Modpacks Question

[Entemega]

Hi there!

I was deeply in love with modpacks, the truth is that I was stuck in factorio 12.29 until today, when I decided to "get up to date". So I kind of had to deal with the mod portal and get used to it, though pretty simple and understandable I couldn't find "modpacks" nor anything like that so.. my question is. Are there modpacks? Is it actually supported in the mod portal? And in any case, how do I get to know if two mods aren't compatible? D:

Thanks !

[ssilk]

Modpacks, as they where as big package of collected mods, don't make much sense with the mod-portal anymore.
A modpack can simply be a mod, that requires a lot of other mods. Every dependent mod can then be downloaded by the game itself in the latest version.

But they make sense: Someone makes a modpack for some kind of game-experience: A modpack for stone-age Factorio for example. A modpack for mods, that don't change the game.

And so on.

[depeter]

In addition to just being a collection of mods, a modpack might also override or tweak some of the config options of the various mods, to make them integrate better etc.

[Entemega]

Modpacks, as they where as big package of collected mods, don't make much sense with the mod-portal anymore.
A modpack can simply be a mod, that requires a lot of other mods. Every dependent mod can then be downloaded by the game itself in the latest version.

But they make sense: Someone makes a modpack for some kind of game-experience: A modpack for stone-age Factorio for example. A modpack for mods, that don't change the game.

And so on.

Humm... I get your point, but that introduces more than a few problems: certain modpacks may require a specific version of certain mods, this versions may not be available anymore from the mod portal thus breaking the modpack.
Furthermore, as depeter said:

In addition to just being a collection of mods, a modpack might also override or tweak some of the config options of the various mods, to make them integrate better etc.

I think that the mod portal doesn't have this capability, therefore making it impossible to tweak automatically the configurations of the different mods (so if you want to do it, you would have to "get dirty" and do it manually, mod by mod, conf file by conf file).

So finally I would like to propose some improvements to the portal mod:
[*] Availability of older mod versions, specially for those which have a registered dependency. This would need to add to the mod portal the capability of a mod depending of the certain version of another mod and, of course, 'versioning'.
[*] The capability of a mod to "override" other mods files (conf files, in this case). So basically permitting a mod to mod a mod, it sounds pretty cool to me
[*] Installing mods in groups, not just one by one (HELL YES!) and certain marker to get to know directly whether a mod is already installed or not.

In my opinion, the first two could be pretty much ignored if the modpack-maker just uploads all the mods together as one mod (I don't really know whether this is actually possible). But that would somewhat kind of override part of the idea of the mod portal, wouldn't it?

Am I getting something wrong?
Thanks for taking your time to read and answer

PS: Sorry for the delay replying, I took some days off and went to the beach

[depeter]

In addition to just being a collection of mods, a modpack might also override or tweak some of the config options of the various mods, to make them integrate better etc.

I think that the mod portal doesn't have this capability, therefore making it impossible to tweak automatically the configurations of the different mods (so if you want to do it, you would have to "get dirty" and do it manually, mod by mod, conf file by conf file).

Actually my post was intended (albeit not very clearly) to point out that that is possible (albeit not in a 100% robust way).
A modpack would thus not necessarily be just a list of dependencies, but might also have a bit of modding itself. Not much, ie no new entities etc, but just enough to override some settings from the other mods it depends on. There's already plenty of mods that do this (Angels and CMH tweaking Bob stuff, Angel adapting to the various uranium-using mods, ...).

Modpacks physically containing other mods is definitely a bad idea imho (as you also say), as that means missing out on bugfixes etc, bloating mod directories, ... This would also pretty much require changes to mod portal / factorio, in order to detect issues with different versions (ie version 1.3 inside the modpack, but version 1.5 in your mod directory).

Being able to depend on specific versions would be nice, especially if some flexibility is introduced and people adopt semantic versioning, ie once version 1.1.0 of a mod is out, new features would go to 1.2.0 (and then 1.3.0 etc), but bugfixes go to 1.1.X, and even after 1.2.Y is about, an imported bugfix could still be ported to 1.1.Z if needed. Modpacks would then be able to depend on 1.1 to receive the most recent sub-version of that. This does put extra responsibility on the source-mod developers though (following the version scheme, backporting relevant fixes to older versions of the mod), as well as requiring extra features on the mod portal / factorio (if such flexible dependencies are not possible yet).

So in the end I think that it would (and probably should) be the modpack maintainers that do the extra work, to keep the modpacks compatible with the most recent versions of the mods. This starts by writing the overrides in a safe way (so that, if the source mods change drastically, they don't crash, but instead just skip that particular modification attempt, ideally with a little warning message if it might affect gameplay significantly). In addition to that, they would have to keep track of new releases in the source mods, and then adjust their overrides accordingly.
That's not as bad as it sounds, because there probably wouldn't be that many overrides (many mods already handle intercompatibility themselves), changes wouldn't be needed all that often (bugfixes or minor changes would usually not require any modifications), and the burden could be shared with the community (host on github so anyone can make pull-requests).