Background: every single person I have spoken to about the game who *didn't* come from a "superhero game" background has basically said that unless the game has support for significant modding, it is pretty much a non-starter for them. Too many different needs for MWM to ever even *try* to implement them all, nor would the ROI be there for the effort, in a commercial sense. The ROI for individuals, however, is a very different question. And the potential ROI on "enable this happening" appears to be... shall we say "significant".
So, all of that said...
I went this evening and did some looking at what Epic has set up so far for dealing with mods. The short answer appears to be "they get handled as plugins." Which opens up a pretty huge realm of options, some of them *very* valuable to some of us.
The most obvious and trivial option is simply content plugins: this would straightforwardly allow anyone who can run the UE4 editor to assemble something that replaced any particular piece of content with something else.
Want to replace the mild-mannered walk climbing icon with something that will give an arachnophone nightmares for weeks? Just drop it into the module and make sure it appears in a specific place.
Animated travel power icons? Only slightly trickier -- mainly in that the buttons need to be able to have their "surface" portion overridden with a different material, so that it can be animated. Otherwise trivial.
Complete UI overhaul? As long as the UI is built on a sane API, this isn't a problem.
And there, however, lies the hitch: because mods are executable code linked directly into the game client at run-time, they can only work if you have build, *from the ground up*, an architecture that is intended to have that sort of extensibility without turning into a nightmare of security issues or crash bugs.
Thing is? If you have those security issues, you're going to have them anyway; it means you have failed at the fundamentals of game client/server security.
Similarly, if the API isn't something that can sanely support mods, then it *also* isn't going to sanely support anything *MWM* wants to do to extend the game, either. Certainly not a decade's worth of extension and improvement.
*puts on multi-decade software professional hat*
This is one of the relatively few things that basically *cannot* be retrofitted in any practical way, once there is any significant amount of code base. Design problems that cost five minutes to fix, if you discover them when you first write a piece of code, can easily cost weeks to try to retrofit once you have anything else interacting with them. Trying to add them piecemeal without spending those weeks, once they are needed, is a recipe for disaster of the first water.
In short, don't expect that you can tack in modules as a last-minute thought. Either decide to support them now (if it hasn't already been done), and do what it takes to achieve that, or decided that it is worth sacrificing pretty much any player who started out on WOW or, for that matter, almost any of its imitators. Cryptic's games are some of the *only* ones I've seen in the past several years without some form of non-trivial mod support.
*removes professional hat*
As a bonus, it gives you the huge benefit of "if it actually bugs people enough, it is almost inevitable that someone will fix it as a mod" -- and it is generally smiled upon when a company offers to officially "roll in" an existing mod so that it becomes part of the core feature set. At least assuming one can avoid having any serious foot-in-mouth moments.
[hr]
[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I'm all for Mod's. With that being said, I have no idea what kind of task it would be to roll that into an MMO style game. But having the players of the game be able to fix issues that the dev's might not have thought of is a major plus. It also takes a lot of work load off the dev's. Any mod that is created is essentially work that the dev's don't have to do. Put my name in the hat of Supporting Mod's
As long as there is proper checks and balances as to what can go into the actual game, then I do not see any downsides(besides security).
And I'm sure the community will fully express how they feel about any mod that is put into effect ;)
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Alright, but the problem _I_ see with this is the assumption that mods are necessary, or improve the game. I'll admit, I used two 'mods' in CoH, VidiotMaps and Titan Network's character-tracker. However, neither was particularly necessary.
I don't presume that MWM is going to accidentally leave out some function that I 'must have'. I've never played a game where I needed to have third-party software, to enjoy it.
Still, let's see what's what. What function in CoT do you expect to need to mod?
Be Well!
Fireheart
Off the top of my head? Extended chat functionality, if it isn't built into the core. Both CoH and CO (which have similar chat setups) drive me batty by only having one input area and one chat window. I need to be able to split things like "team coordination chat" from "system messages" from (especially) social chat, without having to give up one or more of them above entirely.
Second up? Support for my SpaceMouse Pro, which requires compiling against a specialized SDK provided by the hardware vendor. It doesn't show up as a normal input device for most intents and purposes, and even when it does, it tends to have nasty issues because doing it without their drivers involved means it doesn't have things like hardware dead zone support. So when I try to use it with, say, CO, I end up in a permanent spin to the left the instant I fire it up.
Third, if the information is published to the client (and it may or may not be; it is actually an excellent example of one of the questions that needs to be considered) would be presenting aggro management information (in different formats; I care about different things as an MM than when running as a more traditional support character, or running a tank, or... etc.)
Fourth, a notepad.
Fifth, a saner way to organize access to rarely used powers (especially things like temp powers -- which others have already brought up).
Sixth, a countdown timer that I can set to trigger and/or reset on various events from the game (or manually). Sometimes it is easier to read a straight number than to try to guess "is that refresh half done?" -- and lots of things don't show as conveniently as a refresh.
So there's about half a dozen off the top of my head. However, more to the point, the fact that *you* don't need extras does not change the fact that people coming from anywhere that has a "tradition" of them is going to expect them... and if things are set up such that they are otherwise sane, all MWM has to do to support mods is "set the game to allow them".
Basically, anything which would cause problems in that case is going to cause much *bigger* problems in other contexts, and frankly needs to get resolved for those other reasons (thinks like security, information management, etc).
[hr]
[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
To clarify: mods in this sense are talking about purely client-side (and generally mostly "cosmetic") mods. Things like showing map overlays in different styles, to steal an example from another thread -- there needs to be *some* sort of mini-map built in, and there needs to be careful consideration of how much information the client is provided as to "what appears on that map" (mobs, other players, etc), but once you've addressed those questions, there is no harm in Bob wanting to use the original mini-map, Fred preferring a partially-transparent full-screen overlay, Zoe using an auto-zooming map display that keeps all known team member locations in view, and Fthangn using a non-Euclidean map that renders mob names as I Ching trigrams and difficulty levels as tastes.
However, it probably isn't reasonable (or cost-effective) to have MWM try to provide all of those. Client-side mods mean that they can instead focus on providing a solid *core*, and at least one reasonable (if possibly somewhat basic) implementation, without having to address every user request for this bell or that whistle.
[hr]
[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Well said DeathSheep, you've also addressed many situations from the other thread!
Yeah, pretty much everything cosmetic can be optimized through mods. I never said that they were necessary Fireheart. But if it's a now or never deal. I definitely think it would benefit MWM in the long run. If it brings more people in and doesn't deter people, then all the better!
