Discussion: Uber's plans for Modding, 1.0 and Beyond

So this came up in a different thread(Starting here) but I wanted to make sure it could be properly discussed, ergo this thread.

Personally, the Biggest issues I foresee Modding is going to have to deal are as follows, in a mostly particular but flexible order;

1. Visibility
2. Ease of Access
3. Modability/Support

Visibility is obvious, what might not be as obvious about it is why it's first and it's really just comes down to the idea that a lot of issues can be overcome with effort, the catch is that you need something worthy of your effort and while it's not a guarantee every single player is going to find something that's worth it at least they know it's there and that information will get nestled away hopefully to come up again later on and have them look again, maybe finding that now less effort is required or there is something now worth the effort. It's also important to consider the "Logistics" of it all, think about SupCom1/FA, a pretty big game for it's time and genre, but nothing more than a minority ever played online even once, and out of those people, only a minority even knew about Mods and even then, only a portion of them actually played them with any regularity.

This shows that we need to tap as many people as possible because there are so many stages where we lose people that you need as big of a potential audience as possible and to me, that should come even before something like Ease of Access, which is still important but compared to raw visibility it just doesn't help as much in the beginning/mid-term.

Ease of Access is what comes next thought, once people know about something the next major turnoff for players is getting said mod working, is it hidden behind a bunch of menus?(Don't scoff, it doesn't take much to deter people that are only mildly interested) Are the mods "hidden" in the forums? Are lobbies with Mods "hidden" from the lobby? These(And more, make no mistake) might all sound really inconsequential, but you lose people at every turn in this process so working to streamline it is super important. This is the thing you need to carry mods into the mid-term and long term, being easy to use and share with friends is key to growth, nothing sucks more than trying to introduce a friend to a mod and having to walk them through a complicated process, only to still encounter issues and your version is out of date and blah blah blah, stuff like this is potentially crippling to that person's perception of not only the mod, but the whole system/idea of playing with mods in general.

Modability/Support is, potentially controversially, last in my list because frankly I just don't think it's the Modders themselves that need the most help. Sure, I'm not saying you guys should expand what can be done via modding and what not but first and foremost you need to get people playing them, that way when you come out and say "Hey guys, you can do X now!" not only are the modders excited by the new possibilities in regards to what they can do, but all these people that have been playing the mods and are invested into the system start thinking about what changes might be coming to the mods they like or what new mods might spring up. At the end of the day, modding's "Success" comes from The Players much more so than the Modders as odd as it sounds. Sure sometimes you get the oddities that break the curve and draw people in but those are just that, oddities and are not to be relied on.

So what can you tell us about your plans in regards to this type of thing for 1.0 and the following month or two? That is the "make or break" period IMO and what happens in that time period is really what's going to set the tone for what's to come.

Mike

I'm not overly active with the modding community, but greatly appreciate y'all's work.

On the topic of visibility, the mods section of PA Matches is pretty popular, roughly 11% of PA Matches' traffic. It's actually more popular than the gameplay section (lol), and is the 2nd most popular section of the site.

If y'all have any suggestions for improving it, I'll be happy to do what I can to implement them. I'm a bit swamped with client work right now, but will try and work on it as soon as I can.

Starcraft 1 had a very popular custom game scene. So did Warcraft 3, which gave birth to DOTA. The interface for discovery custom maps was beyond **** for both games.

In Starcraft 2 Blizzard added a relatively decent custom game hub. It had discovery via popularity, matchmaking, and a variety of goodies. I have not played Starcraft 2 custom games for a very long time. As I recall it went through quite a few iterations. What did they do well? What did they poorly? What things did they do that we should also do? What things did they do that we should not do?

I've already asked that you either remove my mods or provide credit to the mod author. I don't really like that you are just directly copying lengthy mod descriptions without even saying who made them.

Thread derailment...

The majority of the descriptions I wrote myself.

And again, the links go directly to the forum posts, not to a download.

As I mentioned, I am under some very tight client deadlines and all around have a lot on my plate right now. I'll be adding author categorization to PA Matches as soon as I can, but I want to do it right.

Well, Blizzard in general is not the greatest example/comparator to use, they're just such an outlier in almost every respect that it's basically not fair to make the comparison.

