My apologies, I will fix that in the next THI update.
No worries! I get why you would do that as a safeguard just in case. If you choose to keep it considering the below response, I will not hold it against you as I completely understand the complexities involved. Trying to do the best for everyone.
Morrokain, I would *strongly* suggest you allow the opt-out (or really ideally, converted to opt-in...) system done within other mod's themselves. Having folks need to ask you every time (if they do not specify custom dialog blah blah) is not good. That is taking up the Mantle of Infinity on your end. And then what happens if you are no longer available for some reason? Then modders are just screwed, and either are *forced* to do custom dialog, or just live with this mod hitting their own against their wishes for all eternity or at least until you are available again.
The take away to what I'm about to say should be:
I want to work with you, I understand your concerns, and what is the best way to go about this? Nevertheless, I again feel the need to get very detailed. (Really sorry if this comes across as pretentious prattling. I really feel it has a well-meaning concern for the community behind it though. I'll just say that.)
I get what you are saying and I want to be delicate here and say upfront that I will try my best to work on a solution, but... well, this is more difficult to "fix" because that is just how vanilla is set up with rules and vanilla factions iirc. I'm pretty sure PickGreeting is the only entry point in the rules dialogue for this and it's hardcoded, and I'm pretty sure many vanilla factions still use the default version of that implementation. I could be wrong and I will investigate that more. The only way I see that I could get around that is to create my own rules dialogue for each vanilla faction using the default greetings as a guideline. What that would boil down to, in that case, would be me fleshing out the greeting system for potentially lots of factions instead of a mod author copy pasting the defaults (one time) and adding their mod id to the check *if* they wanted to opt-out of the dialogue features. (They don't have to actually write custom dialogue, just implement an id check to it. It would even be a good idea to do this, so that custom dialogue can be added later on if desired.) So, the onus would be on me to handle a purely vanilla feature so mod factions don't have a few options added to their fleets who
also use said vanilla feature when it is unnecessary to do so in the first place. I actually want to do that eventually, anyway, but is it really worth it to wait until that work is completed? What if I
didn't already want to do that? Let's consider:
1) No custom mod content is truly being modified.
2) Different methods of opting out within the faction mod itself have been given with various levels of difficulty/effort.
3) If zero effort whatsoever is desired, the interim solution is provided (Assuming the mod id doesn't change, even though this option is done within this mod it would be a "one and done" change that wouldn't require future maintenance unless Rules changed significantly... which would generally break everything anyway. Still, it's not the option I would pick as a modder and yes the complication of my availability is an issue that isn't ideal)
I think this is pretty reasonable considering it purely stems from vanilla implementation. I want to reassure that
I'm not saying I won't personally be conscientious or do more about this and seek a solution before release, I am trying to be crystal clear that it's
not custom mod content at that point, if that makes sense. It is custom mod content
using vanilla components that are themselves fair game. If you are using defaults from vanilla that vanilla factions use en masse (as opposed to faction specific) and another modder wants to make a mod overriding those defaults
to affect vanilla, that inherently is going to affect anyone still using the defaults. The expectation is that if you aren't providing custom content and are using vanilla components, anyone modding those components will affect you assuming they are moddable in the first place. It is not "hitting another mod against their wishes" though- at least not intentionally in this case- because those mods are relying upon vanilla components, themselves, which are also justifiably able to be overridden for other reasons. If that was not the case and this was not the access point vanilla itself uses and it was specifically set aside for faction mods, that would be a very different story. This just happens to be one of the parts of vanilla where I don't believe this is the case. I will be happy to be wrong, maybe it is easier than I think and I'll let you know if so!
Can you suggest anything as an alternative? Technically-speaking, is there a way that doesn't involve me essentially finishing the game's greeting dialogues and removing defaults from the vanilla factions altogether? I may even be willing to do that before a release if it's important enough (heck, I did a lot more for the TC to be able to use faction mods that edit vanilla ships and that isn't even balanced for faction mods in the first place) but I reserve the right to, well, not, if it comes down to it. That isn't what I want, though. I'd like to satisfy everyone if possible. Can anyone give me a use case where this would cause technical complications, for instance? "I don't want the feature for my faction" is probably not a valid use case if you are using vanilla defaults. Why?:
The point of all this detail/musing: We quite simply cannot police people for overriding vanilla. It is
completely unreasonable in every way to expect modders to never touch vanilla features or accommodate every other mod that has come before them in a community with a mod index like the one we have. Not only will that kill mod variety and features that could be useful or just desirable to some end users, if we're really honest with ourselves it's just not fair to the modding community. Fledgling modders are going to want to try out their own cool things with vanilla components and we have to let them- even when it affects another mod in weird ways or ways outside of the faction mod's original vision. I'm definitely not saying that you shouldn't let them know "Hey this is doing X to my mod, anything we can do about that? I'd rather it did Y or nothing at all." Nevertheless, overriding vanilla is a perfectly valid way of modding and it brings more features to the end user community. It should be preserved as such. It's how we all got here initially.
Conceptually: If you want to preserve
every aspect of a faction mod 100% when dealing with a mod merging community, you are either going to have to not use vanilla defaults and keep everything faction specific where possible, make it a TC, or manually exclude mods that don't fit your vision.
It's just that simple. Read as: Not at all simple and filled with obstacles and headaches but an overall necessity. Without more complex mod merging management options (which would be great, I'll add, but most likely are outside the scope of Starsector's development), power creep from feature mods will happen. Feature mods making the game easier/harder/more accessible will happen. This is a natural part of every healthy modding community with a diverse set of preferences.
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Any trade fleet. Cabal doesn't actually ever have its own trade fleets, to my knowledge.
It should look like this (interaction is with a smuggler fleet)
Thanks, I was looking for cabal trade fleets. I found a normal trade fleet and:
It should accommodate both. I haven't had a chance yet to check hostile trader fleets assuming that's different. I will check later.