Bring back the mods


JackTrysGames

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Guest jeffpeng

Not saying I am particularly fond of modding, but:

Hinterland didn't remove mod support, they changed how part of the game is released. By that mods that were made for pre-1.6 don't work anymore. People figured out modding Minecraft after it was obfuscated. People have already figured out how to bring back mods to The Long Dark after IL2CPP. I won't take too long until most of them are back. Use your google muscles.

 

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18 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

People have already figured out how to bring back mods to The Long Dark after IL2CPP.

Yeah, there's a mod loader that allows people to read from and write to game objects (I think the published version actually only supports static fields for now) and that allows you to manually rewrite the game's assembly at runtime, but that's it. That's a far cry from what was possible with Harmony. Also, having to write mods in C++ is a huge hurdle for people who want to get into modding and who don't have tons of experience yet. Having to install IDA / Ghidra / whatever to disassemble the game's binary to make sense of what the game's various methods do is a huge annoyance, as well. Also, these mods would then rely on fixed offsets within the game's binary, so they'll almost certainly break after every ever-so-small update to the game.

18 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

It won't take too long until most of them are back.

Yeah, no. We're sitting on thousands of lines of legacy code written by modders that either aren't around anymore or don't have time or motivation to work on modding anymore. We simply don't have the manpower to rewrite all of these mods in a different programming language, with a different modding framework that has fewer features, and worse modding tools overall.

For a game that's eventually supposed to get mod support, that's a pretty rough deal.

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Guest jeffpeng
2 minutes ago, StrangerFromTheInternet said:

so they'll almost certainly break after every ever-so-small update to the game.

That's kinda the problem modding "true" binaries, yes. But honestly ... that's not the dev's problem.

3 minutes ago, StrangerFromTheInternet said:

We simply don't have the manpower to rewrite all of these mods in a different programming language

That's kinda the problem modding a game with a rather small userbase - small compared to things like Skyrim or Minecraft, which have modders that count in the tens of thousands. But again, not really the dev's problem.

4 minutes ago, StrangerFromTheInternet said:

For a game that's eventually supposed to get mod support, that's a pretty rough deal.

If - and by this time I doubt it - The Long Dark gets modding support they will want to have it restricted to what you are supposed to mod. Like adding some food, tweak weapons, add new maps, things like that. Removing breath, for example, probably isn't in their playbook. Also godmoding, teleporting, or what have you that was possible with the right mods which you can't really consider modding, but more like cheating, is something they will want to avoid with all means neccessary.

I think we could now have a discussion on if someone paying money for code should be allowed to use said code as they see fit. And I'm probably with you on that argument. I'm involved in open source for 20 years, not big time, but with a few contributions, mostly in the GNU and Linux code bases, and also Minecraft modding back in the 1.7 days. But I'm also making a living writing proprietary code, and if there wasn't such a thing as ownership of intellectual property I'd be out of a job in no time. And as such it's at Hinterland's gusto to allow or prevent modding either with their EULA, by means of obfuscation or, as it happened in this case, converting bytecode into actual machine code. Doesn't mean I have to like it (since I indeed believe in free software - free as in free speach, not as in free beer), but I guess I'll have to respect their stance on it.

It is possible to do binary modding (maybe the most popular example of this is SKSE), but you kinda rightly point out that this is a job hardly possible for a signle individual unless comitting to it full time (maybe patreon the project? Crowdfund?). But if that was done actual modding could be done in a simpler language like JavaScript. Let the mod loader expose an API via V8 and people could mod TLD with limited programming experience. Sure that wouldn't bring back legacy mods, but it could be a way forward. Basically my point is: if the community has a big enough interest in it - it'll happen.

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1 hour ago, jeffpeng said:

If - and by this time I doubt it - The Long Dark gets modding support they will want to have it restricted to what you are supposed to mod. Like adding some food, tweak weapons, add new maps, things like that. Removing breath, for example, probably isn't in their playbook. Also godmoding, teleporting, or what have you that was possible with the right mods which you can't really consider modding, but more like cheating, is something they will want to avoid with all means neccessary.

Yeah, but then again, it's not like you'd even need modding tools for that 😛

But on a serious note, anything beyond the most basic mods will require some code to be written to enable custom functionality, and if that's not possible with Hinterland's mod support, then it's pretty much DoA. Most stuff that the community has been requesting for years (and which ye olde mods provided), like binoculars, more food items with special effects on the player, new firestarting items, etc., all require some code to be written. From what I've been able to tell, most people aren't just looking for "more of the same", which is the only thing you could do without writing code.

