I've decided to start this thread in reaction to comments made by @jables in the daily questions thread. To quote from that thread: "13.8.2015 Q1) nixtempestas: any news on an in game mod manager jables: nothing official. I'd like to get something in eventually, but lower on the list due to making sure we are not "officially endorsing" mods, as that can get us in trouble since we really have no control on them, and no resources to really moderate it. nixtempestas: is a "use at own risk" disclaimer not enough legal protection? jables: not really if it's on the main menu or something that makes it look like we did it. most people skip that and just see it in game and think it's official. so we have to be careful on it nixtempestas: fair enough jables: buuuut i'd like to do it eventually.. just can't say for sure it'll happen" To summarise, the issue is that Uber need a way to make mods more accessible, without 'officially endorsing' them as that could lead to issues (e.g. if someone were to release a TA mod, who would be responsible for the potential breach of copyright if someone who doesn't own TA used it)? So, lets throw a few ideas around, maybe we can come up with something @jables and the team hadn't considered before... To kick things off, I wonder if a way to do this would be to include a 'community hub' in game (rather than a mod manager). Inside this community hub would be access to a range of community run resources such as Exodus E Sports, a link through to this forum, a list of community game vox / team speak servers *and* a link to the community run PA Mod Manager (that would still remain a separate tool). This way it would be clear that in that section - All content is provided by groups outside of Uber - Mods would still be kept separate from PA and very obviously take you out of the game - This information would be accessible to new players who may not be aware of this forum or any of the organisations so should still have a significant positive impact on the uptake of many of these tools.
It might be good to work with modders to implement and expose functionality that would allow the community to create an in-game mod manager. Therfor taking that burden off of uber themself. So enabling/disabling mods in-game? Make sure all json data is passed from the mod files into the javascript(I think this was an issue at some point, don't know if it still exists or not though) Now i'm going off of quite out of date information here as I haven't looked at pa modding stuff in a long while.
I think making an integrated mod manner is already possible, although as pa mounts mods on start-up it would probably require a restart of the game to apply new settings. This isn't really the issue though. Many think mods are unfair for use in say the ladder, due to not all users having access it or knowing about them. An updated community tool wouldn't solve this as you'd still need to learn of it to get access. We need something that ships with the base game, although as stated a mod manager itself may not be possible. Thanks for the thoughts btw
Not everyone plays on Steam. It'd be a decent investment, I think, but it would split the modding scene into PAMM vs. Steam Workshop (with people having to maintain both if they wanted to maximise reach). I mean, there aren't many games I wouldn't want Steam Workshop support for. But PA is a unique case with an already-established modding scene supported by community tools.
I don't think it's possible. Last time I checked, PA doesn't allow you to write to files from within mods.
