Hello creators! First of all, thank you for writing this open letter and bringing it to our attention.
Last week, we went ahead with a meeting to discuss the concerns raised in the open letter, along with a collection of other pressing modding-related issues that we gathered via feedback.
As you might imagine, some of these topics are pretty big and in many cases, it is going to take some time to implement solutions, but we have already started taking steps towards resolving the issues and wanted to share this with you.
To start, we have decided to hold regular modding meetings to discuss feedback and other modding-related topics from the forums and Discord to ensure that issues like these aren’t allowed to fester.
In addition to this, we think that providing clearer warnings and assertions for the tools should help to point you in the right direction when trying to diagnose an issue, or at the very least, provide you with useful information to include when requesting support from us. We’ll be adding them within the next few patches.
So, with the more general things out of the way, let’s move on to the core topics we discussed at the meeting:
We have identified a number of bugs with modifying and creating new campaign maps and will be looking into fixing them. We have also discussed a couple of potential solutions that we will be exploring to enable modifying of the MapWidth and MapHeight for the walkable area and camera. Ultimately, the message we want to convey here is that this certainly isn’t intended and that you will be able to add custom campaign maps when we have decided which path to take and implemented that solution.
- Custom Skeletons & Body Meshes
We’ll be adding a system in the future to allow you to change faces, hand meshes, and body meshes, as well as, a system to add new skeletons to the game. Please bear in mind that you will likely have certain limitations when adding new skeletons for agents capable of combat in order for the native combat system to work properly.
- Code-related documentation
We hope to start providing a reference for the API. In addition to this, we will be reaching out to collect specific requests for documentation to be brought to our developers for review and extend our efforts to make more documentation, similar to this explanation regarding
Sealed Class Extension. We encourage you to request specific documentation in our updated forum section for
Official Tools & Modding Feedback.
In this case, we feel that the best approach would be for us to know specifically what you are trying to achieve so that we can find an appropriate solution. Please let us know which specific problems you’re facing
here. With that being said, we will be doing a review of our code to see if there are places where we might have used “internal”, or any other modifiers, unnecessarily.
In addition to the topics from the open letter, we identified the following points that we will be going over in the dedicated modding meetings to find solutions.
- Total conversion mod load order
- Enable Cloth Physics on CraftedItems
- Allow attributes on Items to determine weapon damage
- Extrude function for AI meshing
- Subdivide function for AI meshing (into quads not tris)
- Allow single axis scaling of assets before placement
- Ability to name a new paint layer upon creation
- Mesh keyframes documentation
- Documentation for skeletons for reins/horse harness and their implementation
- Documentation on implementation of custom quivers
- Add a duplicate mesh option
- Add attribute to hide head (xml)
- Ability to disable the usage of generated widget code
As we have said previously and will say again, modding is a huge part of Mount & Blade and we will do what we can to work alongside modders to help you fulfill your modding ambitions. However, we do want to be clear now that there will be some instances where we will be in disagreement about how a problem can, or should, be resolved. Moving forward, we ask that modders include more details about what they are trying to achieve when making suggestions, requesting support, or leaving feedback, rather than just suggesting a solution to their issue on its own. This will help us a great deal when exploring potential solutions, some of which may already be present. It would also be helpful if everyone could share future feedback and suggestions in the
Official Tools & Modding Feedback section of the forum to ensure that your comments are processed correctly.
