So the kickstrter backers got an early heads up on a new feature that has been worked on and now opening it up to everyone to know.
Colonisation: Moonbase will have mod support, there are some good and bad news on this front though.
Due to the continued extended development time required at this point mod support will be fully implemented after release.
The good news is though the functionality could be added sooner, 85% of the functionality of the mod support is in it is the super easy UI that I want to develop that will have to come after release.
Here is the kickstarter information I released and should explain all about the mod support
What will this mod support look like?
Well the one thing I wanted to do is make it super easy for people to make all kinds of mods, this means no extra tools or downloads, there will be a specific menu in the front end for mods to create and add, most of the cleanup of code, while has helped me develop the game easier and get some performance back has also meant that adding additional content is possible straight from within the game.
So what can you mod?
Well if you really wanted to you can mod the original content, while this will not be possible from within the game itself it is completely possible by editing a database.
What can you mod in game.
Well you can add as many buildings as you like, setting up their resource cost, income and outcome, description, name, how many colonists will work there etc. just like any other building in the game.
For buildings you will need to get a 3D model and texture, these can be created by yourself or obtained through other sources available on the internet, there will be some setup required to get the texture working in game and giving them correct naming convention.
Missions, you will be able to add your own set of missions to the game to run alongside the normally available missions. These can follow any scheme that the current missions will follow
The plan is then to make this easy to package up and then unpack into another copy of the game, avoiding mod mixing problems allowing you to add as many as you like without any interference from each other.
While these are all possible, unfortunately the UI to make this all super easy will take some time to do and while might be an awesome addition to the game, its not essential to the games release.
As mentioned above in its current form there is some mod support, if enough interest is shown in modding the game before the official UI is made I can potentially finish it up to get some basic mod support going.
What you will definitely need to add a mod without the UI is an sqlite database editor, for those who want to add 3D content you will either need to find a model of the internet that will fit specific requirements (the UI will hopefully get around most of these) or the best approach is to model the content yourself in a 3D modeling program.
As to textures for the 3D content, again you can use existing textures if you wish however the specular (shiny surface) and emmisive (glowing / light emitting) have a specific requirements to follow and it is suggested that you have 2D editing software like photoshop.
If there is interest in modding please post below and I will do a short write up on the specifics mentioned above so that you can start making mods while the mod support is being added.
I'm personally very interested in modding, some of my fondest memories were creating levels and graphics for the BBC game Repton. I think the designer was included with Repton 3 if memory serves. Anyhow fast forward nearly 30 years (!) and I've been active in lots of modding circles, creating add-ons for World of Warcraft and messing about with Blender, Terragen, Brcye 3D and Photoshop.
The opportunity to craft some constructions and either replace the default buildings or create my own is a great way to interact with the creativity of gamers.
Depending on the level of customisation you could even get a game that's almost unrecognisable from what you release.
If I were you I'd start out simple though because as I found out with warcraft, custom mods can break the core game, and that makes debugging especially difficult, a no-mod startup option should be available to rule out any interferring mods.
Being able to customise the building's will be very popular I'm sure and something I'd like to have a go at is re-texturing. You could always take a leaf out of Blizzards book and use a bespoke codeset to interact with published variables and create custom UIs. Sharing the community creations is important so an easy way to install them (into a mod folder perhaps) would be ideal.
A couple of other ideas for modding that spring to mind;
* custom maps
* mission design
Anyhow very pleased modding is something you are considering post-release, I know it was never mentioned in the kickstarter so came as a pleasant surprise to me.
for the most part, the in game modding will not allow you to break it, only in the sense of balance but that is up to the mod itself to get right.
As to modding the game outside of the UI (pre-release mod) as long as you fill in all fields in the database entry for that building, again it can not break the game providing you give the correct names for your models/textures.
the problem with mods is that if you add extra content and you play with it removing the mod to a "base code" game would break the save that has utilized the mod content, to get back to the base game you would lose your save game in this instance - a force career delete.
Alternatively which may cause even more problems due to size and shape of the building is to possibly provide a default block that would replace the missing content.
As to modding the existing content this has been something I have gave some thought to and is also related to the above stock game. while it is still early days my thoughts where not to allow modding of the standard content inside the game itself (there is nothing preventing extreme moders to edit that sort of stuff out of game) its something I will work more on and see how much time it would take to make redundancies to ensure things don't break.
Map modding has also crossed my mind, however there are more issues with this, mostly to do with the way I have optimized the game to work as fast as possible, this has evolved into a somewhat complex process with getting collision to work with the map but yet not slow the game down on slower machines. As a thought it is possible but would require a fair bit of setup to make sure this doesn't get broken easily.
As to mission designs, these will be limited in a way but the variety of types of missions should be enough to satisfy most mission ideas that people can come up with.
The whole idea behind the mod is while the content that will be included in the game will be of good quality, there will always be people doing better things in their spare time as they can focus on a comparably small amount of content than myself and with no time limit. the other part to this is that extra content will extend the games life.
But as you rightly put, a lot of games allow modding but the mods break the game, this has been the number one thing that has put me off either adding mods to games I play or making a mod for another game, this is why the highest priority for the mod feature is to make a good UI that allows easy creation and distribution that will guarantee to work in any other game, even with multiple other mods already in.
The benefit of making an easy to use mod feature is that you wont have to know programming, modeling or texturing to get additional content in. (while it may be advantageous to do so, as stated in the first post this content can be gotten else where) so artists and story writes don't have to concern themselves with anything other than what they already know.
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