While I understand Taleworlds may not be very keen to support modding while the game is unfinished and in early access, the fact is that there's already a very large group of players that use mods. The most popular mods on nexusmods have well over 200k downloads. It is clear that for many players they are a great addition to their game.
However, in particular the maintenance of mods is currently a heavy task on us mod authors due to the lack of access to the module source code. While we can decompile the DLL's back into C#, the resulting code is often convoluted and comments and local variable names are lost in the process. After every official update we have to decompile the new DLL's and painstakingly analyse what has changed and what impact the changes have on our mods.
This has resulted in a lot of popular mods lagging behind in updates, breaking people's running games or causing them to stick to earlier game versions. A popular sentiment among the community currently seems to be that people rather not play the game at all until this situation improves.
Therefore I'd like to petition Taleworlds for an earlier-than-planned release of the module source code to the community. I think the extra work (which could be made a mostly automated process) would be very much worth it to both Taleworlds and the community for the following reasons:
At the time of writing, the Taleworlds developers are completing a major code refactor. That sounds like a perfect opportunity to share the result with the modding community. For the reasons stated above, I'm convinced this would a be a win-win for both players and developers. If you agree, please voice your support for this petition!
However, in particular the maintenance of mods is currently a heavy task on us mod authors due to the lack of access to the module source code. While we can decompile the DLL's back into C#, the resulting code is often convoluted and comments and local variable names are lost in the process. After every official update we have to decompile the new DLL's and painstakingly analyse what has changed and what impact the changes have on our mods.
This has resulted in a lot of popular mods lagging behind in updates, breaking people's running games or causing them to stick to earlier game versions. A popular sentiment among the community currently seems to be that people rather not play the game at all until this situation improves.
Therefore I'd like to petition Taleworlds for an earlier-than-planned release of the module source code to the community. I think the extra work (which could be made a mostly automated process) would be very much worth it to both Taleworlds and the community for the following reasons:
- The community (in particular mod authors) could make more detailed bug reports. It happens often that people report bugs to mod authors that on investigation turn out to be vanilla bugs. Access to the module source code would allow us to debug them faster and point to the exact line numbers when we report these bugs to Taleworlds devs, making their jobs easier.
- It would be a lot easier and faster to update mods after releases of official patches. More people would play on the latest game branches, improving the experience of many players.
- We would be able to make better mods in general. The modding community functions very much like a meritocracy with extremely fast and parallel iteration of ideas. This information provides invaluable feedback to Taleworlds. It shows which concepts work well and which don't, which issues are in most need of fixing and what features the community is generally interested in.
- A sizeable group of players have expressed their discontent with the general lack of features in Bannerlord's early access and roadmap compared to Warband and Viking Conquest. Enabling us modders to be a better part of the solution would show Taleworlds is doing everything it can to improve customer satisfaction. In the end, the modding community will produce much more features anyway than one dev studio ever could. Why not unleash that force as soon as possible?
At the time of writing, the Taleworlds developers are completing a major code refactor. That sounds like a perfect opportunity to share the result with the modding community. For the reasons stated above, I'm convinced this would a be a win-win for both players and developers. If you agree, please voice your support for this petition!