Modular Modding

This is more a meta-post rather then any concrete ideas for any of the mods you guys are developing. I've expressed these views before, a long time ago in a forum far, far away (atari forums ), but I thought I might hit my target market better by posting them here again.

You guys have done some superlative stuff, especially with regard the Middlestates cluster and the (seemingly) large chunks of code that accompanies it. I tip my hat to you good sirs.

Yet there is not alot to show to non-modders for your efforts, which is a shame because I do believe that you have code/ideas that could be packaged as a mod right now and distributed. Frankly, I think this is a paradigm more modders should adopt - release smaller, self contained mods that can be enabled/disabled at the discretion of the end user, rather then forcing them to "buy" into a gigantic mod that adds/modifies stuff that the user liked as is. Take, for example, Freelancer and its modding community. Some mods are pretty good in what they have achieved, but are ruined (IMO) by forcing users to take the good with the bad - some mods have battleship encounters but also give you star wars fighters or flying saucer models on top of that. Ideally, they should be packaged separately - this is the concept of the modular mod. A positive example of this paradigm would be Flamineo's Damage Mod (there are many others), which worked well within the confines of the game without adding lots of craziness, like the freighter-carrier in the unleashed mod.

What I'm trying to get at here is that maybe you should step back and see what ideas/code you have now could float on its own with some work and perhaps go about releasing it piecemeal, rather then working towards a hugh uber-release that might suffer from infinite deadlines (thusly denying the public the fruits of your labour). I am a programmer myself - I can appreciate that some concepts cannot be extracted from the superstructure of supporting code, I'm sure alot of your ideas could be modified to fit into vanilla EoC.

[+1 to me for using the word paradigm]

Your argument is very reasonable. And in many ways that is what we are doing. We are replacing each of the PS systems with more moddable versions.

Small achievable goals is the motto. And small achievable releases. For instance, this first release has only a few coded features outside of the economy and trade simulation. On the otherhand it allows the huge amount of graphical work to get the viewing it deserves. But nothing stops someone from packaging up the economy sim for the standard EoC game. I have gone out of my way to make the economy adjustable via INI file. To the point that the team member setting it up has never run a POG compile.

The design plans for future releases are the same. We are going to replace the traffic scripts with versions that can be customized via INI file. The ships that are chosen, the numbers of escorts, which types of stations they show up around. These parameters could be changed via INI file.

And another plan exists to replace the base load out. To break the restriction of only 5 types of player ships. And allow the player to customize a whole fleet. When all ships can suffer battle damage, and get repaired, the damage mod will really shine. I did not want to do a load out screen. And I had avoided working on one. But when considering what the community really needed solved - what every mod really needed to have working, it is the natural choice. EricMan proved it was possible. This next one will just be a more generalized solution.

There is some difficulty in making these kinds of changes on the base game scripts. They just were not designed for it. Some work has to be done to go back and smooth over the rough edges. Fill in the gaps and get rid of special cases.

These mods will not run in the badlands cluster without some modification of that cluster. That cluster was never built to support an economy (for instance) and the stations are placed in crazy ways. The economy sim will still run on it, but the pricing will be very goofy. Some work would have to be done to make it run in the badlands, but far less work than coding one from scratch.

So rather than be totally backward compatable, the goal is really to build a conversion platform that is very flexible. So that Buda5 could convert. Or an Iwar style game could be made.

And the goal is to build it one little release at a time. Taking on just one major feature at a time in a focused manner. The first release (The Middle States) will be out (at least beta) in June.

We are still looking for coders. If you would like to help get these other pieces done - and understand them enough to get them running in the badlands - we would love to have the help!

Ahhh freelancer.. I wish I never lost my CD.
I belong to the Freeworlds Mod Forum as the infamous bahamut.

Cal, when are we gonna get somethin' cool?