The thing is that I know we can't sit here and just say what we want, that doesn't help anyone, I'd rather you guys talk about what you can/plan to do so we can discuss alternatives/adjustments in such a way that we can actually come up with something actionable within your time frame instead of the "someday" type plans that don't do any good once the modding scene is already potentially "dead" you know?

Mike

I, uh, barely even know how to respond to that.

We look at what other games do all the time. Blizzard games in particular. What we, and the community, want to do with mods is similar to what Blizzard has done with the Starcraft 2 Arcade. It would be insane not to look at what they've done.

They've also iterated on their design several times. They tried things that didn't work, so they tried new things. What things did they try? What worked? What didn't work? Why did they not work? Would those things work for PA? Would they not work for the same reason? We ask these types of questions all the time. I'm asking for your help to answer these questions so together we can make the mod ecosystem vibrant and awesome.

What you're asking for is for us to put together a complete plan and then send it to you for review and approval. That would make you my manager. That's not how this works.

I'm just trying to approach this from an angle where things are feasible, like I said earlier, the most important period is release and the period of time immediately after that, a big fancy plan that will take an extra 4 months after release to fully execute isn't worth doing if the modding scene doesn't go anywhere.

I don't see a huge list of what people want really helping you guys "hit the ground running" as well as a focused(or at least as much focused as possible) discussion.

Lets start with this, what do you guys think of the content of the first post? Are you guys thinking the same thing or do you view it differently?

Mike

Haven't delved into Starcraft 2's custom maps, or even played the full game.

But in Starcraft and Warcraft 3, discovery of a custom map was nearly instantaneous. You'd simply select custom games and from there, you could see the name of the map for any game. You could even download said map directly from the host (as maps got larger, the bandwidth limit got awful, but eh). And since downloading a map allowed you to host it, maps could spread as quickly as they were played.

Early on there was a lot of talk about how Starcraft 2's custom map system restricted the maps you could see and play on, but as said, I never saw this for myself and didn't stay in touch with it as it progressed.

The first thing that is needed is the (limited) ability to write to the mod filesystem from in-game. That is a requirement to open up the ability of in-game mod management (even if it's community based for now, obviously a native manager is more ideal). Extending from that, and from what @Dementiurge described in the Blizzard system, should be the option to save server mods that you download by joining hosted games. That means they can then host them themselves down the track, rather than either going and getting the mod themselves, or joining games running that mod.

The mod scene is also currently hampered a bit by the need to shadow unit blueprints; the ability to hookmerge with existing blueprints would be really useful - this is doubly true for build.js and unit_list.js, because this at the moment makes it impossible for more than one unit mod to be run simultaneously.

Finally, make the lobby have an option to list games with and without mods at the same time, and make this the default.

So in short, some (potentially) quick wins:

• Write to file system from in-game
• Option to save server mods
• Ability to hook unit blueprints
• Ability to hook build.js & unit_list.js
• Lobby option to show modded & unmodded games at once, and make it default

Dementiurge, I may have been overly harsh on Starcraft/War3 systems. It did suck if you wanted to play a specific custom map and couldn't find it though. I would love it if you checked out the latest and greatest in the Starcraft Arcade (it's free!) and share your thoughts. That offer is open to everybody.


Raevn, that's a good list. There are really two sides to making mods awesome. First side is enabling modders. You guys need tools to make the awesome. We want to provide those tools so lists like the one you just gave are fantastic. More of this please.

The second side is enabling players with the ability to easily find and play cool mods. Personally I'd like to think we can do better than simply mixing mods in the server browser with everything else. It's not necessarily a bad first step though!

Forest, if ya'll do not want to make modded and unmodded games mix from the start (I understand how that could confuse some people), why not make it more obvious there are modded games? The current drop-down isn't that obvious

If you don't know the name of a mod you want to play and you don't have it at hand you'll have a hard time, no matter what system the game uses

The catch is that right now it's not "Mixed", right now it's still almost "hidden" behind the drop down menu and even then the modded games end up mixed with non-modded games if the user just flips mods to on. That's something that still needs to be updated, nothing was really said about it last time we talked about it.

Mike

Also, any distinction that highlights modded games and hints at the type of mod they contain would be useful. Even just a descriptive sentence written by the host could used for this purpose. (Game names have always been a popular feature.)

