How do we create a modding wiki

[Nightinggale]

It is clear to me that the modding community has gained extensive knowledge on how to mod various parts of the game. However each modder relies on personal experience and the exchange of knowledge between modders is limited. Also it is not time efficient to start threads each time you are stuck and then hope somebody will see it and hopefully know the answer.

Also we do not have any introduction to modding. People are left to figuring it out on their own and look at what other people have published on GitHub. There is no "hello world" kind of modding guide. It didn't hold me back because I was experienced with Harmony prior to discovering ONI, but that's a way too high bar to set as requirement for modding.

We do have "the wiki" for ONI, but it's kind of lacking when it comes to the modding page. Ideally we start a new wiki, which is written by modders for modders. Something similar to "the wiki" where everybody can sign up and start adding new pages or update existing pages. The wiki should contain all aspects of modding, like how to decompile, extract graphics, set up the compiler to compile a new mod etc as well as actual modding like how to add a new building, mod an existing one, add a new map generator etc. A guide on "starting your first mod" would also be nice.

Personally the first thing I would like to add is a guide on how to save data from your modded object or base game object without breaking savegames from either adding or removing the mod. Also other tasks like how to copy settings between buildings (easy if you know what you are doing, but hard if you try to copy the decompiled code). How to add sliders to buildings would be good to add too, particularly how to add multiple to the same building and how to make methods trigger when the slider change value.

Unlike Klei's modding tutorial (which has yet to be written), we can also add libraries or library like code written by other modders for tasks, which would be useful for modders. Config files comes to mind as well as my library to add unlimited number of pipe ports to buildings (Klei only supports 2 in and 2 out, the secondary with some limitations). If your mod adds features for other mods, you can add it here and let other modders be aware of it and why it would be interesting to use. It should however be optional as in the wiki shouldn't assume all mods to rely on code from other mods.

There are likely way more information, which could be interesting to add to a wiki, but this is what I could think of offhand.

 

Do anybody know how to start a wiki and equally important where such a wiki should be placed?

Sure I can do something myself, but that's not the way to go if the goal is it should be a community effort. If somebody else knows more about wikis than I do, then please enlighten us. I kind of like the GamePedia wiki. Maybe it would be best to just start another wiki there. It should be two wikis because you don't want to mix search results for gamers and for modders, but if we use the same server, we can reuse accounts and wiki syntax.

[Cairath]

Wiki/gamepedia aren't really good for code stuff, personally I prefer github because it integrates links to repos, code snippets, gists and anything you can think of. I'm in the process of writing an extensive tutorial with templates and examples, but have been waiting for the game to be released and want to see what Klei comes up with and that's when I'm going to push it live (sometime between me dealing with the load of mods and TNI to maintain... wtb more days in the week)

[Nightinggale]

3 minutes ago, Cairath said:

personally I prefer github because it integrates links to repos, code snippets, gists and anything you can think of.

Good point. The thing I dislike about GitHub is that it has a tendency to become a closed group. Also wikis on GitHub are tied to projects and projects usually have a git repository as well. This means it becomes the wiki of a modder rather than the community.

For us to make a community wiki on GitHub, we would need a project not linked to a specific repository or mod development. Also we should have a clear and easy procedure for adding new contributors.

13 minutes ago, Cairath said:

I'm in the process of writing an extensive tutorial with templates and examples, but have been waiting for the game to be released and want to see what Klei comes up with and that's when I'm going to push it live (sometime between me dealing with the load of mods and TNI to maintain... wtb more days in the week)

I fully get what you mean by this, but I disagree with waiting. Ideally we should locate all bugs in the mod support code prior to release. If ONI is released and we encounter bugs, it could take a while before they release a patch to fix the bugs. There are already mod support fixes in the test branch, though admittedly I can't think of any offhand, which wasn't reported for QOL3, but not fixed until the test branch.

I'm working on modding and posting bug reports for the test branch. The last report isn't even 24 hours old yet.

 

[Cairath]

1 minute ago, Nightinggale said:

Ideally we should locate all bugs in the mod support code prior to release.

I agree, I've reported a bunch directly to the devs when we chatted during introduction of the mod support and they've been fixed  

 

The waiting part is mostly due to me being insanely busy these days, both irl and with updates here, and hating half-assed solutions - though after a year of modding ONI there's tons of stuff and quirks I know and share whenever people ask, but writing it down would save me some time answering questions 

 

14 minutes ago, Nightinggale said:

For us to make a community wiki on GitHub, we would need a project not linked to a specific repository or mod development. Also we should have a clear and easy procedure for adding new contributors.

Yeah - exactly what I had in mind. I have a new repo for that, it's just waiting for me to finish up. I'll try to release at least the initial part soon and I'll add you.

 

One more thing, there's a modding section in the ONI discord, but at this point I think we might be better off with a modding discord? I've made one, we could see if it catches on - personally I despise using forums for any kind of modding conversation, it's too slow paced  Most of the time I help people is on discord anyway. https://discord.gg/9mXNdWe