This so far has had far more success than I could have imagined.they aren't going to change. 2 whole years of people complaining on the forums about the state of game is has done nothing, so at this point the overhaul modders are at risk of wasting their own time on a mod that will never be possible. It's not about "dreaming big" when you're up against an incompetent company.
The 'moment' it hit early access was a year ago, of which it was just a measly 10 years of development in order to hit EA.So they have to make it moddable the moment it hits market with EA, just because they worked for 11 years on the project? Nice logic.
And the 'fact' is that it takes time, 11 years is for game development an extraordinarily long period of time. That is longer than the lifespan of the PlayStation 3, an entire console generation on which was born many a triple A title, conceived, developed, released, conceived, developed, released.Also no one said you can't have that. I'm stating a fact - if you wanna blindly ignore that, suit yourself.
You live in your own world. I am jealous.It's not my problem that you have issues with understanding what's written there.
Completely refuted? Calling me the one that is denying the reality? Fun and also proves that you don't understand what I'm posting.
Yet here you are.
Anyway not gonna waste my time with this.
O_OWe have progress!
1. Hiring an intern to write documentation - DONE
2. Other stuff than hiring an intern to write documentation - PENDING
Exactly, it has only been 11 years of development and everyone knows it takes at least 20 to get decent modding support.Imagine asking a dev team to cater to modders, before the game is finished.
Honestly, this is yikes. I'm a modder myself, I love modding, I love modding communities. This is well beyond putting the cart before the horse. Starting any sort of overhaul mod when the game is in a constant state of flux is just a massive headache. It's going to be one step forward, and two steps back, CONSTANTLY, until they reach a point of stability in the code, which will come with a 1.0 release.
But that's exactly the point, isn't it? They're asking TW to change the way they approach the development of the game now, so they won't have to go back and fix things later, when 1.0 releases.Imagine asking a dev team to cater to modders, before the game is finished.
Wait, they did not create a chain of communication for you moderators?!? Mods see an issue, pass it up to someone that passes onto the manager that can speak to the devs? Ugh...that explains a lot then. These boards are not operating as virtually any other developer forum I have experienced...also did not notice John Ms post. checking for that now. Thanks for not getting too defensive mate.If you want someone who is communicating the needs of the community to the developers, that's what the community managers like Dejan or Duh are for. It's not like we moderators have some kind of privilege access channel to the developers. Mind that John_M is another moderator who wrote here in favour of the open letter, who is actually a moderator at the Bannerlord modding section and who is also leader of the 'Kingdoms of Arda' mod team, probably the base initiator of the open letter.
Yep, when you dismiss everything that goes against a thing, its completely right.Ark is an unreal engine game...snipped since its just a dismissal
Broadly speaking Earendil is completely right.
We can just toss out the fact that over 85% of the games on modding sites like Nexus were released after 2015 or that Steams Workshop has more than 3x the amount of games using it today than it did in 2015.
That hurts the narrative that GAMES ARE HARDER TO MOD! Anything, ANYTHING to not have talk about how they are hard-coding things that DO NOT NEED TO BE HARDCODED...which is what is making modding more difficult HERE.
Wait, they did not create a chain of communication for you moderators?!? Mods see an issue, pass it up to someone that passes onto the manager that can speak to the devs? Ugh...that explains a lot then. These boards are not operating as virtually any other developer forum I have experienced...also did not notice John Ms post. checking for that now. Thanks for not getting too defensive mate.
You may be wondering why the majority of mods released for Bannerlord are small-scale tweaks, faction/culture overhauls, and generally don’t change the core gameplay of Bannerlord. The reason behind this is that TaleWorlds has put up artificial roadblocks throughout the game’s code that severely impede (and often, make it completely impossible) to make any large scale changes.
6. With Warband the list of hardcoded features lessened as time progressed. Will this be the same for Bannerlord as you decide over time what should and shouldn't be hardcoded?
Most probably.
10. How is the code split between hard-coded (engine) and modsys (open to the modding community)? What level of access do we have to the game UI code, AI, etc.? Could you provide us with an example of what will likely remain hard-coded?
Unlike Warband, the vanilla game scripts will not be directly modifiable by modders. However, it will be possible for modders to add new scripts as plugins and also have modifications for XML data files.
This is correct but I also want to note that modding in Bannerlord is waaaaay easier compared to Warband even in this early stage. Because reverse-engineered or not, some parts are basically free-for-all at the moment - you can literally see what TW dev wrote in the code. Which wasn't the case for Warband - even after they released that weird-module system.Bannerlord on the other hand has tonnes and tonnes of formats which are, as far as we can tell, impossible to reverse engineer.