2 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

It is possible to do binary modding (maybe the most popular example of this is SKSE), but you kinda rightly point out that this is a job hardly possible for a signle individual unless comitting to it full time (maybe patreon the project? Crowdfund?). But if that was done actual modding could be done in a simpler language like JavaScript.

Yeah, something like that would obviously be sweet, but I wonder how well this would really work for a game like TLD. Many TLD mods don't just extend the game's code in some way, but also change the game's existing functionality. Doing that from a scripting language but targeting a native binary - without having to embed asm into the scripting language and without ruining the game's performance - sounds like a horrendous task.

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1 hour ago, DerpyLemon115 said:

Bring back what mods exactly? I might not be entirely in the know about, this but the only "mod" for TLD that I ever heard of is a save editor, and that doesn't really count as a mod (And from I understand the editor still works to this day). So were there any mods out there that are actually worth bringing back? Genuine curiosity. 

There were around 80 mods written for TLD by about a dozen modders, but they're not that easy to find. Part of the reason why you've never heard of them is because talking specifics about modding or even linking to mods is a big no-no on this forum.

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Guest jeffpeng
3 hours ago, StrangerFromTheInternet said:

Yeah, something like that would obviously be sweet, but I wonder how well this would really work for a game like TLD. Many TLD mods don't just extend the game's code in some way, but also change the game's existing functionality. Doing that from a scripting language but targeting a native binary - without having to embed asm into the scripting language and without ruining the game's performance - sounds like a horrendous task.

I never got it finished, and hence never released it, but I had something rather similar for Minecraft 1.7, which basically could do bytecode manipulation from JavaScript - among other things. Maybe not horrendous, but "tedious" is probably an apt description. Basically the sheer size of the undertaking killed it. 

I have read a bit in the old pre 1.60 codebase of TLD back then, but no actual experience modding TLD (again, since I respect the devs wishes regarding that). But to do something like that on actual binaries ..... sounds indeed something hard to do, and being able to do ASM from JavaScript/Lua/Python/ChooseYourPoison would kinda defeat the purpose of a scripting language in the first place.

If I were to create a modding API for JavaScript (which is my poison) you'd have to have a lot of hooks into a lot of the inner workings of TLD, and this would still come out rather limiting to modders. So for example adding new food should be rather straight forward. Implementing binoculars as they were .... hu, that would require hooks to the camera. And so forth ..... Of course you always lose a lot of capabilites working on an intermediary API rather than modding the source.

Thinking about it I almost wanna get into this :D But nah, HL doesn't want mods, so no modding for me. What you people could do .... is play pre 1.60 via TimeCapsule. But I guess that's obvious.

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4 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

I never got it finished, and hence never released it, but I had something rather similar for Minecraft 1.7, which basically could do bytecode manipulation from JavaScript - among other things. Maybe not horrendous, but "tedious" is probably an apt description. Basically the sheer size of the undertaking killed it. 

Funnily enough, we actually used to do that in some places with Harmony when the usual Prefix / Postfix methods wouldn't cut it: we take the method's IL (think bytecode, but C#) and modify it, and Harmony would install the new method after doing some checks that we wouldn't crash the VM 😄

Messing around with Java bytecode is extremely interesting, too. Writing Java Agents to modify a program's instructions using ASM (https://asm.ow2.io/) is such an awesome hack! (using the original meaning of hack)

8 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

What you people could do .... is play pre 1.60 via TimeCapsule. But I guess that's obvious.

Yup, a lot of people are already doing that, and I've written some instructions on how to download TLD v1.56 to a different location using the Steam command line, as well. That way, people can have both the current and an old version of TLD installed at the same time 😀

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Guest jeffpeng
1 minute ago, StrangerFromTheInternet said:

Messing around with Java bytecode is extremely interesting, too. Writing Java Agents to modify a program's instructions using ASM (https://asm.ow2.io/) is such an awesome hack! (using the original meaning of hack)

Yeah I've done that extensively. :D *sigh Minecraft modding ..... good days.

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On 1/8/2020 at 10:55 AM, JackTrysGames said:

A recent update removed the ability to mod the game, crippling a major part of the game's community. I speak not only for me here, but several hundreds of people. Bring back the ability to mod the game, please.