This wasn't directed at me, but since I found it nearly impossible to read your OP, I'm going to pretend I'm qualified to teach English Literature... Please hold while I find my spectacles and teaching crop.

The "Visibility" paragraph starts with a long sentence that is fairly winding and unfocused. Then it quickly diverts to talking about the "logistics" of mod communities. --- Your 'Ease of Access' paragraph feels like a branch of 'Visibility' rather than a problem of its own, because you use similar words to describe how they whittle down the playerbase, and it comes off sounding like the exact same problem, because you describe how important 'ease of access' is, but don't describe what it is. --- Lastly, the 'Moddability/Support' paragraph feels more like an anti-issue because you start off describing why it's not important, and then elaborate more on how visibility and players are more important than moddability/support.

In summary, you need to describe your concepts and make better of use topic sentences.
...Now I need to figure out where these spectacles came from...

Well the thing is that Visibility and Ease of Access are similar, but they cover different facets of the problem. Visibility comes first(Can't try playing a mod if you don't know about it) then comes the issues with actually trying to play the mod.

As for the 3rd paragraph, yeah it kinda is a non issue in the specific context of release and the immediate period of time afterwards, you need the players to realize there is long term potential while they're still playing PA and haven't put it down for something else. Mods live and die by people playing or not playing them, in the short to mid term I think it's more important that players know that modding is a thing and can easily play mods than it is for modders having the up most best tools. We can already do quite a bit, a bit more won't hurt of course but being able to do more doesn't necessarily help in the short term.

I know writing isn't my forte, but I don't think it's quite as "impenetrable" as you make it out to be.

Edit: Dammit I was editing the first post and I lost it because I accidentally closed the tab, ugh.

Mike

Maybe it would be a good idea if I wrote some of what I think will/should happen, and someone can pick out what they agree/disagree with.

Visibility
This will be covered by the mod-marketplace, whatever form that takes. I imagine the form it will take is a small-scale version of the steam/itunes/android market, a website built into the game. It should be built into the stock launcher, basically "PAMM but flashy". In fact, what I'm thinking of is like the blizzard launcher, where the mod marketplace has a dedicated tab in plain sight. The tab would have:

• A way for users to give mods ratings, possibly reviews
• A promotion ticker at the top, highlighting random or selected mods that the devs want to push (this is where I'm allowing free vs paid 'unfairness' to live, and only here)
• Below the ticker, a table much like my database (but good), showing the top 25 mods ordered by popularity (the rest on page 2, 3, ...)
• A drop down to change the ordering by views, downloads, rating, last updated etc
• Free and paid mods both visible by default, with filters of just paid and just free
• Mods you have already have a different colour background, and can be filtered out
• A dynamic search bar, where type a few letters and it filters the database automatically
• A page for every mod, like this but good
• Instead of reviews, maybe comments on the mod pages. Then again moderation could be a headache
• A way for users to submit media showing off use of the mod. Modders can then select media which does do so, which gets added to the pool of media viewable on the mod page
• Modders have moderation of their mods page
• A page for every modder, with links to/from the author page and mods pages. Another way to discover mods other than searching the database
• The author page would list their mods automatically, and below it basically be a blog for the modders to use as they wish. Dev diaries would be interesting to see from the bigger projects

Ease of Access
Simply a button on the main menu, which when clicked displays the mods (similar to raevn's installed mods list), also allowing you to enable/disable them at will (with an apply button to refresh the scene, for mods in global or start scenes)

Modability

• Features over time
• Documentation over time (the community can fill this gap if it has to, it's not like it's a core feature for users)
• Sucking as much native code from the server executable into libraries as possible, making it easier for people who want to mess about tweaking the core logic just because

BTW, we've been keeping a list of nice modding features for the client and server. They're on these threads:

• https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-client-api-requests.57785/
  
• https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-server-api-requests.61182/

Visibility is easily solved: Simply have a button that says "Arcade" next to the multiplayer button, exactly like how one would implement "Skirmish" right next to the multiplayer button on the main menu. Arcade is filtered modded games only, name subject to change of course.

Or call it just "Modded Games", arcade kinda throughs me off, not sure why just sounds weird XD.