Today

Can you shed some light on your plans to make Mods easier to share and, more importantly, what measures you're thinking of taking to make sure mods are visible in-game to the average user?

Really? You think?

I think this may be part of the problem. I can see the value of marketing material being directed at those outside the forums. That makes perfect sense. But there doesn't seem to be a companion "in-detail" newsletter for those who frequent these forums. A lot of people are giving up many hours of their time to run fan-sites, mod managers, make models, other mod related content, post in-detail analysis, and even support you as often as they criticise. They read something that clearly wasn't aimed at them and think "gee, where is the stuff that I'm interested in".

A detailed post about feature development would go a long way to help sorting that out.

I was going to say this at the experience I have with it, except it would sound racist coming from me *shrug*

I hope all the tools aren't finished ever being worked on lol. I know external API can pass downloads to other people for matches. C&C Renegade latest fan patch from Tiberium Technologies finally allows download of maps from servers to enter servers, and to enter the server in the first place the link to the patch is presented, so that is as accessible as you can make mods.

So we don't top priority need a built in mod manager, but we hope we don't need to patch over Uber that soon. Even if they were to make some investigation into borrowing PAMM as a tab on the main menus of PA or something and then making mod games list beside normal games or in the same list with different "color text". These are all things that can be modded, but in the past case I know it is a mild inconvinence to be directed to a fan-patch link to enter a server to begin with.

I'm all for in-game mod ads, but they would have to be seamlessly integrated. We don't want anyone thinking the community is doing the same amount of work as Uber. That would be, awkward to say the least.

I think a good option for this is an extra main menu button that says 'Mod Database' or something similar.

Also, will there be an official market-like PA Stats integrated into the game? I thought I read about this somewhere but I don't remember. That would be a nice addition.

Looking forward to that blog, @garat

Good post.

The first, and biggest thing on our longer term plans is an ingame mod manager that everyone gets by default, without, say, having to install a mod (which immediately ups the adoption friction by orders of magnitude). Right now though, the dev focus is still on expanding the actual scope of what can be modded, and making sure our mod publishing pipeline from front to back (publishing from a technical perspective, not the business sense of the term publishing) is thoroughly fleshed out and working. I'll have to pow-wow with the guys working on modding, Chris and Jorgen, to go into a little more detail, as I'm just looking at the high level for this, as the timelines for modding are not tied to our core 1.0 release timeline.

Any thoughts on allowing the modding community to participate in such a discussion in any capacity? Or perhaps holding some other discussion with the modding community about things that we may be able to work together on? Setting up a more concrete mechanism by which we can discuss thing with you guys would really help the long term sustainability of the modding scene.

Indeed, we are not the whole audience and if the post was meant for a wide audience whose majority isn't present on the forums, why post it on the forums? Post it on the main news page, because by posting it on the forums you have made the wrong impression on the active community, while most of the regular consumers didn't see it any way.
What we, the active community were expecting (or rather I as a part of the active community), was a news post with definite plans or lack of there off. Vaguely hinting that something awesome is coming will probably impress the average consumer, but not one that is a part of the active community, knows that something big is coming (or maybe even what it is). Additionally it might even put him in the wrong mindset where he thinks that he is being left out of the loop more than he deserves.

Agreed. And there's only a couple people here who have the comprehensive roadmap enough in their head to write up a post like that on a regular basis. It took me all morning, between working on other things and making sure I didn't have a ton of things that could be taken wrong or misconstrued in my fairly straightforward post you just read. And that post was just standard production and PR methodology - stuff I could probably discuss relatively well in a deep sleep.

So while I think it would be great to do what you're suggesting, it's not like we haven't thought about it, but there are only so many hours in the day, and writing comprehensive, or even single feature focused posts that did into any interesting level of detail eat hours of a persons time. We post what we can, and try and provide as much detail as we can.

This isn't a response to all of your argument, but the PTE is THE place to go and see what we're working on right now. It's a literal, playable changelog that you can visit to see not only progress of the game as a whole, but the stages of iteration between basic implementation and full implementation. The PTE was built for you guys -- the people who frequent the forums and care deeply about the game enough to jump in, see what's up, give us feedback, and continue looking forward to new developments.

We want to get Chris and Jorgen to have a chat with you guys. The problem that comes up, though, is that the time spent having the complicated, far-reaching discussion that you want is time not spent actually working on fleshing out mods as much as we want. I talked to him this morning about it, actually, and he's just in too deep solving various technical issues cropping up to have a great conversation. When we do this, we'll want to do it right, so it's just a matter of timing.

I know it's hard, but sometimes we're going to hold back describing some features. It's not that big of a deal -- especially if you look at it in the perspective of being able to access the PTE.

The exact same thing happened with Supreme Commander 2.... 1-2 months after release the 1v1 ladder was implemented, by then it was already dead.

The point is that PTE doesn't show all of the picture. It only shows a very near future and a lot of issues and missing features will not be addressed in the near future and mostly what we would like to know is when certain issues and missing features will be addressed.

I very much agree with this.

As a community, a VERY invested, involved, and enthusiastic community, it seems like we feel way out of the loop. We don't know what's coming. We don't know what's being worked on. We don't know what or when 1.0 is. Things that we thought were going to be in 1.0 keep on getting moved to the post-1.0 category. And we have to figure it all out after the fact.

Some of us have been here since the Kickstarter, which is coming up on 2 years ago now.

I feel like I know less about the 1.0 game now than during Alpha.

Is this maybe because, as described, even Garat doesn't know what's coming a lot of times? Just think about that a bit. I'd rather be patient and wait for updates, than to keep demanding them to liveblog every moment of development and divert them away from their actual jobs of making the game.

And at this point in the project, every second of devtime counts.

So no one has 15 minutes or an hour to talk to the community? We have a Community Manager after all.

Software development is mostly planning.

The execution is easy with proper planning, and coffee.

So unless they have having like, a execution month where they unleash their plans into development, this month, then I don't see why not.....

So should we take this to mean that Modding isn't a 1.0 Goal anymore? I'd worry about that because much like Ladders, if you wait too long many of the people that would have stuck around for Ladders, Tournaments, Modding and other such "long term hooks" will be gone by the time you have them ready.

Mike

I know of a lot of people who have already left the game because of a lack of ladder and balance in particular.