Okay. So I am trying to make 1 commander in TeamComBuilder have a mostly integral autonomous functional orbital base. Including metal generation, energy generation, storages, factory, defences, and units. But noooo.... the dumb thing wants to be difficult in the worst ways, and this is my second attempt! Orbital factory: What I was mainly using as example. Works. Wasn't changed. (besides build arm and health...) Orbital Energy Storage: A land energy storage, built on orbital layer. When built, sinks to surface. Orbital Metal Storage: Made same way as energy storage, so of course it also sinks to the... wait, thef***? It STAYS in orbit! WHY! Anyway, it also doesn't have the orbital position line, bet that is just a FX. It also doesn't seem to show "orbital shell" despite "enableorbitalshell: true". Solar Array: Just made it stationary. At least it stays in orbi... DAMMIT! It falls to the ground too! WHAT THE RELATIVE F***! Where did I go so wrong in life...
OKAY, UPDATE: - "physics": {"collision_layers": "WL_Orbital","gravity_scalar": 0.001,"push_class": 50,"radius": 15}, -"spawn_layers": "WL_Orbital", -"enable_orbital_shell": true, All of that achieves desired results. New question: The jig has (had) a placement area of 300x300. This prevents other jigs in the same radius. This also prevents defense platforms unfortunately. HOWEVER, this doesn't prevent solar arrays (?). Solar arrays were units but were made AFAIK fully into an orbital structure. It sure as hell don't move. Anyway, that is my question. What does the solar array use to be buildable/existable within the same 300x300 perimeter of a jig? That would be very useful for defense platforms and factories.
Problems and questions like this could easily be avoided if someone (a dev?) took the time to slap together some basic documentation
If I didn't know any better I would think you are being paid to spout platitudes and excuses for basic **** that could be done in a single day of work not being done at all. I said "BASIC" documentation. This is *NOT* a difficult thing to do for anyone with source access. Edit: Just wanted to add... this IS work. No kidding they have work to do.
They have more important work to do, how the heck don't you realize that you're (and modding is) a teeny tiny minority? I can't believe you'd prioritize modding over gameplay, balance, the server, bug squashing, etc... This is a 30 man team for **** sakes.
Anyway, I suspect "placement size" is the reason. If one item has a 300x300 placement size, it covers 300x300. If an item has 20x20, it covers 20x20. That 20 area cannot overlap that 300 area. HOWEVER, an unmentioned or ZERO placement size, cannot overlap, but as it is nonexistant, it can literally be placed in a 300x300 and not overlap, as it is nonexistant. Can't overlap what doesn't exist. THEN, the only check for overlapping is "mesh bounds" I believe. You can't say they aren't doing terrific work anyway swizzle. I mean, recent updates, hello? Besides, EA and Sony do much better jobs at documenting their stuff... not. I wouldn't mind documentation, but the only dev team I ever seen document anything, was Totem Arts, and they are nonprofit.
Then you haven't played many games with any sort of decent mod support. Even complete Indie games created by solo devs can have decent documentation. Take the game "Distant Worlds" for instance. It's made by a single guy but he put the time in to create a fledged out modding document. If a solo dev can make a 100+ page document to cover mod basics, so can a 30 man team on a game that, when being developed, was touted as "modder friendly"
Supreme Commander had at least 5 times the budget of PA, and had minimal documentation also. More people doesn't mean they have people to spare; there are things far higher on the priority list. Being a single developer has many advantages in that respect - he can do whatever he wants in whatever order he wants. Maybe the game is already completed as much as he wants, so he can afford to spend the time doing mod documentation.
Raevn, there were multiple devs that were "assigned" to mod support that have now fallen off the face of the earth. The concern is not that this has happened, it's that again we are in the situation of having zero information about what the **** is going on. Jables doesn't post here, and he doesn't answer threads here either so obviously this is something sensitive for some reason or they simply do not have any future plans to do anything with their modding community. For a game where one of the big selling/backing points was "MOD SUPPORT", lack of official information about direction and etc.. is pretty **** and is actually quite inexcusable.