The Long Dark has never had support for mods. It is something that is on our road map for the game's future, but not something we have the capacity to support at this time. Due to this updates may at times break unofficial mods since as we are improving the game for our players it may chance things that these unofficial mods rely on to operate.

While we are allowing theoretical talk about whether or not people would like modding to come to the game, we are not allowing discussion or promotion of any mod in particular. This is because unofficial mods can cause issue with how the game operates and we are not able to offer technical support to anyone who has modded their game. 

So please if this discussion continues refrain from offering instructions on how to apply existing mods, where to find them or what exists.

Thank you.

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I only recently looked at mods.  When I realised that using mods it was possible to not die, to have unlimited carrying capability, to give yourself any equipment that you wanted, restore to 100% condition all of your resources it sounded fun.  It might have sounded fun initially, but It spoiled the game for me.


One of things I have enjoyed about TLD apart from the challenge of surviving in the frozen wastes, is this forum.  I find it interesting to see what achievements and difficulties others have, and learning from their experiences.  In spite of TLD being a single-player game it felt like it was a group activity against the challenges of Bear Island.  I felt that I knew and respected some of the regular contributors.   When I realised that some players were using these mods and not mentioning it, I felt that much of what I read of the experiences of others was misleading and the the respect I had for others became questionable.


That, and the problems with timberwolves, decided me to have a break with TLD for a while.   I still think it is the best game I have ever played and I'm sure that I'll return to it, but it is good to escape from Bear Island and try another game.

 

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Guest jeffpeng
4 hours ago, Admin said:

This is because unofficial mods can cause issue with how the game operates and we are not able to offer technical support to anyone who has modded their game. 

I guess this is maybe the best point why mods on the "metal" indeed are a problem. If you allow modding via a dedicated API you can limit the amount of things that can go wrong, especially if the mods run in some sort of sandbox like they would with - for example - Lua (I hate Lua ...). If you introduce foreign code to a codebase that is not fully understood things might break at joints nobody has looked at before. I know it's a farcry from how modding games work, but I deal a lot with Wordpress installations at work where a plugin I wrote (I hate Wordpress, too, btw) works perfectly fine in 90% of cases, but some other plugin somehow breaks my code because it rewrites some core class because why not? 

Just think about if Hinterland officially supported mods the way they were done prior to 1.60. Let's say there is a very popular mod a large percentage of players is used to work with. At that point Hinterland would have to keep the codebase compatible to third-party code. Expand that to maybe 20 popular mods, and the devs are mostly looking for ways to keep mods alive and have new functionality not break existing mods.

Again, if you actually want to do this, and make it also doable for people with limited programming experience, you need a sandboxed API to work on the actual game engine as both a safeguard for the codebase and a compatibility layer to keep mods alive after changing the game itself. And that really is nothing to be sneezed at.

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  • 6 months later...
On 1/10/2020 at 12:38 PM, Admin said:

The Long Dark has never had support for mods. It is something that is on our road map for the game's future, but not something we have the capacity to support at this time. Due to this updates may at times break unofficial mods since as we are improving the game for our players it may chance things that these unofficial mods rely on to operate.

While we are allowing theoretical talk about whether or not people would like modding to come to the game, we are not allowing discussion or promotion of any mod in particular. This is because unofficial mods can cause issue with how the game operates and we are not able to offer technical support to anyone who has modded their game. 

So please if this discussion continues refrain from offering instructions on how to apply existing mods, where to find them or what exists.

Thank you.

I find statements like these to be... complicated... which is definitely not meant to be complementary. Whether or not The Long Dark is modded, is not Hinterland's decision, the fan base will modify the game if they choose. Highly modded games are usually indicative of highly popular ones, the more people play, the more likely someone who knows what they're doing will become annoyed at some aspect of the game, and attempt to "correct" it. At least in their eyes. Vampire the Masquerade received some heavy-duty mods, Nestor Gomez(KSP) at one time wasn't going to support them, now KSP lives on them, Stardew Valley uses code injection, Dangerous Waters, a very old and very discontinued game, has a loyal and strong mod community keeping it alive, GTA 5...

