Factorio Forums

I have now been in a few vanilla games, where there are additions to the normal gameplay. One server i encounted, had a GUI for adding tags for users, so they could assign them to task in game, and even servers with the autofill mod, which is a mod from the mod portal.

I am just very curious as to how this work, as far as i understand there is no "serverside" and all clients need to have the same mods installed.

I am asking because i would like to start developing my own "serverside" stuff.

Thanks in advantage.

Sounds like a custom scenario.

Each save file has a control.lua inside the zip. That's where the serverside mods are copied into.

Is there a definitive list of differences of the capabilities between scenarios and actual mods?

Mods are clearly less limited, but I don't fully understand what scenarios can NOT do.
For example, no modifying data.raw? Not changing map generation settings?

If anyone can point me to any information on this, that would be great!

Thanks,
Oarc

I may miss something, feel free to add:

Data phase:

Scenario: no data phase, cannot add new items or entities, or modify the existing ones.
Mod: has data phase, can add new items or entities, or modify the existing ones.

This is limited by how the game loads data. Mods are loaded when the game initializes while scenarios are only loaded when they are opened. There is no way scenario can access data.


Control phase:

They both have access to control.lua.

That's why you can see GUI and autofill in that scenario. They are all run-time scripts. You can see what they can do by checking the current API doc: http://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/


Easiness to join your game:

Scenario: scenario is automatically downloaded. Players don't need to have the same set of mods with the same settings. Easy to join your game.
Mod: you need to have the exact same set of mods as the server, as well as the exact same settings. It is painful for mods that allow custom configurations. Any difference on the configurations will disallow other players to join your server.

But these may change in 0.15 as there will be improvements for mod configurations. See FFF #165 and also this thread viewtopic.php?f=34&t=32890


Easiness to maintain:

Scenario: if your goal is to combine multiple mods into the scenario, the difficulty to maintain it (keep the scripts up-to-date) will increase with the number of included mods. No one can help you because it is so specific for you. Furthermore, you may need to check the licenses of the mods as some of them may not allow you to copy their scripts. But once these problems are solved, other players will just need to auto-download the updated scenario before they can join your server.
TL;DR difficult for server host, easy for other players

Mod: you just need to make sure the mods are compatible with each other. If any bug exists, you report to the mod author and he/she will (hopefully) do the job for you. After you have updated the mods on the server, other players will also need to download the same versions of mods before they can join it.
TL;DR easy for server host (if mod authors are maintaining their mods), quite troublesome for other players

Hopefully this will change in 0.15. But so far I see no news about automatic mod download, so any change on the mod versions will still require players to re-download them.

Thank you!

That's a very useful summary.

didnt found out where to post it..but on a oarc scenario i played recently, i found that worm in midle of water..

That's an American alt-worm.

Server side is just so much easier in multiplayer.

I made my own with many features: autofill, upgrade planner, blueprints, start robots, ...