Technically, the game does support Full Conversion mods in a certain manner. Where content is concerned, you can prevent the loading of all SandBox and SandBoxCore content into your campaign by using a custom campaign type. This was successfully implemented in previous versions of the game by Jance (and us, to a lesser, buggier extent haha.) If you create your game with say CustomCampaign instead of Campaign or CampaignStoryMode, only xml content marked with the gametype="CustomCampaign" tag will be loaded. This leads me to think this may be the way the designer of this system intends total conversions to be done. However, creating custom and functional GameTypes is quite difficult at the moment. I think your proposal has some pros and cons, but it would certainly be an improvement over the status quo. I look forward to seeing what TW comes up with.This is correct but I also want to note that modding in Bannerlord is waaaaay easier compared to Warband even in this early stage. Because reverse-engineered or not, some parts are basically free-for-all at the moment - you can literally see what TW dev wrote in the code. Which wasn't the case for Warband - even after they released that weird-module system.
Seeing some people say stuff like "Modding support is not just something that can be slapped on at the end," in this thread just shows their ignorance. Because that's not the case in Bannerlord at the moment. Even moving from module_item.txt ( where you see magic numbers and object names ) to more structured item.xml is a huge step for modding support for many of the non-deeply technical people. Providing official modding tools in EA is another plus. Having gameplay logic accessible via certain tools ( dotPeek, dnSpy etc ) is another plus.
OP and overall the letter has valid points as I said in my first post. However, they are missing the fact that, currently, the module system doesn't look like it's designed to support Total Conversion mods anyway. I mean game literally enables Native + SandBox modules by default and makes it impossible to disable it from Launcher UI. The current system is more or less the same as Skyrim's module system - which was not TC friendly but "small modification" friendly. Having documents, removing internal keywords won't make life too easier for TC modders - since they will still need to completely copy-paste some of the Native code, change it or write it from scratch.
@Jance @John_M and of course, @Callum , I'm wondering your thoughts about the following:
I mentioned this before but for Total Conversion mods, the best thing to do for TW would be separating the copyright/sensitive code from the gameplay logic DLL's and then publishing the entire Gameplay source in Github or any other place. This might be daunting for TW to do at the beginning but It comes with several pros, rather than cons.
- With this way, Total Conversion modders can simply download the entire gameplay logic as a VS project solution, do their tweaks, change whatever they want, built it from that and name it MyCoolNative2 and tell players to use only that module in module folders.
- With this way, you wouldn't have to patch anything, you wouldn't need to reverse engineer it and you wouldn't be "angry" about hardcoded stuff since everything will be accessible. TW also wouldn't need to change their unorthodox style and continue what they are doing.
- With this way, community could make PR's to populate/comment on methods and help out the documentation. Also since it will be a Git comparer, seeing module system v1 to v2 changes would be extremely easy to track by modders - they can even argue about certain changes in merge-pull request branches if this goes too complicated in the future.
Easier to mod for people with in depth coding knowledge. The entry barrier is quite a lot higher for Bannerlord than for Warband, since you need more knowledge about modern programming concepts. Once you're in: you do have a lot more to work with (or rather, you should have a lot more to work with, if the code was actually approachable, which it currently isn't), but it really is harder to understand.This is correct but I also want to note that modding in Bannerlord is waaaaay easier compared to Warband even in this early stage.
But modding support doesn't mean it will be super simple for everyone. If you simplify it for in-experienced people, it basically means you have to simple it down as well. Which is opposite of what mod support means because when you say "We will increase our modding support coverage" it basically means you will grant more possibilities to modders and you cannot do that without increasing the complexity. In Warband's case, we had a shadow/shallow version of the actual game in some module system, it was more like a code sandbox - but you were extremely limited. This is not the case in Bannerlord since you have more or less the same power over the engine/game with any Gameplay developer in Taleworlds right now.Easier to mod for people with in depth coding knowledge. The entry barrier is quite a lot higher for Bannerlord than for Warband, since you need more knowledge about modern programming concepts. Once you're in: you do have a lot more to work with (or rather, you should have a lot more to work with, if the code was actually approachable, which it currently isn't), but it really is harder to understand.
I'm not saying it should be made easier. I agree that a high level of modding support is only possible by giving modders access to the "nitty gritty", actual code. I guess I'm just using a different definition of what makes modding a game easy. Accessing and editing certain behaviour is easier in Bannerlord than it is in Warband (which I think your point was?). Getting started with modding, on the other hand, is a lot harder in Bannerlord than it is in Warband.But modding support doesn't mean it will be super simple for everyone. If you simplify it for in-experienced people, it basically means you have to simple it down as well.
I mean, isn't it? Sure, it's not 100% impossible to edit (like everything stuck in the exe file), but it's... 95% impossible to edit instead. If you have to replicate and replace complete libraries in order to edit a few particular values, that's not exactly mod friendly.Having constants in readable, changeable C# code is not "hardcoded"