I read somewhere, on some Hinterland thread, that the lead designer, I really can't be bothered to look up the thread or even his name, stated that Unity doesn't lend well to mod support... KSP is written in Unity, and they ported from version 3 to 4 to 5 during development, and kept mods alive during the process. Actually, KSP is a good example of one way to do mods. The game itself doesn't actually support mods directly, it instead loads an external library, separately maintain by the community, which then loads properly formatted plain text files and libraries. The Hinterland Dev also said they had to decide what mods they'd like to see in the game. Again, not really their choice, as soon as a way in is given, beyond code injection and manipulation, someone is going to bodge something together that is counter to Hinterland's "wishes".

Also, no game, that I'm aware of, offers technical support for mods, every single studio states something along the lines of, "please uninstall all mods and attempt to reproduce the crash," or whatever. Even save files that have had mods applied in their histories are usually excluded from direct support. Again, KSP offers mod technical support through their community... direct technical also actually, we're basically computer and space nerds, and some on the forum expend herculean amounts of effort to help people get things to work.

Satisfactory is another great example of a studio not taking an active role in mods, but encouraging their community to play. At first, it was a bodge using some kind of DirectX hack to get code into the game... now it's a loader or something. I'm not sure how the new version works actually. Update 3 broke everything, mod wise... Coffee Stain literally said, "sorry, but look, pipes!" Everyone had a right old laugh, then within a few weeks, the community got almost everything back up and running.

My only interpretation of statements like these from Hinterland is, "this is our game, and you'll play it they way we want you to." Which is a huge sign reading "go away" to me. One of the reasons I got involved with The Long Dark way back when, was because of the promise of future mod support... I think to some extent, the ambiguous statements on modding, restricting discussion to the theoretical and the like, is an attempt to not avoid alienating part of the potential audience... but I interpret them as a passive aggressive rejection of the concept... Or maybe they're afraid a prospective modding community will show them up, insert something they wounder why they didn't think of first... or it's as basic as artistic control. Or it's authoritarian and this whole post gets censored, which at this point, I'm assuming, hostility to mods amd new mechanics was the reason I stopped playing a few years ago.

Games live and die by their power users, people who have some kind of devotion to a game, who buy copies to give away(I checked, prior to 2017 I bought 30 copies), or write mods to add realism, or conversely, cartoonish antics, or make episodic stories to post on youtube... Winter's Embrace brought me back to the game for a little while... I got the badge, cleared out a few regions... now, I'm not sure what'll bring me back to the game tomorrow... or cause me to stream it again... I definitely can't say, "that's a cool mod, let see what a playthrough will be with that!" Which is somewhat heartbreaking, The Long Dark got me back into gaming, got me on Steam, made me care about the character... it WAS basically the only game of it's kind, and uniquely Canadian... Now it just feels like an old game whose time's past... Hinterland could change that over night... probably won't though... theoretically speaking... Which BTW, should actually read, hypothetically speaking.

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On 1/10/2020 at 12:15 PM, peteloud said:

I only recently looked at mods.  When I realised that using mods it was possible to not die, to have unlimited carrying capability, to give yourself any equipment that you wanted, restore to 100% condition all of your resources it sounded fun.  It might have sounded fun initially, but It spoiled the game for me.

To me starving to death in a blizzard sounds fun. I am looking forward to some mods which will shift the challenge more towards fighting the weather instead of endless wolves.

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6 hours ago, odizzido said:

To me starving to death in a blizzard sounds fun. I am looking forward to some mods which will shift the challenge more towards fighting the weather instead of endless wolves.

Same here, once official mod tool launches, there will definitely be several mods which increases the difficulty and realism to the next level. With the official tool and support, I'm sure some creative minds will bring TLD to next level. I think Hinteralnd will surely wants to see them. I guess, a part of reason of why Hinterland is reluctant to unofficial modding might be some "cheating-like" mods which makes the game too easy and offers too simple roundabouts. I'm not saying I don't like them, I respect mod developers and mod users for such mods. Some of them are based on great ideas. What I think is, if there are some brilliant mods that could help players to enjoy more realistic and challenging experience and also overlaps with the intention of TLD developers, I guess devs will not that much reluctant to them. (These are just my pure guess. )

So I really wish Hinterland solves (maybe they did already?) their optimization, performance, and bug issues related with Unity as smooth as possible, and then throw us all great ideas and plans they had for this game. And of course more new maps too! 