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
All of those things, except the Mouse, seem like features that would be built in to the game... However:
I'm not sure what you mean by 'extended' Chat Functionality not being part of CoH. I had at least three chat windows running at once and could add tabs inside those windows. Granted, only one input location. I fully expect at least this much to be in the core game.
What 'aggro management information'? Like some sort of numerical readout for who has the aggro?
I usually run in Fullscreen-Windowed mode, so Notepad is just an alt-tab away... However, I'm aware that a notepad-type function has often been requested.
'Saner' than having them on power-trays?
Count-down timer... for timing spawns, or attacks? I mean, I do understand the call for an Alarm-clock to tell you when you Must Quit Playing or Die!
I came to City, originally, from a much more complex game. I was Thankful for a game where I didn't have to manage crafting resources, or stop to loot my enemies, or negotiate whether _I_ had earned the special item, or whether another player deserved it more. I was Thankful for a game where, even at Ungodly-Fast-Super-Speed, it might take me a half-hour to cross certain zones. I was thankful for a game where I wouldn't be booted from the team, if I didn't chain-heal everybody.
Every 'mod' or 'plug-in' requires that the game have an open socket that reports the information needed to operate that extra thing. I'm not sure that exposing the input and output of the game to third-party programmers is wise. I also didn't see anything in your list, here, that seemed to 'need fixing'. You were a little vague about what function some of these things were supposed to handle. You seem to be anticipating problems that cannot be seen, yet.
Clearly, you'll need a better driver for the mouse, if it's not registering as an input device. So, maybe you do need an interfacing program to connect it to the game.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I'd be curious to see if parents would like a feature to limit the playtime for their kids, as a parental control option. :]
Pretty much agree with the last paragraph.
As an example, and this is something that some people might not necessarily think of as "needed", but it does provide a very good case for a mod being applicable.
If City of Titans allows dual/multiple builds for characters, some people might want a different costume depending on the build that they are in.
I know that in Wildstar, in the baseline client you can change your equipment, your costume (appearance) and your build.
However, there was a smart person who came up with a method of being able to presave builds (This is because respeccing your abilities is quick and free) with a nice label, link that to a specific equipment set, and also linking a costume appearance.
Now, you could do all of that manually, and to be fair, if you had your bags laid out nicely, it would just be a few clicks to get the gear sorted, another couple of clicks to get your costume selected, and then quite a few clicks (depending on changes needed) to get your ability bar sorted.
And yet [url=http://www.curse.com/ws-addons/wildstar/225512-vince-builds]Vince Builds[/url] for Wildstar allows me to do *all of that* with just two clicks (one to open the menu, another to select the build). Hell, you can even use slash commands to load specific preset saves if you so desire.
And yet... you *could* have thought that the developers would have thought to do this... But not even City of Heroes implemented something like this *natively* in the client (Linking of Build to Costume). Yes, I am aware that you could write a macro that did the costume changing.
Then there are the other ones such as an "auto inviter" where if you are not really bothered WHO is on the team, you can set a passphrase so that when they whisper you the word, they get auto invited into the team. This doesn't prevent people from joining you via other means, just means that you don't have to spend time yourself manually inviting the people.
Again, something that the developers might not have thought about, until it was added to the game.
Then there are the UI mods which just turn down the flashyness of the general UI so that it is basic bars and lines (no shading here) or able to resize/relocate specific bars that might be linked directly in the base UI ie health and End bars were stuck together in CoX. There is an UI mod for Wildstar that allows you to place and relocate *every single bar and UI icon wherever you want on the screen*. Hell, I might not even want to show my shield/resource bars *at all*.
And yet, in the base UI? I have to show shield and health.... No if's, no buts. But a UI mod allows me to get around that limitation.
I will say that there are some UI mods that others might find questionable... like the "drawing a line to quest mobs". Although this (in itself) isn't all that different from writing a macro to target a specific mob and you just running around the zone, spamming that macro button.
Hell, I could see someone coming up with a mod that would change what was said according the mob type (ie if it was a quest mob, or a basic mob, or a boss), that in itself actually requires some similar functionality to the "Find my mob" macro. Just that combined with something else (ie possibly build changing) it could make it a bit "overpowered" (ie if you target an elite boss, your build was changed to something for suitable for the "hard to take down" style of mobs, where DPS might not needed and it is just more surivability that is needed)[1]
[1] I am not actually aware of ANY mod that does this, but it is just something that sprang to mind as being "theoretically possible" in Wildstar. Hmmm... *goes looking* Theoretically possible, as you can get the mob type via the game api... so in theory it is possible to link that to "mob type". I know that you can set various alerts to fire off when you enter a specific zone... The mind boggles once you start thinking about how stuff can and might work.
I've never written any mods myself, and I can;t say I feel that mod-ability is a huge factor in whether or not I'd play CoT.
Having admitted that, from what Sheepy is saying, it sounds like if they make the game more mod-able fromt he get-go, it will alleviate future dev stresses and at the same time lure in customers (and by customers, I mean people apt to write custom mods). So I'm for it, I guess.
Assuming the decision is "Yes, we're going to make it mod-able." then what does this do to the timeline for getting the game rolled out, ultimately?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Personally I don't think the real question is if mod support should be in but rather what kind. We can go from an EQ2 style purely non-function changing cosmetic/aesthetic one all the way to a Wildstar style full replacement one (WoW and similar has override, not replacement).
I'm leaning towards the Wildstar style due to the high amount of customization both in form and function but at a minimum I would say to have one that gives full form customization.
At this stage in the development I am not sure if the devs can change focus enough to do what you want if they have not already done it. They have spoken about client side mods in other threads though....mostly in regards to cosmetic changes.
I personally like user created mods in most games and see no real issue with them other than 'exploit' mods. I just don't know how easy it is to limit that type and still allow the others....you seem to know more deathsheep....how much dev work goes into the protection aspect of allowing mods?
This would be an awesome feature! It would be amazing if you could have a long list of settings for this. So there would be a "Set Number" where you can set the max number of people you want it to auto invite before it stops. So say your friend is gonna get on in a half hour, you could set the number to 7(or 1 less than full, not sure what the team sizes are going to be) so you can have a spot ready when they get on. Then, you can have an option of "Preference" Where you can choose no preference, or I want 1 of everything, or more damage heavy, controller heavy, ranged heavy, melee heavy, etc. Those are the only settings that I can think of right now but I'm sure there's a lot more that can be done with a feature like that
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
Oh agreed. And this is why addons are handy.
They might not be suitable for *everyone* but allowing the UI to be extended in a variety of ways can help out those players who have those specific needs.
Hell, I am sure that most of the people here used MIDS for city of heroes... it was an excellent out of game tool. Now imagine being able to do something like that INSIDE the game. Being able to tweak/adjust as you needed.
