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Author Topic: collection of faction mods?  (Read 10618 times)

MesoTroniK

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Re: collection of faction mods?
« Reply #15 on: June 29, 2016, 08:23:37 PM »

It takes about 10 minutes with a good connection to literally install the entire Modiverse :)

Orikson

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Re: collection of faction mods?
« Reply #16 on: June 29, 2016, 11:39:09 PM »

Hmm... collection of mods in one file is not covenient unless the game finalises. Which I will give it how many years it wants, I love it and don't care.

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That also brings another quirky thing. If the game finalises and all the active mods are compiled into one, what will one do about new mods coming in? I'm imagining more mods will come in at that time and people will have more freedom to do more than one mod and tweak their already present mod to balance or add stuff.

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Balance and synergy as well as fail safe interactions (something like the Templars Lattice shield everyone has to code properly when it come down to unique weapons and such), are important. Like the mods already said, SS has a lot of growth and more so to come.

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Not to mention some whole gameplay changer like Ironclads (sad to see it go, but it had me confused for a while).

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I would suggest do what you wish, maybe wait (forever?).

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Also, mods arguing about Workshop? That's something I haven't seen before. I agree with some points and disagree some others. Let us wait for Alex to proceed how he wants and we'll move according to the decision.

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That said, do we have a mod that plays around with laser weapons? I'm trying to think of a unique hull mod for the mod I'm brainstorming for now. It'll probably be based off similar to Diable Avionics, but something like this:

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This faction laser weapons range are finely calibrated for range and strength, therefore, they take time to warm up before making a very big impact. Range and damage of beam weapons are decrease by X% for A seconds. After that, the damage and range are increased by Y%.

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This is just one idea though, still working on plans and description.
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Tartiflette

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Re: collection of faction mods?
« Reply #17 on: June 30, 2016, 12:31:05 AM »

This is grossly misrepresenting what the actual terms of the license are.

   As I said, they changed it to much friendlier terms recently, but I assure you that during the "paid mods" debacle the EULA was extremely disadvantageous for modders. I understand why they wrote it that way by then (to protect themselves in case of problems with a mod with millions of paid subscribers that would have ground for a class action) but it could still have been used for more nefarious purposes, not necessarily coming from people part of Valve.

   Now it is more on the fair side though not quite there yet, but they still have that reserve to change the EULA on a whim without warning (EULA you would have to accept to remove your mods from the workshop should you be upset about it) and they intend to bring back paid mods at some point again. Two reasons to be just a bit concerned about the Workshop.

   Concerning SS, the Steam's EULA is indeed not quite compatible where it comes to modding... But nothing prevent Alex from having a different EULA with the next update or on the Steam release. If Valve condition putting his game on the store to modifying his EULA, I have no doubt he will comply. It wouldn't be a very smart move to do otherwise.


Also, mods arguing about Workshop? That's something I haven't seen before. I agree with some points and disagree some others. Let us wait for Alex to proceed how he wants and we'll move according to the decision.

   Do you often go to the modding forum of a game that has Workshop support? Personally I don't. But try searching and you'll find that the Workshop isn't, understandably, nearly as popular with modders as with players, or with other players when the game is also sold out of Steam. First result of my search just for example...
« Last Edit: June 30, 2016, 02:29:38 AM by Tartiflette »
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: collection of faction mods?
« Reply #18 on: June 30, 2016, 01:37:53 AM »

Thats like 200+ clicks, not counting having to read the mod pages to see if you actually want the mod in the first place. I think the Blackrock download page even has a captcha now that requires you to view/read an ad. (*edit- double checked and it wasn't there this time... that only happened to me once...)

I'm too lazy to download all of those in one sitting haha...

(but yeah, I'm all for a mod downloader/installer... get coding people!)

The time to make that installer and maintain it (100 hours initially and about 1 hour a week for, say, 2 years) to achieve cost parity with what you save other users from having to go through (optimistically, 10 minutes saved) requires about 1200 users playing heavily-modded Starsector.  You'd only see that around the time of a major update, where none of the mods will be compatible anyway.
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Orikson

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Re: collection of faction mods?
« Reply #19 on: June 30, 2016, 01:52:52 AM »

  Do you often go to the modding forum of a game that has Workshop support? Try searching and you'll find that the Workshop isn't, understandably, nearly as popular with modders as with players, or with other players when the game is also sold out of Steam. First result of my search just for example...

Well, I haven't been introduced to Steam until recently. I have heard of it from some friends, but haven't dwell into modding till I came across Starsector.
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Dark.Revenant

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Re: collection of faction mods?
« Reply #20 on: June 30, 2016, 09:01:25 AM »

And if you were obsessed over the possibility of someone ever repackaging your mod and claiming it as their own, simply obfuscate the jar, have it compute an md5 checksum of itself on initialization of the mod plugin, and throw a RuntimeException if it doesn't match the checksum you specify. Literally no one could change even a character of your mod's text without it crashing. No one could make changes to the mod, only redistribute it.

Missed this one.  First off, this is a pain in the ass to do and may not actually be possible with the current security restrictions.  Second, it forces the mod to be closed-source, which is generally frowned upon for a great variety of reasons.  Third, that would most likely break inter-mod script hooks and such; even if you think you tagged all of the important ones to not be obfuscated, you'll surely miss a couple.
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xenoargh

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Re: collection of faction mods?
« Reply #21 on: June 30, 2016, 12:12:52 PM »

It's amusing that this thing about Workshop made people twitch... but, really?

If you're a modder, you want maximum audience and exposure for your project; Workshop's the best way to connect with the audience.  It's one of the smartest things Steam ever did.

Steam's EULA and intent is basically misunderstood here.  Like Nexus, which has a similar EULA, they don't want to do anything to annoy the modders, they really couldn't care less about "stealing your stuff" and the EULA's mainly covering situations where, for example, Modder A "borrowed" content from Modder B.  VaLve wants to be able to shut that down without any legal recourse or counter-claims about copyright violations, etc.

I strongly suspect that if Paid Mods are going to go on the table again (which they will, almost certainly, for the same reasons they went that way in the first place) there will be another EULA for precisely that situation, rather than the blanket EULA.  That was one of the errors with the first iteration, and Steam's management is usually pretty good about learning from their mistakes.
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Tartiflette

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Re: collection of faction mods?
« Reply #22 on: July 01, 2016, 05:42:04 AM »

If you're a modder, you want maximum audience and exposure for your project; Workshop's the best way to connect with the audience.  It's one of the smartest things Steam ever did.

   Even if exposure was every modder's end-goal, the Workshop really does a terrible job at highlighting non ultra-popular historic mods. And it is also terrible at searching anything else, and you have very limited presentation tools etc. It did popularize modding and it is very conveinient when it comes to install your mods from a user points of view, and to update them from a creator perspective, but I think the Workshop does a terrible job at maximizing your audience beyond providing a massive playerbase.

   And the EULA is perfectly transparent: it's a blanket statement to cover their rear againt any problem with non curated user created content. But it is far more addapted to "hats mods" rather than huge, complex and high quality mods with a lot of original content that significantly change games: For a long time the EULA for mods was the same as the EULA for uploading screenshots!

   And the thing is, some sections are still plain illegal in Europe!

   In my case, it is incompatible with my mods' licence so the question is moot. For other's, if you don't care about Licences, sure go ahead, it is improbable you'll ever have any issue with the EULA. I for one would rather have a fairer system as a principle.
« Last Edit: July 01, 2016, 06:55:29 AM by Tartiflette »
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gruberscomplete

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Re: collection of faction mods?
« Reply #23 on: July 01, 2016, 01:25:51 PM »

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