11 hours ago, Joelle Emmily said:

I read somewhere, on some Hinterland thread, that the lead designer, I really can't be bothered to look up the thread or even his name, stated that Unity doesn't lend well to mod support... KSP is written in Unity, and they ported from version 3 to 4 to 5 during development, and kept mods alive during the process. Actually, KSP is a good example of one way to do mods. The game itself doesn't actually support mods directly, it instead loads an external library, separately maintain by the community, which then loads properly formatted plain text files and libraries. The Hinterland Dev also said they had to decide what mods they'd like to see in the game. Again, not really their choice, as soon as a way in is given, beyond code injection and manipulation, someone is going to bodge something together that is counter to Hinterland's "wishes".

 

I'm not Hinterland people and nowhere close to game industry, but I have some experiences in developing and coding using Python... So this is just my pure guess. I think, it might be the direction of the source code during early phase of the development of this game game was only partially ready for mod or they may not have enough time to consider future modding possibility in full scale. Which is understandable as a crowd-funded product, where the survival and official release is the top priority rather than long-term sights and plans. It is usually not easy to predict and prepare such long future for crowd-funded projects. Then now, as time flows and as the game gets bigger and bigger, a lot more problems to solve. Yet limited time, budget, and manpower is a sort of chronicle issue around many indie developers and indie studios. 

Again, I'm not in game industry, so I'm not sure how much the difficulty of coding and developing differ among different games and genres. But it might not be fair to compare KSP and this one. We don't know how much budgets and programmers were available at the early phase of both studios, and we don't know how tight the schedules were for both games, for example. There can be many reason why products based on the same engine and the same configuration differs. It happens in other industries too. I heard that this game had (and maybe still has) a performance and optimization issue. These are definitely not easy problem to resolve, and Unity is not Hinterland's product. 

11 hours ago, Joelle Emmily said:

My only interpretation of statements like these from Hinterland is, "this is our game, and you'll play it they way we want you to." Which is a huge sign reading "go away" to me. One of the reasons I got involved with The Long Dark way back when, was because of the promise of future mod support... I think to some extent, the ambiguous statements on modding, restricting discussion to the theoretical and the like, is an attempt to not avoid alienating part of the potential audience... but I interpret them as a passive aggressive rejection of the concept... Or maybe they're afraid a prospective modding community will show them up, insert something they wounder why they didn't think of first... or it's as basic as artistic control. Or it's authoritarian and this whole post gets censored, which at this point, I'm assuming, hostility to mods amd new mechanics was the reason I stopped playing a few years ago.

 

Yeah, I feel sad too, about the idea of limiting the freedom of modding. I see so many games flourished even more than original thanks to great mods that are based on very creative approaches, and some of them are not in the same direction with the intention of design and development or only within the minimum degree. But at the same time, I think we need to respect such decisions even if we don't like it. Well, TLD is based on good ideas and really enjoyable game IMO, and I think I need to respect all those efforts and time of developers for this achievement so far. 

I hope, once official modding tool comes out, then maybe devs of this game will change their minds after seeing all those bright ideas and great possibilities, and may open more freedom to mods. Who knows? I wish to remain as optimistic when I think about the future of modding in TLD. I myself also wish to try something, yet my time is so limited... Anyway, let's hope the bright side will coming.  

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 7/22/2020 at 1:42 AM, sonics01 said:

Same here...

All game developers are losing my respect, and... I don't really owe them anything to begin with, I paid for the product, furthermore, I paid for it when certain promises were made to the community via their roadmap. Personally, I think Canada and other countries should go the way of Australia, and start suing and otherwise legislating these companies into good practices. No Man's Sky is a huge example of bait and switch, Sean Murry sat there and promised the world; then Hello games turned around and sold an early access at full price. Only in the last few months has the game come into line with what Murry and co promised. Peter Molyneux over promised on every single game he was ever involved in...Anthem... Fallout 76... Andromeda... the list is literally endless. The gaming industry is an absolute mess, and no one seems to really care...

Here is what Hinterland said they were going to add to the game, but haven't, when I bought it in 2016: MOD SUPPORT!, Cougars, Axes, wellbeing system(all we really got was cabin fever), primitive fire starting, more first-person presence, NPCs in Sandbox, parley system (all we have is a button masher), improved fire starting (IE blowing mechanics), snowshoes/skis, spring Sandbox, moving water, improved fishing mechanics, wolfpack behaviours (they stand around in groups, but the AI does not interact), wildlife interactions IE Wolves vs. Bears (if it's there, I've never seen it happen), Grizzly Bears, Sandbox survivor personas (I assume a character selection), VR, crafting for safehouse customization, crafting for clothing customization, full-seasons sandboxing, travel options (IE canoes and horses), long-distance travel, planting(crops I assume), and sandbox AI community social dynamics...