Sure, there would be those who would still install MIDS for the "out of game" theory crafting, but I can also see people using it IN GAME as well.
Its kind of along the same lines as "why do people have scripts for IRC"? Because those scripts add something that the base client doesn't do, but that person needs it to be done[1]
((Yes, I do use the Runecrafter Addon for wildstar... even though there is a more than suitable spreadsheet available on the web for me to use))
[1] Even if all it is coding up a "texas Holdem" or a pacman clone that you can play whilst waiting for stuff to start.
I'm a bit worried that this might be one of the things that DSFH and MWM had differences of opinion over. The sad part is that you can drive yourself batty trying to anticipate the future like this. It's like back when CoH launched, it would have been hard to believe that ten years later:
[list][*]processors with 2-4 cores would be common, and 6-8 cores would not be unusual,
[*]video chips on mid-range cards would have thousands of rendering pipelines, and decent video could be had from on-CPU graphics,
[*]3840x2160 resolution would be available in high-end machines, and DPIs could be high enough to make the screen-door effect irrelevant, and
[*]touch UIs would be commonly found in tablets, which would also have powerful enough graphics to be useful.[/list]
And again, IMHO Mids-like hero builder tools would be much better as external items to the game (plugins, apps that work off shared XML files, whatever) than having one built-ion thing everyone complains about and the devs don't have the spare manpower to support. (Disclaimer: I could be full of beans and this could be one of those things which requires little effort because it would reuse lots of existing infrastructure.)
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
(BTW, when I first read the title for this topic, I thought we were talking about case mods. Hoboy...)
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
I'll take a quote from Lothic "If they don't want it, they don't have to use it"
Also, why would it be more likely that it would get more support out of the game than in the game? And if it needed tweaking then it could just get optimized with another mod.
Even if it was outside the game, If the person who makes the new "MIDS" plays CoT, then any updates could just roll out from outside the game to inside.
The Carnival of Light in the Phoenix Rising
"We never lose our demons, we only learn to live above them." - The Ancient One
Avatar by lilshironeko
I'm not thinking of just tweaking. I'm thinking "what if someone comes up with a radically different way of designing character builds." If you've got a builder in-game, you have to sync them, possibly by hand, and the new builder couldn't have an in-game UI. If you take all builders and make them mods, providing just the API needed to let them talk to the game, then you avoid all that. Further, you could have builders talking to each other or other tools.
Of course, maybe they really want a builder to ship withthe game. Then I'd lobby for that builder to be a mod that ships with the game, rather than something more tightly wound into the system. Developing it would highlight the necessary APIs so the devs don't forget any, and if they released the source, it could be used as a template for others to work from.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
I'm the guy who is tasked with developing the chat system. A notepad/note taking system is already being discussed. I've been directly tasked to design its UI and its functionality and have been given guidelines. Allowing for modifications to enable the full functionality of specific devices is on the table. There's even been talk of enabling the more recent forms of VR.
I have a visual mockup of the chat that has been the base of internal discussion. I'm debating it's release to the community without vetting though. If you have requests concerning chat please send me a private note.
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[color=#FF0000]Senior Developer/Project Manager/Co-Founder... and then some.[/color]
It hasn't seen any activity in over a year, but I'll pimp my [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/chat-tabswindows]chat requests[/url] thread anyway.
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
Not that my opinion has any weight, but I'd say don't release before vetting.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
+1.
;)
I remember posting in that thread. ;D
One addon/mod that I would have *loved* for City of Heroes would have been a "non full screen enhancement slotting screen".
Or an alternative "Tailor" window.
Both of those were full screen, and removed the ability to communicate with other players whilst you were using those screens. And you could quite possibly spend a LONG TIME in those windows, doing what you do.
A simple addon could have changed it so that they were smaller and movable, and still allow your chat window to be visible.
Hell, I know of some addons where they are quite literally the "base UI" in terms of functionality with all the window decoration turned off.
Side note: One addon that I have just come across for Wildstar actually changes/tweaks your graphic settings according to the zone you are in (you can set the zone, graphic settings accordingly)
So for City of Heroes, this would have been along the lines of "automatically hit The Hive and turn all settings down to minimum/what I set" so you could still have a playable framerate. Leave the zone: Return back to normal.
Sure, you could set it so that the base client can optimize the settings according to frame rate.... but that then means that it would take place *everywhere* (even in empty zones) if your find your game start to chug. I might be fine with the chugging in one zone and not another.
So this addon actually does what you tell it to WHERE you tell it to.
As always: Mods are there for people to use. You don't have to use them, but at least with Wildstar and World of Warcraft, the developers have been *willing* to roll player made addons into the base UI; especially if it is a "missing feature". You cannot expect the developers to come up with solutions for *everything*, and mods help them in this case.
This doesn't mean that those addons stop being developed, just that (for some addon developers) you have to find additional features to add (Scrolling Combat Text... lets add the facility to change the font/colours used for healing/damage/crit hit numbers whilst in combat as an example. Or if the health coming IN goes up the screen, and damage IN goes down the screen. Health going OUT goes UP in a different color, Damage OUT goes down in a different color). Some people might just find this method of information being relayed to them better than the normal "Numbers stay still, just the color changes" style of CoX.
I agree. Think of the animals!
/ PETA
// People for the Ethical Treatment of Assets
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[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
The key component here is ... don't write the programming in a way that is [b][i]*SO TIGHT*[/i][/b] that not even the original programmer can understand its functionalities. You want to have the [b]Easy to Modify [+10][/b] perk applied to pretty much anything having to do with the User Interface (something that City of Heroes DID NOT DO!).
Why?
Because whatever you do for launch is NOT going to be where the game will eventually end up. This stuff WILL GET REWRITTEN. It WILL BE overhauled and refactored at some point, and that's a Good Thing™. As proof, just look at the forums here. Everyone knows that the forum software in use right now is sub-optimal, but at the moment we're "stuck" with using it because it's going to be an incredible hassle to swap it out for something else (and the people who would have to do it have better things to do right now).
In City of Heroes, the entire Supergroup Base system desperately needed a complete overhaul as well as a "repeal and replace" of how the system worked as an editor/constructed environment. But that couldn't be done because the underlying code was inadequately documented and no one REALLY understood how it worked, so if you touched it, it broke ... horrifically. That then became a classic situation of a SUNK COST that prevented anything useful from ever being developed.
When you DESIGN IN, from the get go, the notion that something is going to be reworked and refactored, there is a completely different mentality concerning how everything has to hang together going on ... and it is one that presupposes and even embraces the notion that "modding" is a desirable outcome of the structural decisions being made.
