Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Author Topic: Advanced mod options  (Read 531 times)

hydremajor

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 461
    • View Profile
Advanced mod options
« on: June 22, 2022, 11:37:20 AM »

basically a built in set of options to pick and choose what from a mod gets added or not

Though I imagine the whole thing would need a system of "Tags" to be implemented so the mod options can detect what counts as X or Y

the ideal thing would be the ability to cherry pick wich weapons/ships get activated...
Logged

Amazigh

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 284
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced mod options
« Reply #1 on: June 22, 2022, 12:24:25 PM »

Short answer: no, unless alex puts a bunch of work in (unlikely)

Long answer: This would put a lot of work on modders to make this work as you want, unless alex puts a bunch of work in to make this possible/easy.

Say for example you want just the ships from a mod, and none of the weapons.
it's almost 100% likely that the modder used the weapons from the mod on some/all of the variants for the ships, as such those variants will not work as you have disabled the weapons, this will cause crashes (unless alex adds some system that autoconverts variants "broken" by only loading part of a mod to use an appropriate available weapon instead)

To do this without requiring alex to program a new "variant conversion system", and "just" add a set of tickboxes to enable/disable parts of a mod, then modders would have to make multiple variants for ships that do/don't use weapons from their mod, and that would be a lot of work for larger mods. And i expect some modders wouldn't bother with supporting this feature anyway, for various reasons.

This would also have the potential to completely break faction mods, as an example:
If you decide "i want to use Kyeltziv, but just for the ships and disable all the weapons"
Then you'll find that the Kyeltziv faction will suddenly not know how to make any weapons as i've not set them to know any of the vanilla weapon BPs.
Logged

Harmful Mechanic

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 1340
  • On break.
    • View Profile
Re: Advanced mod options
« Reply #2 on: June 22, 2022, 05:16:36 PM »

And i expect some modders wouldn't bother with supporting this feature anyway, for various reasons.
It's the level of work required. Given the choice, would you rather have unique campaign mechanics and stories, or the ability to select hardware line-item? Because modding time is finite; we have to choose what to work on, we can't do it all.

A mod would have to be designed this way from the beginning, and - while that's possible, it's not practical to do that to an existing mod without giving something else up - probably a lot of things, or progress on the mod at all.
Logged