That is a very long list of stuff, and even if it was a ""theoretical", would like to have list, it shouldn't have been posted to a roadmap with time frames and update names. They made it look like an expected feature set... And even if it wasn't intended to be a lie, it ended up being one. A very large part of me believe that they're pushing back mod support integration, because if they do allow mods, they would be instantaneously showed up by the community. Want such and such? FireStarter80 coded it and built new assets. You want so and so? DarkLongBoy built a backend addon that'll allow you to do that yourself... If you saw an advertisement for a colour television, and when you got their it was monochrome green(yes I'm dating myself), you'd be justifiably livid... Cellphone carriers are now forced, by law, to unlock your phone so you can switch carriers while retaining its use... a battle is continuing as we speak for the right to repair farming equipment... almost every jurisdiction has lemon laws pertaining to cars... Every industry has checks and balances... except software.

Is Hinterland the worst? Not even close, there's much worse out there. Should we give them a break for not being complete con-men? No, absolutely not. In any other circumstance, they stole my money, and did it 30 times over because I kept buying copies and giving them away. The Long Dark is a very big reason I no longer gift keys or games... not the only reason, but a large one... it's one of the reasons I no longer get excited for new games... And you can say they have legitimate reasons for not expanding the game too far beyond what it currently is... having only 2000 concurrent players and only middle of the road sales would be a very big reason for that... but I really do not care. They've made a decision, it's alienated a portion of the community, and that, essentially, is life, it's the reality of software design and allowable false advertising.

But why Hinterland and The Long Dark has hit so close to home? It's because it's always been uniquely Canadian. In winter, I can look out my window and see a scene very close to what's in the game. Or not see, because we frequently have whiteouts exactly like what's in the game. I walked around Pleasant Valley and Mystery Lake and am convinced they referenced photos from places I've been. And they received Canadian taxpayer's dollars through "the board's of Canada", which is the generic catch all term for the million and a half funds and foundations that give Canadian companies money to produce something. I expected my countrymen to be better than EA, and Bethesda, and Konami, and Hello Games... and every other shady publisher willing to lie just to push another few units out the door. In the gaming world, The Long Dark is as iconic as Canadian, as Mounties... but their business practices, wouldn't seem out of place if their headquarters were in silicon valley...

That's my rant. As for the supposed technical issues, and comparing games, it's not apples and oranges, nor can there be something inherent in the coding to make modification excessively difficult, unless you're attempting to obfuscate something within the instruction set. Other games that have no inherent support for modding, but have robust communities, are Stardew Valley and Satisfactory. Nothing in their code is setup to load external libraries or assets, both are VASTLY different games and use radically different engines, but both accomplish modification in near identical fashions, and in which KSP ORIGINALLY did modding, before Squad inserted a preloading procedure to look for one specific file which then loads other mods. And I am very aware of the evolution of KSP, because I was involved with it's modding community. How modding is accomplished when it's not directly supported, is through code injection. or sometimes memory manipulation followed by injection. Some basic understanding of a program's defined calls are need to accomplish this correctly, but basically, a boot strapper inserts itself into the loading of a piece of software, and adds more executions between existing ones. If you'd like to visualize how this occurs using the language you already understand. Imagine you've written a function, then someone comes along, changes the name of your function, inserts a new one with the original name so the program automatically calls it, then re-appends your function to the bottom of their's... or vis versa, sometimes you want the original code to load first.

That's basically it. That's modding in its most basic, and complex form. Every single piece of software does this to some extent as well, whether you're calling Microsoft's native APIs to do a thing, or you're fixing Unity's glitchy native physics with the extremely common patch, everything has some kind of modification to existing libraries to do something, adding to one that someone else has created for a game, is no harder or mysteriously difficult. Sometimes things don't work, sometimes they act in a manor that isn't expected... but the exact same thing happens during a regular development cycle, and you just have to work out the bugs. SAYING you won't allow mods, or talk about specific mods, is a jive, Hinterland has it's archived versions of the game, that they specifically say they will not give technical support for... mods would be no different, and would not generate very much additional requests for service than the legacy versions likely do, nor would they require a novel approach to deal with, in both cases, you simply reply, "I'm sorry, we do not offer support for [legacy/modded] games. The community helping one another on a game's public board without the company being involved or enforcing, literally happens everywhere all the time. I don't want to outright say that their official statements are a lie or outright obfuscation... but I can't really think of another plausible explanation. the only answer is, they wont absolute creative control over the customer experience... which is why they're ranked 200th... and losing to Raft...