At the last City of Heroes Player Summit, I was talking to [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Noble_Savage_%28Developer%29]Noble Savage[/url], one of their concept artists, and in response to a question I posed to him after dinner he responded (in a somewhat disgusted/dreary/hopeless tone of voice), "it's all spaghetti code now" in reference to the City of Heroes code base ... and the way he said it carried the weight of knowing that EVERYTHING in the game was spaghetti code by 2012. There wasn't a "clean" bit of programming left at that point, for all intents and purposes.
I also remember a Cryptic Studios release of some kind where they flat out admitted that the database used by Star Trek Online had become SO CONVOLUTED and ridiculously complex that the Developers couldn't even interact with it directly anymore. They had to write what amounted to "expert programs" that would allow them to edit the database (at all!) without crashing the entire game. To put it in the simplest possible terms, the complexity of what they were doing eclipsed the ability of their own Developers to understand what they had done (and were continuing to do), such that the only way to interact with their own database was to write another layer of computer programming to do the job for them. The result was a sort of "Willy Wonka's Chocolate" world, in which the code base couldn't (or at least, shouldn't) be touched by human hands (so to speak).
Designing in, from the outset, the intent and purpose of being able to "mod" aspects of the game is crucial to making sure that this sort of "dead end programming" is less likely to happen. That's because if the programming is kept "hermetically sealed" and no one outside the company ever gets to work with it, then it's possible (and incentivized!) to simply create a bunch of "hacks" to do the job and then sweep everything under the rug. It doesn't matter HOW it gets done, just that it DOES (and in time to make a deadline, usually). That kind of "crap" then starts accumulating and accreting and ultimately "hardening" into what amounts to a [b]Do Not Back Up, Severe Tire Damage[/b] configuration of sunk costs in programming. Eventually, you paint yourself into a corner, and then it's incredibly hard to get out of that position if you ever need to change something down the line so as to work BETTER under the hood (and free up resources for other priorities).
So I, for one, see an embracing of the "modding community" as being an all around win-win-win for everyone ... except for the deadline on initial delivery of the feature set involved. It'll "cost more" to design something that's [b]Easy to Modify [+10][/b], but MWM will [b][i]*SAVE*[/i][/b] so much time, effort and funding [i]in the future[/i] that it's practically a No Brainer™ that this is the way to go from the start.
And finally, I'd point out that City of Titans isn't supposed to JUST BE a game. It's intended to be a Community.
Mods and modding, more than PvP, encourages as "develops" a shared sense of Community in a game. It encourages people outside the game staff to invest their time, talents and resources into furthering the game's promise ... and its potential. Why would ANYONE want to turn that kind of spirit AWAY from City of Titans ... especially when it's pretty much that exact same spirit that has brought the official Developers of the game onboard at MWM in the first place?
{spoiler alert} It's in NO ONE'S (best) interest, in the long run, to program City of Titans in a deliberately Mod Unfriendly way.
I say that it is within MWM's [b]Enlightened Self Interest™[/b] to foster and encourage a modding community to take root and aid the development of City of Titans.
All opposed ... raise their prehensile digits ...
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Well, I've been playing with the idea of going with what City of Heroes/ Villains did and have a markup language borrowing from Microsoft's XAML (both were forms of XML if I recall) and customizing it for us and our players so they can do mods [i]safely[/i]. Special cases like game controllers and the like will need additional thought. The advantage of XML is everything is basically in a human readable form and you can identify (somewhat) readily what each thing is for or doing).
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[color=#FF0000]Senior Developer/Project Manager/Co-Founder... and then some.[/color]
So long as you don't do what City of Heroes did and use PERL for the UI programming ...
/em shudders
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
This might sound like a "bad thing" for you, but *honestly* take a page out of Wildstar/World of Warcraft/Rift do for their addons.
It is (primarily) LUA based scripting (wildstar uses XML formatting though). Wildstar goes the extra step and includes the code for ALL of their UI (everything from currency tracking through to the Market House and power bar layout) with the game as well as a GUI for addon making.
Sure, it might not be perfect, but it is what the developers use to make the UI for Wildstar, so there are no "developer only" options here.
Bonus points arise for developers updating/streamlining their API over time as well, so what could take a long time to resolve (ie getting the remaining time of a buff/debuff on a character) or several calls, was changed to something a lot easier to manage (i believe it is now a single call, and all the information is relayed at once).
In terms of controller support, that (for me) is NOT an "addon" functionality... that is a base game capability. If the game cannot bind "joypad button 1" to "Number 1" or something like that, then it sounds unlikely that the game would be able to do that with an addon.
Now saying that, using a game pad so that it is more "action based" (ie if you move the left joystick it goes into mouse look mode) could fall into "addon functionality". But the buttons/axis still need to be recognised by the game to implement [1]
[1] Wildstar whilst it has a "mouse look mode" that could work *brilliantly* for a game pad. However, it actually fails unless you use something like a programmable gamepad or Xpadder, because Wildstar *doesn't* actually recognise gamepad button presses as standard; so you need something to go between Windows and the game, so that the game recognises what is being sent. Unfortunately, that is the external software.[2]
[2] However, that doesn't mean that you cannot write an addon that at least *changes* the layout of the action bar to look like a game pad, and then use Xpadder to "re-program" your joypad to send mouse/keyboard presses.
Wow I'm not sure I ever knew that (or remembered it at any rate). Perl is a great hacker/scripting language for "having a single task and getting that single task accomplished" but it sucks for "implementing X if that thing X ever has to change/evolve over time". Using Perl would likely be one of my last choices for a MMO game UI. *shrugs*
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Explains a lot about the Eve Online UI though, doesn't it?
Yep, that used PERL for its UI (or at least it did at some point in the past... not so much nowadays, but it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case)
I only know about mods through Skyrim. My little niece loves the idea that I can turn the horses and dragons into My Little Ponies. I'm always looking for a new joke mod for when she visits.
Skyrim is a one player game, This is an MMO.
[b]Let me ask newbie questions:[/b]
1) Will other players get to see the various mods in question? Or will this be on the players computer only?
and
2) Will I need to coordinate mods with my team so we are all compatible? Or will this kill teaming?
I ask #1 because of the adult mods with Skyrim. They are not sanctioned by Bethesda, but the cat was let out of the bag...any mod can be applied now.
A lot of the mods described above look great. [u]Do the other MMOs exercise veto powers over the mods?[/u]
[img]https://s15.postimg.cc/z9bk1znkb/Black_Falcon_Sig_in_Progess.jpg[/img]
Mods are generally client side only.
Almost certainly the latter, as trevor pointed out. That said, you could simply play with other players who have the same mod, though it's almost certain that a given mod won't be able to share data with other players using the same mod over the connection.
