Enough with the "just mod it" argument

By that reasoning the game will never be fully released.

But what's actually going to happen is they're going to continue to improve the game over time.

And as far as UI goes, the default UI appeals to casual users and the average users. Some of the UI additions through mods would be bad additions to the game because they would confuse new/casual players.

Customization to fit my personal play style is the core of what UI mods are. Not every UI mod should be incorporated into the game, even if a lot of competitive players use them.

Not exactly true on both points. If someone says, "Will such and such be added?" Sometimes the appropriate answer to the question is "No, it won't be added. Maybe a mod will." It's the only answer so it should be said.

And the second point isn't exactly true because there are people who are already formulating plans for some of these mods.

I agree "just mod it" should not be used as a excuse for building an incomplete game. It is our intent to build a complete and polished game. In the game we're building, there will be nukes and anti-nukes, because that is part of the game we choose to design.

Our customers may also be interested in another game that is strikingly similar to the Planetary Annihilation game we're building, but distinct, perhaps in that it doesn't include nukes and anti-nukes. For those customers, we are building a modding system that allows them to create or consume that game easily. We believe this provides additional value to some customers such that they get both the game we're building, and that strikingly similar game with its unique ruleset. Perhaps they will get many different games with varying degrees of similarity out of the feature "mod-ability". And some of our customers will derive great enjoyment in the modding process itself.

This isn't new or unique, as YourLocalMadScientist observed with respect to top Steam games (and don't forget MineCraft).

I avoid saying, "PA isn't done yet," for the most part, however in this case the issues is whether the presence of modding excuses the current state of the game, and we can't decide if those are excuses or not until we evaluate it in light of a released product. If we tried to declare it released today it would be a very poor excuse indeed, so I would respectfully request the OP and others wait until what we actually declare as ready for release (but incidentally not "done") to make their inevitable judgments about whether we have left too much for modding.

I'll be happy if I could load up PA without any mods, see a game lobby for a total conversion mod, join it and play that game without alt-tabbing or restarting the game. At that point, mods will be truly 1st class citizens.

My only concern is that after tank commander had been unceremoniously closed down (after being given an ok initially), are Uber as a company actually going to be ok with those 'strikingly similar' mods you speak of that inevitably share copyrighted game assets?! I'm a firm believer that you judge someone (or in this case a company) on their actions and this does appear to go against what's being said...

people aren't making correct use of the whole "mods" idea in both directions :

I got that shi t argument on a crapton of suggestions of mine

having a mild understanding of how code and programming in the general sense work, I can see things as either possible or impossible for moderately hobbyist coders to do.

this is why I explained to people that the question of future orders and binary suns and scale change wasn't a question of modding but one of the devs leaving this in the engine for us : because NEVER IN THREE BLUE MOONS could we mod it in. It just requires an encyclopedial knowledge of the PA code, not to mention exceptional to expert programing skills and a big-a ss team.

Then there's those things that we've already done as mods. these are likely to be integrated to PA ( see how it happened for supcom, let alone in the transition from supcom to supcomfa.). Why deprive yourself of them while you need them?

Unfortunately Tank Commander was not a mod of but another game using PA's assets - which is a different kettle of fish, entirely.

the thread op is right i think. A lot of features that are added by mods right now should be standard. Cos only a small part of players uses mods. So the game benefits from those mod features A LOT (Hotbuild? Cant do without! PaStats? AWESOME! Economy Efficiency and hell other ui mods? They make it look so much more finished!).
So actually then the players without using mods, who are the majority i guess, experience a worse game. This makes the game look bad actually. And if a modder can do that feature, Uber can do it quite quickly also.


Even worse it gets when you talk about mods, that add units or other non-ui-mod things. They split the community, and this sucks. Player A wanna play with Mod 1, Player B with Mod 2 and Player C with Mod 3. So A B and C will never play together.

Well Ta spring is a new engine for ta, using its assets... Would uber have demanded that be shut down as well? My main gripe re tank commander is they allowed it initially and have now decided to squash it. It's the inconsistency that worries me (also tank commander was made on agreement that it was non profit, obviously if that had changed I'd understand)...

This, you punish yourself by not using the mods.

but that's not it. You also punish Uber. It was their original intent that PA be an integrally moddable game, a game that's very easy to mod, and in which mods are so popular that they bypass the vanilla use.

but my personal opinion lies elsewhere:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/enough-with-the-just-mod-it-argument.57853/page-2#post-895483

this.
but I'll add to it by saying that technically it's progressively becoming not the case anymore as the majority of them have been made stock ranked and part of FaF as it comes out of the box.

I don't think Tank Commander getting taken down has anything to do with Uber, but is a byproduct of US' broken copyright system.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/tank-commander-pa-minigame-v1-5-closed.57195/page-8#post-895501

And this.^^ I am most worried about insufficiently advanced unit behaviours, which most probably is a thing, that cannot be modded in, I would assume. I really don't want any more silly units. For example my concern about transports working as retarded as in SupCom, with transporting one unit type after the other, rather than mixing it up. Stuff like this annoys me so incredibility much, but also isn't really in the mod realm.

Maybe some of you know the wargame series by Eugene Systems. It has really entertaining gameplay, but the UI is load of crap really, which made me quit the game rather fast. So bad UI and bad unit AI or bad unit coordination algorithms can really make a break a game imo. I don't really care if unit XY is in the game or not, I mostly care about UI and control features being in or not and about good unit AI.

you're not talking about forged alliance there are you?

I consider myself an "old" supcom user but then again by the time I discovered this game, Forged alliance had been out awhile, so I don't know it this was the case in vanilla sup com or something.

I may be wrong, but I don't believe that Spring uses actual raw TA assets - my understanding is that it's a faithful replication. Indeed if Ozone's game used only faithful replications rather than actual assets, I'd have thought it would be okayed.

It is the case in FA steam and FAF. I assuem also in vanialla. Look here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/on-transports-unit-type-distribution.57782/

Many suggestions do not match the core idea of PA and so a mod is the only route they have to existence.

wow, that was a lot of answers.

to be honest, i didn't think about UI mods at all when talking about this, just game mechanics.

and more importantly, i never said the game shouldn't be moddable, you can mod whatever you want on your side of the Internet, that's none of my business.

put shortly, my main point was "don't rely on mods for the game to be complete".

when someone says "just mod it" that's the feeling i get : something's wrong ? nah, i'm not gonna change it, but someone will make a mod to fix it.

i sure hope that's not the way Uber thinks, and i can understand it may be hard to have everything packed perfectly. there will always be bugs, balance issues, features you didn't have time to add and so on. but don't let people handle it themselves with mods if the game needs it.

the same goes for good ideas that weren't planned in the first place. the "economy efficiency" mod for example, a lot of people seem to like it, so why don't we put it in the core game ?

that would be perfectly fine to me, everyone would get it at the next update, so that will no longer be a mod. I played forged alliance forever and they made countless changes to the game. i had no problem with that, because FAF had actually become the core game.

damn I also persuaded the distribution is random. I'll test it and record it for you if I don't get what you have at all.

My hope is that the game releases without the devs all using 3rd party mods. IIRC, I have seen them using mods (particularly the one that shows % usage of resources) and it just makes me think, "If you like it that much, why isn't it part of the game."

If the game releases with the devs happy with its state, and they don't use any mods then I'm happy.

From there other people can customize but the base game should be where the devs, at least, want it, mod-free.

Some games for Spring RTS do indeed use TA assets. And yes, it's copyright infringement.

Oh dear. That's unfortunate.