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I think they want control as well. That's why they stopped selling on gog, got angry when people started playing their already purchased game on non-local hardware, and possibly why they got rid of mods. I've found Hinterland sometimes stays silent on topics or deletes discussions when it doesn't suit them to be open about what's happening.

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On 8/5/2020 at 2:46 AM, Joelle Emmily said:

All game developers are losing my respect, and...

Yeah, I feel you. I agree about your comments on the gaming industry. And yeah, I also read Hinterland's "Roadmap" which is not "officially" exists anymore but we can still search for it... And yes, I agree the 99.9% of your comments. I'm not even Canadian, and I born and raised near Pittsburgh, and I lived in the Eastern US during most of my lifetime. However, as a winter sports fan and as a person who likes winter and outdoor/backpacking, I also love this game. 

Somehow, I think (and it is not only me who think like this) this game is somehow stagnant for a while. From my reading of Raph's post, I'm assuming that the most of the devs and resources were concentrated to solve performance/optimization issues which significantly hindered/delayed their mid/long term plans. I guess they wished to solve performance/optimization problems once and for all before head to the next step. But as far as I know, Unity is not that great engine if the size of the product is expanded and enlarged, and if there are any issues regarding "optimization". This is a bit different example, but if you were KSP modder, you should know that the KSP had issues about multithreading. MT is in KSP now, but not perfect, basically one core per a ship as far as I know, right? I know some games eventually changed their boat to other engines. Like Mordhau, EVE Valkyrie... I guess, TLD may eventually move to the Unreal engine? I don't know. Such migration will also take some good amount of time and resources. Anyway, I just wish Hinterland solved (or at the end phase of problem-solving) regarding the issue of performance/optimization.  

Yep, I feel sad about it too. If Hinterland had opened the door to modding, from an earlier point, we would see more creative "big mods" in TLD.

On 8/5/2020 at 2:46 AM, Joelle Emmily said:

The community helping one another on a game's public board without the company being involved or enforcing, literally happens everywhere all the time.

I really really agree with this. I also mentioned some famous mods are not developed based on the same design principle/direction of the original game. Don't Starve has a lot of mods, and some of them really are horror games, not like Don't Starve at all. I really enjoyed the Misery mod of Stalker and XCOM Long War mod. These are great examples of how mod can "upgrade" the original to next level. And look at DayZ and Black Mesa... I just wish their official modding tool has enough freedom to allow modders to play with TLD as wide as possible, and provide to us as soon as possible. (I have no experience of C#, I'm mostly with data analysis using Fortran and Python, but I wish to learn C# and "secretly" try something myself. The only thing I need is time... )

Anyway, I "wish to" believe their issue is really related with Unity engine and these issues are forcing them to be more "conservative" towards modding and further contents. I'm also disappointed after I read Raph's comment, but what can I do? I just wish to be in optimistic side. I'm sure, in the future, they will change their mind to open more freedom to modding... 

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On 1/8/2020 at 11:55 AM, JackTrysGames said:

A recent update removed the ability to mod the game, crippling a major part of the game's community. I speak not only for me here, but several hundreds of people. Bring back the ability to mod the game, please.

They're BAA..ACCCKKKK!

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On 8/7/2020 at 12:13 AM, odizzido said:

Did you do any work on the mod yourself?

You mean, for XCOM LW or Stalker Misery? Nope. I never directly coded any mods for any game before myself.

Also, if you enjoyed Misery, try Anomaly mod too. 

Edited by sonics01
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I meant MISERY. Yeah I have anomaly already but I've been waiting for the game to get patched up as much as it will. I need to modify the weapons and ammo so I can feel good playing it but I don't want to put in the effort if things will change. I really dislike the 7.92x57 rounds barely scratching people with a leather jacket on.

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On 8/6/2020 at 11:06 PM, sonics01 said:

Anyway, I "wish to" believe... 

Why would you wish to believe something untrue? Why not just be hopeful instead? Does it really require a cognitive dissidence and blind faith to believe they'll deliver on their promise? If so... I don't know what to say... If I didn't think I might be kick banned again, I'd show you how easy it is to mod... anything.

Edited by Joelle Emmily
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