General question for modders

[Smellyfries]

With the recent September dev log, the end of the Long Dark has never felt so near to me, but with the potential end of major content updates in the next 2 years, I was curious how modders thought? Especially with the potential of mods being supported in the future, are you excited for major updates to stop if it means allowing easier development, and support of mods over the long term without major updates changing aspects of the games code, which may outdate mods.

Additionally, since I honestly don't know much about modding, has the recent separation of story mode and survival made modding easier? 

Been getting really interested in modding, but I'm also really interested in what you all may have planned for the future!

Anyway, hope everyone has a great week!

[HyperLordBender]

Honestly modders may get annoyed by updates from time to time, but most of us wont want updates to stop. Official mod support is a very long ways away at this time due to various things like inaccessible code and inline methods. These things make the game work better for devs but make modding the game very hard. The most noticeable change came when HL switched from Mono to Il2Cpp, which hid the actual code in the game, making altering that code harder since we can no longer see it (this happened with the DLC). Oh, another thing for modding is you should have the game on Steam as other platforms tend not work work. This is not the fault of HL, rather the platforms themselves (usually their own implementation of DRM).

If HL were to implement anything right now for us modders to use, if not outright modding support, it would be a fully featured mod settings API. The current one we have does pretty well, but lacks alot of options (doesn't allow dynamic options or loading of other options after game start).

As for the separate of Wintermute and Sandbox, this has had no noticeable affect on modding, outside of no longer being able to mod Wintermute (Melon Loader would need to support it). 

[Digitalzombie]

On 10/2/2023 at 5:33 PM, Smellyfries said:

Additionally, since I honestly don't know much about modding, has the recent separation of story mode and survival made modding easier? 

No, not really. But it didn't make it more difficult either. Mods don't work on Wintermute anymore, but thats only a minor issue that *could* be solvable if we would be interested enough. But it just isn't worth the time, since the story is finite. Survival is where the meat of the game lies.

In terms of modding "support" by HL, I don't have the same opinion as HyperLordBender. While not "enduser friendly" or as "easy" as official tools that other games got, we have our own tools now. We have support mods for certain functionalities, we even have a few tutorials. If Hinterland would actually publish anything like that, it would be severely limited compared to what we can do right now already. 

The best thing HL could do in the future is to actually open a dialog to the current modding community like they've said they would 2 years ago.

Poke poke 👉👉 @Admin The door is open

But that too is just a minor thing. We do the mod support, HL is doing the normal game support and all in all there is not much we can complain about with the status quo. There won't change much from our side when the game is fully done one day. As long as there are players around, there will always be some modders too.

[piddy3825]

19 hours ago, Digitalzombie said:

Mods don't work on Wintermute anymore, but thats only a minor issue that *could* be solvable if we would be interested enough. But it just isn't worth the time, since the story is finite. Survival is where the meat of the game lies.

As a player who mods their game extensively, for the pure enjoyment of playing, I do really miss not being able to mod the Wintermute side of the game.  Prior to the separation of the Wintermute from Survival, I loved to play in story side of the game while having access to all the mods that made my gameplay so enjoyable in the sandbox.  I enjoyed being able to use mods like Place Anywhere for example.  If as @HyperLordBender says - As for the separate of Wintermute and Sandbox, this has had no noticeable affect on modding, outside of no longer being able to mod Wintermute (Melon Loader would need to support it).   What would it take for Melon Loader to be updated so story mode could mod friendly again?  Financial inducement perhaps?  

[Smellyfries]

Thank you all for answering my questions and providing insight into modding. I'm especially interested in how the new Recipe menu is going to be used in the future! Definitely going to be looking more into stuff, especially when development of the game slows down. Have a great week everyone!

[odizzido]

Personally modding is the only hope I have for the sandbox version of this game to be enjoyable so I hope they finish it up sooner than later so that more serious mods can be made. But that's me and only for this game. For a game like Space Engineers I would enjoy a DLC with some actual gameplay content with objectives and/or something interesting to solve.