For example, say you had a mod that replaced everyone's heads with rubber duckies. You'd be the only one that saw that. But someone else could install the same mod and see the same thing.
Now say you had a mod that only replaced your character's head with a rubber ducky. If someone else installed that mod, they'd only see their head replaced, not yours. There's no way for your copy of the mod to tell their copy that you're also running the mod. So much for the Secret Order of Plastic Waterfowl.
There's a longshot chance something could be made to work like that via workaround, such as using a secret global chat channel as an identify-friend mechanism. But you have to be careful or the devs might see it clogging up the chat server and kill it. Also something like that is wide open to disruption by others who know of the channel. Same thing with opening direct sockets between the clients, or relaying info through a shared web server, assuming such an API were even available.
Maybe, maybe not. On the one hand, if you have a mod and someone else doesn't, you can't really talk to them about whatever the mod is showing you, because they don't have it.
On the other hand, I've known WoW raiding guilds that had a list of required mods, and you get booted from the raid or guild if you don't use all of them.
I doubt they could exercise veto powers mod-by-mod, however they could veto [i]functionality[/i] by simply not supplying the necessary APIs.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
What follows is concerning addons of [url=http://www.curse.com/ws-addons/wildstar]Wildstar[/url]. [url=http://www.curse.com/addons/wow]World of Warcraft[/url] or [url=http://www.curse.com/addons/rift]Rift[/url] addons might have more/less functionality to what I am going to explain.
1) The addons described here are entirely client side only, so you only see what you want to see[ Basically, think of (what we are at least talking about in this topic) of UI modification and adding of features and NOT the modding of *character models*. Stuff from changing how the power bars look, to how health/endurance/other character information is displayed, to changing the look of the Auction house window looks (or adding extra function there...hello commodity scanner)
And even then, those would be client side only.
2) There is no "addon synchronisation" that is needed to team up with players who do use addons. If there is any "elitism" (ie use this mod or you cannot team with us) then those players would find reasons to NOT team with you even if addons were not possible in the game. And as there is (normally) no way to tell if another player is running a certain addon or not... I think you might get the idea here.
Typically not directly. They don't say "Addon 23 is banned from our servers". As all (MMO) addons are client side and call upon features/information that the developer allow to be passed onto the player. If an add-on does something that the developers feel *shouldn't* be done, the developers are able to remove or edit/introduce limitations on what that specific functionality would be.
Example: Developers might give the ability for an addon to go to the server and ask "which direction is %target from me". You can then use that information for the addon to Point an arrow in the direction of %target (which would be fine normally). This can then end up so that you could do this to *stealthed* players (welcome to hell in PvP.. stealth is now destroyed). The developers could change it so that "which direction is %target from me" *doesn't* work if the target is stealthed or if you (or the target) is flagged for PvP.
So if MWM allowed mods (look at [url=http://www.curse.com/ws-addons/wildstar]Wildstar[/url]/[url=http://www.curse.com/addons/wow]World of Warcraft[/url], and used a similar plan as Carbine/Blizzard do, they only put so much "power" into the hands of the players. Not everyone will take advantage of it... hell, not everyone took advantage of keybind files and macros in City of Heroes (or PopMenus or VidiotMaps or even MIDS), but they still put limits into what those could do. You couldn't write a macro to fire off 3 abilities... Why? Because the developers *limited* you to what a macro could do. It was powerful, but still had its limits.
Side note: Whilst you could well write an addon that replaced all the power icons to look like boobs, some addon hosting sites (curse.com springs to mind here) might not host it for you. It might not be against the terms of the developers, but it could be against the terms of the hosting site.
If you look at what some of WoW/Wildstar addons can do you can see a wide range of looks/features that get added. Sure, you will see DPS meters and threat meters but there are also addons that do automatic chat spam blocking / random costume selection / different UI looks (so that your health/stamina are semi circles around your character as an example) to Different inventory storage (with virtual bag sorting/searching capability) to changing how the enemy nameplates look like (or adding additional features such as when to show/not show them) to (in CoX terms) an enhancement slotting planner, showing stats post slotting.
*edit* I would say "ninja'd to the reply", but I took forever writing this post.
[b]Thanks.[/b]
I feel a LOT better about modding. Chalk me up in the support for mods category.
The only thing that would change my mind would be if the mods would edge out the company store. MWM needs the revenue to keep going.
[img]https://s15.postimg.cc/z9bk1znkb/Black_Falcon_Sig_in_Progess.jpg[/img]
Not quite sure how (or why! I suspect the engine uses it.) Wildstar uses Lua scripted UI (though I've coded in it). I can already parse XML. It's a standard data format. Quite generic. That's why everyone uses it (including as you noted, Wildstar). I doubt the UI will have much (if anything) scripted. It's going to be hard enough to do the XML structure for Unreal. (read the docs for UMG sometime and you'll see what I mean). Take a look at the docs online for XAML. It's not actually what will be used but it will give you a sense. If you've done web page layout you will also get the same idea.
And as for game pad ...
[img=512x288]http://gallery.thebasketcasesoftware.com/piwigo/_data/i/upload/2015/10/25/20151025024709-a591ca02-me.png[/img]
Yes, we have been talking about adding controller functionality. The above "diamond" pattern is nod to that.
(That white square is a teaser where the chat might go. :p )
Send me a list of the controllers you are interested in having supported and I'll see if we can pull it off. I can't make any promises about anything at this point, but I can try to do what I can. If the controller manufacture has something we can plug in at our end during development or a future update that would be best.
By the way, the image above was done entirely in XAML. Not one bit of code was involved (the background is just a screenshot). No scripting. Nothing. Simple text file really. Just like HTML. This was an early draft mockup.
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[color=#FF0000]Senior Developer/Project Manager/Co-Founder... and then some.[/color]
Mods are indeed client side only.
But this is why I'm trying to develop a file structure to make shareable mods. Did you ever see the format of demorecord files? Or of your character costumes? In CoH/CoV? Same idea, but more functionality is what I hope to have implemented. It may not be in the first release (time issues), but I certainly hope to have it in later updates.
What I want people to be able to do is use resources that live on their own computers (at least) i.e. sounds, images. To be able to have a custom layout for different situations (including colors and graphics). We plan on having the chat available in all the screens, including the tailor shop and such (yes, even in character creation stage, though the channels will only be globals). Other things will be note taking functions about other players, teams, places, etc. (also saved in that mod file - it's really a database). At least this is some of the stuff talked about anyways. Some features might be purchasable (don't ask me what - that still is to be decided).
