the names on bones or altering the textures a model uses without having to go through the laborious process of opening a modeling package and re-exporting the model.

Other than that, some way of easing up the hard-coded limitations on the numbers of weapons and/or hardpoints would be very nice. Sure it'll be more draining on systems, but I don't see that as a valid reason for completely forbidding the use of higher values - modding is about experimentation and customizing the game, a lot of people have computers that could definitely handle a few extra particles.

Mod support for this game started off great, and if we can just go a little further I'm sure that this fairly active community can turn out some very cool stuff.
Reply #23 from Sins Forums Top
Ok question , tools?

By tools , I was thinking some nifty Interface and program that makes it easy for mod-newbs to start modding.

Are the tools just that bunch of files in those folders and the binary converters. Which is more like "mod starter files" rather then tools and you still have to open them up in wordpad

just wondering.
Reply #24 from Sins Forums Top
significant relaxation of hard code limits for buildable ships/facilities, fighters per ship, abilities, weapon types (or at least a new settings file that sets the limits so that a mod can then modify them at its own risk for performance)

reasoning: pretty obvious from a content perspective however, it would be nice to have more abilities to have additional passive abilities (I don't necessarily need more GUI room for abilities if they are passive)

multiple planet module / ship types per entity possibly as a list of bools?

reasoning: I want stations that do research and spread culture, or have hangers and guns as well as shield generators...

ability to define ship roles (what they target, how they move, engagement ranges)

reasoning: at least define how close a ship gets in combat, what direction it faces and what its primary targets should be.

some rudimentary AI settings control to pick what types of targets they pick (commerce, fleets, stations) dream would be to have fully scripted AI in some future version


the parsing order and rules for different files (what orders must entities be constructed in, what breaks them) as well as ability to comment lines.

reasoning: it would be nice to know what breaks the parser if it is placed out of order and what variables entities have.

Reply #25 from Sins Forums Top
and least importantly I'm sure for most of the good modders but would be nice for noobs like me would be a demonstration of someone actually using the "xsi modtool" to create from top to bottom a ship nothing fancy even a simple elongated cube with all the hard points, textures and blagh blagh necessary to make an acceptable ship... and demonstrate how the "dds" file is generated and edited to make it look good with only a 512x512 image file I have all sorts of imaging programs and still cant get one to export to the game correctly ( at least a month of trial and mostly error. ) I've seen some really cool ships all textured pretty and stuff but I don't think any of them use XSI MODTOOL.and don't tell me I have to go buy "Photoshop CS3" for around $900 to do a proper skin cuse I'll burn sins first.btw I'm not hating, I love sins but am very frustrated.ds
If your looking for help, I'm more than willing to give you a few lessons. In fact, seeing as there seem to be a lot of people needing help on the forum, maybe I'll post a tut for ship making in XSI... Until I do, if you're looking for help, PM me and I'll see what I can do


What kind of tools are you hoping to see in a "full toolset release"?
I think Annatar put it best. Most of what is being posted here are just ways to make what is already possible more accessible and easy to manage. In all honesty, we could probably do without most of it. It's the hard coded limits that are really, well, limiting us. I would be perfectly giddy with just the ability to make my own entity type...

Just my 2 cents,

Ezraeil