Leaderboard

Thanks everyone. There seems to be enough interest for us to go ahead with the project, and we're just in the process of doing final tests on the mod loader functionality. Solver is also part of this mod tool project (although he's not posted here) and he's investigating the logistics of getting a standalone editor to run based on the DLLs that are shipped with the game - which would make life a lot easier for everyone, as nobody needs to go near Unity to work on these tools. So hopefully we'll pull something more formal together this week and invite everyone interested to take a look. @Charon yes, you make a good point about modders needing to be involved in the design process. This was part of my plan, but we needed to check first whether there were programmers interested. I'm not sure if there needs to be a formal process for that though; I think as soon as people start using the tools there'll be organic requests for new features and feedback on how the UI could be improved. These tools are likely to be something that are heavily iterated on based on modder feedback. This somewhat also touches on the points made by @drages but the purpose of this initial mod tool is simple mods, and it is intended for people who have very little knowledge of programming or anything else. It should be a single program people can install on their computer and then use it to change the values in the game, and it should spit out a mod that can be easily uploaded to Steam Workshop. To my understanding (although I'm not a coder), the "modular mod" system exists in Xenonauts 2 but is handled automatically this time around. The focus is ease of use. Unfortunately, this tool is going to have limitations. The big one is the ability to add new assets to the game, because Unity locks all its assets away in Asset Bundles and a standalone program can't add new things to these Asset Bundles. At least initially, this standalone editor simply won't be able to add new art to the game in any form - e.g. if you want to create a new weapon, it has to pick from artwork that already exists in the game files. That said, this is something that can be addressed. One solution is to create a second more powerful mod editor for advanced users that works as a Unity plugin, which would allow the users to do anything that the developers can do, including making new maps etc. But this requires the modder learns (or already knows) Unity, as well as there being some technical / licensing hurdles we need to overcome. It's also possible that a standalone tool could be written that hooks into Unity and adds new artwork to Asset Bundles without the user having to have any Unity knowledge. There might be other options, too. But a lot of this depends on the skills of the programmers taking part, and how much time they're willing to put into the project. But these are discussions best had once the simple tools are in progress and people have a better idea of scope and what is / is not possible within our framework.

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone. I've now reverted prototype to the latest Experimental version while I work on the next Prototype build based on this feedback, as the bugs were taking up quite a bit of our time.