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[color=#FF0000]Senior Developer/Project Manager/Co-Founder... and then some.[/color]
A lot of things flying around, and several things that are fairly clearly stuff I should have clarified before. So, in no particular order:
[list]
[*] Unreal 4 mods are, at the moment (and for the anticipated future), just a specific type of Unreal 4 *plugin*. That means that they can do anything a plugin can, but not anything that a plugin can't. The main additional limitation is that when you do a "shipping" build in Unreal, the results are encrypted and given certain security assumptions that can be checked at run-time. Mods cannot penetrate the "security wall" and call random things inside it, even if they know exactly what they want to call and where it lives -- they only get access to the parts of the stuff "inside" that have been specifically exposed as API integration points.
[*] This means that mods are not just a UI thing. Supporting user-configurable UI setups is by no means a bad thing, but that isn't "supporting mods". Apart from releasing the documentation so that mods can properly interact with the UI system in ways that won't cause havoc.
[*] There is very little to do to "support mods" of this sort, in terms of any specific technical task, that is difficult or time-consuming. It is, fundamentally, an issue of *designing* your APIs and *thinking through* the impacts, rather than just slapping them down. Deciding things like "does this information need to go to the client?"
[*] Everything that could be a mod can, *by definition*, also possibly be part of the main client. However, some of us would prefer to not wait ten years to get features we want. And even then, many things that mods might do are simply never going to happen because the ROI on them, from a business perspective, is too low.
[*] As a consequence of the above, the simplest way to think about mods is to consider them "future features we have not implemented yet". Redlynne's post does a good job of presenting *exactly* why this is so important even if you never have mods -- but if you've done the work, why not get the benefit?
[*] As far as chat, the lack of multiple input areas is *exactly* the problem I have. So no, CoH did not support what I desire. It came very close, but it missed that last step. My guess would be that there was some sort of design assumption in the underlying system that as broken, but I don't frankly know.
[*] Doing a mod in the precise way that Blizzard or others currently do it (LUA support) would actually be fairly non-trivial. You would have to build an entire "mod handling" subsystem to go down that road, which *would* have a non-trivial cost. This is one of those places where Epic's choice of how to approach things means that normal assumptions about mods often do not apply in the same way. Specifically, in this case, the path that provides *more* power to modders happens to also be the *easier* path for MWM, since even if you did a LUA mod system you'd *still* have to determine what APIs to expose to it.
[*] In all likelihood, most mods won't go so far as to need C++ (although things like hardware support mods would). Unreal's "Blueprint" system would cover a huge range of what might be relevant, and has the advantage of not requiring platform-specific builds of the plugin.
[*] Security-wise, you must assume that the client is under the complete control of your "adversary". That means that the security evaluation as to what to expose to client-side mods, and what to accept from them, is something that *already* needs to be done for much more important reasons.
[*] There are some additional things that I have not brought up in this thread because, frankly, I don't want to encourage people to think along those lines until the devs have had a chance to consider what they want to do as far as exposing APIs, etc. However, I will say that Gangrel's post nailed a couple of crucial points, such as "you could not write a macro that would fire three abilities at once", because they made the rule "one button push cannot trigger more than one power" as a boundary. This is a good thing; as long as you weren't trying to actively break that or abuse it somehow, you could rest reasonably assured that you weren't going to get banned for cheating. Folks found some *really* clever ways to use the macro language.
[*] In fact, the macro language more or less *was* "modding" for CoH, just without many of the niceties that "real mods" later made expected as baseline. Remember that if the macro language for CoT is as powerful, that means someone needs to *write* that language, and figure out a whole lot of stuff around it. See the comments above, re: LUA, and then add "write the language in the first place" as an additional task / cost.
[*] The reason I bring this up this early is that, even more so that most other things, supporting mods is something that is relatively easy if you do it "as you go along", but to try to retrofit it onto an existing system... well, I have three words for y'all: "Null the Gull". Which was a ridiculously elegant hack to work around the fact that the system was never built on solid software design and architecture principles in the first place, and thus became nearly impossible to modify, later.
[*] When I say "software professional", I mean that (unlike most software developers), I have come across code that I wrote seven or eight years ago, still actively in use in the core of our system at work. So I do actually know something about "built to last". Cryptic's games weren't, and to all indications aren't. That isn't necessarily a flaw, per se -- most MMOs at this point are build assuming a 3-4 year "run" once they open. Maybe 5 at the outside. But they have to be built quickly and, more importantly, *cheaply*, because a single large project failing hard could cripple the company making it, or destroy it entirely. But that involves using a very different philosophy of "how to do things" and "what to worry about" than building something that is *expected* to be able to last ten or more years from the time it goes live. That's on the edge of how long Microsoft supports their old OSes, and they are *infamous* for having ridiculously good backward compatibility and lifespans.
[*] Some of us *can* take a prediction at the future. Eight years ago I was absolutely certain that "faster processors" was going to start capping out, and the only way for our software to take on larger clients (who had more data, and thus would take longer to run) was to support having *more* processors. So the framework I built was fundamentally structured around "support very parallel processing" plus "insulate most of the code that others will write from needing to think about the fact that it is being run heavily multi-threaded". Turns out I was right -- and because we planned ahead, *even though we didn't make heavy use it for for three or four years*, we were able to take on two clients this past year that were an order of magnitude larger than any before. Other stuff had to happen as well, but if we hadn't built that framework back when "four cores" was a dev machine and most stuff was single-core, we wouldn't have been able to use a 32 core machine to complete a run in two weeks rather than "over a year".
[/list]
So: can I predict everything that the devs might include in the app at some point? Nope. Not even going to try. I *can* predict, however, with absolute certainty, two things: first, that there will always be more features requested than there is development time to add them, and second, that there will always be features requested that do not make sense to implement, from a business perspective. I can't tell you *which* features, but I can tell you that both of those things will be true. In fact, I'd be willing to stake my career on it -- because I already do.
I can *also* say that the best way keep costs down in the long run is to *not* allow the "hacks" to build up. There is a concept called "technical debt", that works much like financial debt. A hack today is cheap, but will incur a cost in the future if you ever have to touch that code again. Think of it as taking out a loan (immediate success) but having to pay interest on it (ongoing cost). If don't go back and *pay off* the debt (replace the hack with something clean), then the "interest" will keep compounding. And you'll start to run into "nobody will lend you money because you haven't paid back the stuff you owe" (your old hacks are blocking new features). If you want to see what it looks like when a company gets into that situation with real money, look at almost any of the "big players" in the late 90s, such as WorldCom. They had so much debt accrued that they couldn't even afford to *service* the debt (pay the interest). So they went bankrupt.