Sorian still posts here, as does Ben occasionally. It's possible some of the others were part of the layoffs, but we aren't entitled to that information. I don't share your concern however that this is some kind of indication that they have given up on modding, as is implied. At 232 mods and counting, I challenge you to find a more modded RTS, especially one so young - it's certainly already surpassed Supreme Commander, and that's been out many, many years. If that's inexcusable, then I suggest you may have unrealistic expectations . Also, you are only using a very narrow definition of "Mod Support" which I don't believe is what was meant in the pitch - when a game has "Mod Support", it typically refers to the ability of the game to be modded, rather than the company providing support to modders. There were many systems added to the game to allow modding in it's various forms, including transient server mods which automatically download (which is a far superior system to Sup Com, where you had to manually make sure everyone had the right mods installed). No-one will argue that there's always more that can be done. But you're the first to express such strong opposition, and to suggest modding should be taking priority over gameplay and other improvements at this point. It's a question of prioritization more than anything, and there's no point improving modding if by doing so you ensure there's no-one left to play the mods.
To be honest I think you are totally missing the point of modding. The vast majority of games, even ones that are quite moddable, have no big documentation. The whole point about modding is that modders go at a game, research how it works and change it once they understand how it works. Developers who make that easier are a luxury for the modder, not a requirement. Constantly asking for perfect documentation is the completely wrong thing to ask for. If you want a perfectly documented environment you should stop looking to mod anything. Modding is all about researching by yourself how something works and then modifying it. Good support for mods does not mean that the whole thing should be perfectly documented, it means that the developers put in hooks that allows people to make mods without having to do stuff with for example assembler. So PA has an extremely moddable UI system with modding hooks embedded in it. It uses well known javascript libraries (those btw have documentation that 1:1 works in PA) and for anyone with web development skills modding the PA UI is super simple and very intuitive. PA also has a transient mods system for servers that allow all sorts of mods that modify units and alter the balance, etc. The base concepts behind these systems (client ui mods and server mods) were both documented by Uber for us and most of the modding ecosystem is build on top of that. By now we also have access to the server which actually opens up some simple gameplay scripting stuff (You can change the winning conditions by modifing the server for example), but that is still rough and has no hooking system. On top of this we had a TON of help from Uber to develop all sorts of things over time. So saying Uber is not taking care of modders is simply wrong. Yes we could need more APIs here and there, but that will always be the case as long as we don't have the whole source code. I can see that you are probably as unhappy as you are because you are looking for extensive (?) gameplay scripting (?) or other specific things that are not possible yet. But even once we will have them I an guarantee you they won't have big documentation and most modders won't care much and just dig into it.
I think I am mainly coming from the server side scripting angle. Sure, if you look at modding from the UI perspective, I absolutely agree that it is awesome and you can do pretty much whatever you want. However, from the server side scripting angle, I think "rough" is an understatement. The core of total conversions is basically scripting. Sure, you can do some balance mods and random things like that with limited script access, but without a decent API/hooking system on the server side with some basic documentation, there is not very much we can do. Sure with some of the hacks going through enabling cheats on the client side to enable unit spawning and such, we can do a bit more, but here again this is completely unsustainable considering the ability of pretty much any player to trivially gain access to the cheat and break any game they join. I think if you look at modding from the server-side scripting viewpoint, you can agree (and it seems you already have) that there is much left to be desired and the fact that none of the devs have mentioned any sort of going forward plan is very annoying to me. I don't see how difficult it is to take a few minutes to write a post with something like "we are working on server side scripting and hope to have X/Y/Z API systems in place over the next few months. I wish PA had something like the scripting system in X3... that'd be so so nice.
I am not grading them a 10/10, but they deserve no less than a 7. Some games can't mod at all. Some games were never made to mod but have mods. This game was made to have mods, and have some documentation such as Colin has shown me they listed API calls and junk just for UI modders. 100 pages of documentation, no. Some documentation, yes. It isn't like they didn't show us how to shadow files, use coherent debugger, include coherent debugger with the game install... They did all this for us, they deserve credit.
Again, issue is not the UI modding side of things - it's the server-side scripting side of thing, where all of the critical hooking for anything that modifies the gameplay exists.
