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I'm thinking of starting a modding/development collaboration. (kind of like a think-tank) Anyone is welcome.

Essentially we would all work together to make and mantain mods. (Or utilities) For example, I plan on beginning work on a mod manager soon that I could probably use some help on.

Reply if interested.

What sort of functionality do you have in mind for the mod manager?

slpwnd wrote:What sort of functionality do you have in mind for the mod manager?

Automatic updating, disabling/enabling without deletion, and possibly "texture pack" management.

zer0t3ch wrote:disabling/enabling without deletion

Why doing it externally when it already can be done in-game?!

And for the texture packs, if I am not missing anything, there are actually zero texture packs available, so nothing much to manage
Anyways, there might be a use for it in the future, because it would be a pain in the ass to overwrite all textures by hand.

drs9999 wrote:

zer0t3ch wrote:disabling/enabling without deletion

Why doing it externally when it already can be done in-game?!

And for the texture packs, if I am not missing anything, there are actually zero texture packs available, so nothing much to manage
Anyways, there might be a use for it in the future, because it would be a pain in the ass to overwrite all textures by hand.

Disabling can't be done in game if the game crashes because of a mod. Take for example this scenario:
Your playing v0.5.3 with mods then you update to v0.6 and the update causes a mod to crash the game before the main menu (this happened to me, an api or something changed) So you just disable it in the manager, and then when the mod is patched, user gets a notification asking if they want to update and reenable the mod.

Also, there are no texture packs. Yet.

Ok I did not think about that case.
But for that I suggest a disable-broken-mod-funtionality in-game.
So if your game crashs before you enter the main-menu the mod is disabled on the next start and the game should not crash anymore.
And because I think the crash report is a good feature for debugging, this functionality should be toggleable in the options/config-files

drs9999 wrote:Ok I did not think about that case.
But for that I suggest a disable-broken-mod-funtionality in-game.
So if your game crashs before you enter the main-menu the mod is disabled on the next start and the game should not crash anymore.
And because I think the crash report is a good feature for debugging, this functionality should be toggleable in the options/config-files

I'm not sure how possible a feature like that would be, without editing some base game files.

zer0t3ch wrote:Disabling can't be done in game if the game crashes because of a mod.

Game crashing because of such is a bug. No matter the mods the game should not crash. Any incompatible mods should just automatically get disabled as you reach main menu. And for some major errors while playing may cause you to be forced to go back to main menu. But game should never crash to desktop.

Easy downloading with automatic installing and updating could be nice though.

Phantasm wrote:

zer0t3ch wrote:Disabling can't be done in game if the game crashes because of a mod.

Game crashing because of such is a bug. No matter the mods the game should not crash. Any incompatible mods should just automatically get disabled as you reach main menu. And for some major errors while playing may cause you to be forced to go back to main menu. But game should never crash to desktop.

Easy downloading with automatic installing and updating could be nice though.

Not a bug, when they changed some APIs in the new v0.6 update, some v0.5 mods I had caused it to crash, and automatic disabling may confuse some people. They would just start their game and wonder where all the mod stuff is.

Phantasm wrote:

zer0t3ch wrote:Disabling can't be done in game if the game crashes because of a mod.

Game crashing because of such is a bug. No matter the mods the game should not crash. Any incompatible mods should just automatically get disabled as you reach main menu. And for some major errors while playing may cause you to be forced to go back to main menu. But game should never crash to desktop.

Yes the game should not crash no matter what. If it is crashing please report is in the bugs section and we will fix it.

Phantasm wrote:Easy downloading with automatic installing and updating could be nice though.

Actually the auto updater can do this. The scenario pack is distributed as a mod and auto updated. What needs to be done for this is that we upload "diff packages" (generated by our internal tool) to our server repository. I can imagine in the future that we would open this as a mini distribution framework for mod creators.

slpwnd wrote:

Phantasm wrote:

zer0t3ch wrote:Disabling can't be done in game if the game crashes because of a mod.

Game crashing because of such is a bug. No matter the mods the game should not crash. Any incompatible mods should just automatically get disabled as you reach main menu. And for some major errors while playing may cause you to be forced to go back to main menu. But game should never crash to desktop.

Yes the game should not crash no matter what. If it is crashing please report is in the bugs section and we will fix it./quote]

True, but the crash that I was referring to was actually caused by a faulty mod, but the only reason that it was faulty was because of an API change from v0.5 to v0.6, so the reason I believe so strongly in the mod disabling is to prevent that from happening to other people.
(It had something to do with electricity, I think they didn't specify Watts or Kilowatts, or something like that)

i would be extremely happy to help you test whatever it is you come up with and then make suggestions of what you can do to improve your mod, i especially enjoy the testing stage and would be happy to help