Or you can run a low monthly balance and pay it off regularly (hack when and where you need to, but actively *make time* to go back and fix the crufty bits periodically), and keep doing that... well, pretty close to indefinitely. Certainly as long as your bank is around and you're alive, anyway.
How does that relate back to mods? Well, the metaphor kind of falls apart here, because money doesn't really create more of itself. For those that understand the reference, mods are what open the door to the bazaar (and, admittedly, sometimes the bizarre), but those doors are only open if you've been keeping up with your debt payments. If you plan from the outset to do that, which is a good idea for a tremendous number of other reasons, then they only cost "walk over and pull open the doors". But if you haven't kept up, there's a giant pile of junked furniture in front of them preventing it. But also looking bad, probably smelling bad, housing vermin, and otherwise just being... unpleasant.
[hr]
[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Just to set the bar ridiculously high: imagine a mod for supergroup bases that was hooked up to custom LEGO hardware. Build your base as LEGOs, "scan" it in, tell it to update the actual base, and voila.
Or for just as much fun, reverse it: read your base layout from the game, and control a robot arm to assemble the LEGOs.
And for the triple crown: MWM contracts with LEGO to issue special sets of customized LEGOs for use with SG bases, a la Minecraft.
... okay, that last one isn't really as simple as that makes it sound (you can't just pay LEGO to do that, or at least, you can't pay them *enough* to do it, unless maybe you're Google). On the other hand, this is the age of the 3D printer, so maybe you don't need LEGO at all.
[hr]
[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
The last part about "technical debt" reminds me of my earlier [url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/refactoring-club]Refactoring Club[/url] thread.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
The only reason to haul in LUA is if you need a Turing-complete processing language, as opposed to just a markup language. (Yes, you could make a Turing-complete language out of XML, but it doesn't ship that way.)
The stuff I'm finding on XAML is really high-level, so I can't tell if it allows you to pull in a language like JavaScript to make the various defined UI elements do more complex things.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
derail: This reminded me of an addon for Wildstar: [url=http://www.curse.com/ws-addons/wildstar/232284-katia-builder-toolkit]Katia Builder Toolkit[/url]
Basically it adds a lot of additional functionality for when you want to edit your housing plot (or you want to copy stuff that is made of multiple smaller components). It even goes to do some logic so if you wanted something to be the average scale/rotation/placement of two other objects, this addon does it for you.
Whilst the stock UI for the housing plot is powerful (full 3 axis rotation/freeform placement/automatic stacking (so you can place a shirt on a chair and it would automatically be on the seat of the chair, or you can place a picture *automatically* on the floor/wall easily), it has a few bugs. And it is also lacking a couple of features that makes it a *LOT* easier for the "hardcore plot designer".
[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0qrMvrX4w4]Video of the Builder Toolkit[/url]
[img]http://www.carvware.com/images/screenshots/PS3Controller.png[/img]
You're going to need a LOT more UI elements than just 8 icons arranged in a pair of diamonds if you want to do controller support correctly.
Note that this number of buttons isn't that far off from the number of discrete inputs you can achieve with one of these ...
[img]http://assets.razerzone.com/eeimages/products/13785/razer-naga-2014-right-03.png[/img]
Perhaps some cross-pollination of effort would pay off?
[center][img=44x100]https://i.imgur.com/sMUQ928.gif[/img]
[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
To me proper controller support includes context sensitive changing of the buttons, that is that their functionality changes from pressing another button. By using that they would only need 2 diamonds at most and only show what they would do right now, thus if the functionality changes then change what the diamonds displays. A.k.a they can act as modifier-key like alt ctrl and shift does. Then there is the possibility of having two mods acting like an final "action key" rather than just key mods.
I'm not sure that making a controller specific UI, even just some elements) is good idea unless you make the game centered around controller usage (a.la DCUO), instead of just having it as an option. Think it should be like CO in this regard, just show the controller button instead of the keyboard shortcut but otherwise looking exactly the same. (CO has it's own problems here in that if you rebind keys then it breaks controller binds as well, it seems that it's a hard coded controller to keyboard conversion)
These are the devices that I use to currently[1] play MMO's with:
[img]http://assets.razerzone.com/eeimages/products/13965/razer-tartarus-gallery-4-v2.png[/img]
[img]http://media.roccat.org/img/products/Nyth/teaser/sub/1436887031/background/all/sub-teaser-nyth-v5.jpg[/img]
Thankfully they are both programmable so I can set what each button/keypress *does* on an application by application or profile by profile basis.
And at least with UI mods, you can come up with a *visual* layout that matches what you are using... even if the developers do not *directly* supply that layout, someone could come up with a way of showing that layout for you.
To be *totally* honest, I normally keep the side mouse buttons set as their standard (which is the number row of 1 through to = ), although that does depend on the game. The tartarus is the one that I tend to do the most customisation on, and that changes from game to game (or even just use it as an "easier to hit keyboard" when I use my joystick for Elite Dangerous.
But for those devices you don't need addon (or mod) support for them built into the game, because they are programmable *outside* of the game, and it is the drivers that tell windows "When I press THIS key, X happens". Windows then passes that information onto the game.
Side note: Skyforge *hates* my Tartarus game pad, and they have actually *actively* put in protections against virtual keyboards in their software... which screws up how the tartarus would work for it[2]. That was one game that I deleted as soon as I discovered this issue (about 5 minutes into loading the game up).
[1] I have also used the Logitech G13 and the Logitech MMO gaming mouse (G600) which are alternatives to the 1st and 2nd image that I have linked to (as well as using the Naga mouse)i
[2] It is also why Voice Attack speech/command software cannot interact with Skyforge
Question: will mods take money away from MWM? will they compete with the game store?
Free to play is dependent on people paying money to the game company.
[img]https://s15.postimg.cc/z9bk1znkb/Black_Falcon_Sig_in_Progess.jpg[/img]
That depends on what they allow in the mods API and what they them self sells but I think there will be hardly any overlap, mainly because I don't MWM is interested in giving/selling us those QoL things that can be done through mods. After all, that is the main reason they would give us the ability to use mods in the first place.
Another big difference would be that what MWM sells applies to your account so you get it automatically where ever you log in and can be seen by others in-game while mods would only apply locally to that install and only be seen by you (unless the mods communicate with each other, and even that has limits).
Agreed. The other thing to remember as well is that whilst they *could* sell QoL addons, it then sets precedent for allowing normal addon developers to charge for THEIR addons as well.
And in the MMO world, the general rule of thumb is "Addons are free... you do not charge for them. if you have to pay for an addon, you have been ripped off".
Then it gives the impression of "Yeah, its bugged... hand us $10 and get the working version". That wouldn't go down well either.
