Factorio Forums

I was very sad when I realized the in-game mod manager wouldn't automatically download mandatory dependencies of mods.
Imagine this:

1. Oh shiny mod, let's install it.
2. Forced restart of client.
3. Start new game. Why's the mod not working? Oh, it has a dependency. OK.
4. Install the dependency.
5. Forced restart of client.
6. Start new game. Why's the mod not working? Oh to hell with this.
7. Repeat.

I think this feature is an absolute necessity. It's one of those things I expect an automated system to take of care for me. When selecting mods for installation show a list of dependencies that also must be downloaded. It would also alleviate the "my mod shall not have dependencies" philosophy that's very counter productive and just leads to re-inventing the wheel over and over again and fosters the NIH syndrome.

i think such functionality can be achieved easily upon mod selection
imo what should be done is, that when you select mod for install, all hard dependencies are automatically selected too.

it's functionality that is present in any (and every) linux package manager for example

other option (for lazy solution), will be coloring mods - eg. when you select mod that has not satisfied dependencies, it will have for example red color ... still i prefer way, that regular package managers do.

this is imo thing for ingame mod manager tho', not for portal itself.

mexmer wrote:i think such functionality can be achieved easily upon mod selection
imo what should be done is, that when you select mod for install, all hard dependencies are automatically selected too.

it's functionality that is present in any (and every) linux package manager for example

other option (for lazy solution), will be coloring mods - eg. when you select mod that has not satisfied dependencies, it will have for example red color ... still i prefer way, that regular package managers do.

The in-game installer doesn't even list the dependencies when selecting mods, so until your client forcefully restarts and you remember to check the mods list you have no idea you downloaded something with dependencies.

mexmer wrote:this is imo thing for ingame mod manager tho', not for portal itself.

Is there a forum for that? I am tempted to just report this as a bug, because in my eyes it is.

mknejp wrote:

mexmer wrote:i think such functionality can be achieved easily upon mod selection
imo what should be done is, that when you select mod for install, all hard dependencies are automatically selected too.

it's functionality that is present in any (and every) linux package manager for example

other option (for lazy solution), will be coloring mods - eg. when you select mod that has not satisfied dependencies, it will have for example red color ... still i prefer way, that regular package managers do.

The in-game installer doesn't even list the dependencies when selecting mods, so until your client forcefully restarts and you remember to check the mods list you have no idea you downloaded something with dependencies.

that's good point, except mod portal parses info.json from mod, i'm quite sure about it (for example, you don't need to specify factorio version when uploading, yet mod portal shows it - no other way to get it, than extracting info.json from uploaded zip file). so mod portal knows dependencies, just because they not shown in client, doesn't mean that information is not accessible.

mknejp wrote:

mexmer wrote:this is imo thing for ingame mod manager tho', not for portal itself.

Is there a forum for that? I am tempted to just report this as a bug, because in my eyes it is.

i would not say it's bug, but missing feature.
and there are already few ideas out there about improving mod management ingame, you can check them out.

I'm just bringing that back to the front. It's still important to have and while the staff is reworking the portal, maybe they could implement this? I'm sure you can go and have a look how apt solves that problem. I think the main point is that the portal doesn't analyses the info.json. With that you can easy implement a recursive dependency resolution.

ukezi wrote:I'm just bringing that back to the front. It's still important to have and while the staff is reworking the portal, maybe they could implement this? I'm sure you can go and have a look how apt solves that problem. I think the main point is that the portal doesn't analyses the info.json. With that you can easy implement a recursive dependency resolution.

should not this be part of incoming update (0.17 maybe?) where they promised better mod management?

I haven't seen it in the facts this Friday.