Side note: I notice that people are using mods and addons pretty interchangeably. I am sure that I have made the mistake in a couple of my posts.. but there is (at least for me) a difference between them.
For me, a mod is for a single player game. It can change the game world, add new content, allow you to cheat/twist play the game as and how you want. A mod can make it so that when you press the Z button, you whip out a beat box and everyone dances to death. A mod doesn't have to follow the rules set down by the original game developers (ROM Hacks are a version of mod, and there multiple skyrim/fall out 3mods out there).
Also for online play, you generally have to synchronise mods so that everyone is on the same page, and are able to interact with each other properly.
Lets take Minecraft as an example. There are a lot of "mods" for it, which change how the game world works, and you need certain mods installed on your system to play on some servers.
An addon is for MMO's and they have more restrictions placed on them. They are NOT able to do stuff that the developers do not allow. You are not prevented from playing with people who have addons or not, they are an additional layer on top of the base game. There are Minecraft addons that just change how information is displayed on YOUR end of it, but they cannot/do not change what other people see.
Actually, CO is an excellent example of one of the pitfalls of aiming for controller support "out of the box": it strongly influences the style of play available, both in encouraging folks to assume that movement while activating powers is trivial (it isn't, without a controller, for a significant number of people), and in terms of encouraging "everything you need fits on one bar" (with the rare bits on a second).
This led more or less directly to the fact that for probably 80% of the common builds in CO (and nearly *all* of the ATs), play rapidly boils down to "turn on one toggle power, and then spam one or two other powers as fast as they come up."
So, to be blunt, although I *like* playing a lot of games with controllers, and I've played CO with one off and on, it worries me that folks are already going down the road of building custom UI layouts targeting controllers, before we've even seen anything but the most generic "slap something up on the screen" variants of the main UI.
[hr]
[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
I don't know if I agree on all the distinctions there, but just to be clear now that this is raised: despite the name of the thread, everything I've discussed would fall under the "addon" category, if you go by that set of dividing lines. I think the reason I called it "mods" is because that's what Epic went with, but presumably because they want to support "actual mods" (as given above) rather than *just* addons. Which makes sense, since an addon in that case is just a more limited variant of a mod.
Although supporting actual *mods* that could be used on servers when the sunset happens would be nice, that's one of those pieces that could also be made irrelevant by certain decisions being made about "how sunsetting will happen" -- for example, if it was handled as a source fork of UE4, then mods aren't really relevant, since anyone desiring to could just change the source directly, in their copy. So I am, frankly, a lot less worried about that side of things. "How well the code is put together and handled over time" is going to be the dominant factor there no matter what approach gets taken.
As for Minecraft, Painterly and other texture packs would actually be an extremely good example of roughly how a "content only" addon would be put together. Minecraft does it by making use of how the Java classpath works, so that when it looks for a texture it ends up finding the one in the user's JAR files rather than the "built-in" one. Only two things are required, really: first, that there be some sort of documented naming convention for where things live and what they are called, and second, that everything that makes use of them is set up to obtain them properly (for whatever that means in a given context).
[hr]
[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
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On the other hand, Final Fantasy 14 shows that you can design an MMO to work with both mouse/keyboard as well as a controller.
To be honest, I would say that doing a UI layout so that it *showed* it as a controller layout instead of the traditional bars is an ideal example of an addon.
I would say that "Quality of Life" changes probably comprise the vast majority of MMO addons that I am aware of. And most of the ones that are "more powerful" aren't any more powerful than things you could macro in CoH, which means that they shouldn't become unbalancing to gameplay.
Quite simply, the thing about addons is that it lets anyone make those improvements and offer them to the community, rather than requiring MWM to code it all. It also happens to be one way around a business issue -- once you have even one person being paid to do a job, you can no longer have volunteers doing that job. They have to be paid an equitable wage, in some fashion, unless they are sufficiently "unusual" in corporate terms (for example, a C-level officer can do things like taking one dollar in salary, because it is presumed that the company cannot effectively force them into doing so involuntarily).
However, external people doing their own thing based on features you expose? Not generally a problem, because it can be demonstrated that the company isn't in a position to coerce them (and if they were ti try, it would generally fall afoul of even more serious laws).
So as was pointed out a little bit back in the thread, supporting this has at least the potential to be about far more than just the technical questions, but also about the community. Addons, as Gangrel pointed out, have by and large ended up having a cultural expectation of "free as in beer" being a minimum barrier and "free as in speech" being desirable but not always critical. And if it turns out that someone comes up with the Best Addon EVAR that addresses a critical gap in the main client, MWM can always get in touch with them and see about "rolling it in". As a rule most folks are okay with that simply because it means the company is taking on the commitment of supporting that code, keeping it up to date with future changes, etc.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]
Regarding FFXIV, I will have to defer to those that have played it. All I know is that CO went in a direction that "the folks I care about having a game for" never liked. And I'm the *only* one of that group still playing CO, despite all of us having lifetime memberships. And if you look at both the history of the project and how they set various things up, it is very clear that the original intent of "using a controller is the dominant mode of play" ended up having consequences throughout the system. But there is a difference between "supports using a controller as an alternative, not too unreasonably" and "aimed at that as the primary approach".
It may well turn out that MWM doesn't go down that road; I simply note that working on controller UI stuff before the "main" UI has been even remotely hashed out (at least, that's the status from where I'm sitting right now; I know nothing about where it actually stands, only what they've shown backers), leaves me a bit... concerned.
+1... google.
I have to agree that this is probably an ideal candidate for being an addon. I happen to know that UE4 has support for DirectInput devices already, on Windows, and so far as I know it has "standard support" for equivalents on at least Linux. So it really should be nothing more than some UI rearrangement and *maybe* a customized (or just extended) controller class. Which is probably a Blueprint-level thing.
If MWM decides it is a critical enough feature to block releasing until it is there, that's their business, although I would definitely question the wisdom of such a decision. But frankly, there is enough work to be done just in terms of getting core stuff working that I really hope they aren't getting lost in the weeds, because that is *incredibly* easy to do when trying to deal with UI stuff. What is in front of you is "real" to the brain in a way that the more abstract "back end" pieces aren't, and it has a nasty tendency to steal attention from other things, because of that. Even just *one* UI can do that.
The main exception can think of is a secondary basic UI that exists entirely to help spot bad assumptions. But in general that second UI shouldn't be aimed at some specific real thing -- it should be aimed at being as "wacky" as possible, as *different* as possible from the main one, as it can be while still being sensible. Otherwise it is only going to catch a small subset of the bad assumptions.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
and multipurpose sheep
[img]http://missingworldsmedia.com/images/favicon.ico[/img]