Stagnation of the Modding Community

[squeek]

I may be off on this, but it seems like the number of active mod developers (not counting cosmetic-only character mod makers) has been dwindling since this announcement. I'd like to elaborate a bit on why I think this is the case, or at least why my interest in modding for this game has (sharply) declined.

• Nearly zero hope of further mod support/improvements

  Developer contact with the mod community began and ended with Ipsquiggle and then Cheerio after him. They both no longer come around here, and, as far as I can tell, all hope of mod-related changes to the game left with them. This is a huge deal because there are plenty of things that modders simply can not do without developer support (Minecraft, in theory, has this problem as well, but in that case modders have reverse engineered the entire game code so that they can fix/change anything they want without developer support; this isn't possible for Don't Starve). I went into it a bit in my post in the 'Last Update: What Happens Now?' thread, but the jist of this problem is:

  Things that are not currently possible (or that we don't have access to fixing/changing ourselves) are likely to never be possible.

  This is highly discouraging whenever you're modding a game. If you have an idea that should be possible, but you find out that it isn't and you have no power to change it, it's pretty easy to just give up on the mod (and perhaps give up on modding for that game [as I have done with multiple games/engines]).

  As an example, all the userdata (C++ functions/classes that are exposed to Lua) is arbitrarily restrictive in what is exposed, with zero consideration to what would be useful to modders (only the userdata functions that Klei uses in the game's Lua code are exposed, nothing more). Something I've asked for in developing my Better Console mod is access to moving the edit cursor and modifying the selection of the TextEditWidget userdata. Even though I know for certain multiple devs have seen my request, and that it is beyond trivial to implement, it has been ignored. This inhibits modders' ability to make any use of TextEditWidget beyond the super-basic implementation that they have put in place, even though it'd be zero work for them. With just this simple addition of access to the edit cursor and selection, a fully functional text editor could be implemented (with mouse support), and the lack of this functionality halted development of a different mod I was intending to make that would have relied on a decent ingame multi-line text editor.

  The total disregard for these types of requests made by the modding community is baffling to me, as there is no downside: it's minimal development time on their end for hugely expanded possibilities on ours. It'd take at most a couple hours to comb through all of the currently exposed C++ classes and ask oneself the question 'would this member function be useful to modders?' for each member function of each exposed class.

  Another issue is in dealing with mod-specific bugs, or bugs only visible once a mod is enabled. An example of this would be a bug I came across dealing with screen flickering whenever the MiniMap is visible and MiniMap:RebuildLayer is called (which happens when a tile changes, like when a pitchfork is used or turf is placed, etc). While Cheerio did sort of answer my question about texture masking (something that would be a great addition and we'll probably never see), he seemingly ignored the flickering issue, even though I provided a documented test mod that illustrates the problem. As I said in that post, the flickering bug effectively made a large mod that I was working on incompatible with my Minimap HUD mod, and discouraged me enough to stop developing that mod.

  This second issue is more understandable (much more development time on their end is involved), but it's still unfortunate and discouraging.

• Improvements to the game by modders are ignored

  One benefit of developing a game with mod support is that modders can (and will) improve your game for you. Klei has not taken advantage of this at all, and has, in fact, seemingly refused the help of the modding community. If you followed the modding community a few months back, you may have seen some posts by me and simplex complaining about our bug reports going ignored even though we detailed the problem, with code references, and provided a fix (simplex simply gave up on reporting some bugs because his were so routinely ignored, despite him providing the fix or describing the bug in detail). I think this highlights a sort of (probably unintentional) arrogance on the part of the development team in the sense that they behave as if only their code is worthwhile, and any non-developer's code is inherently worse/unacceptable.

  A good example of this problem is this bug report, which has still not yet been fixed, even though I provided the code for both a robust fix (making the pinecone use the growable component like it should) and a simple, straightforward fix (no possible issues, it's a totally self-contained fix).

  Another, although more subjective, illustration of this problem is the total lack of mods that have been implemented into the official game. Maybe it's a developer preference thing, but it seems foolish to not reach out to mod developers that have made objective improvements to the game and include those improvements into the official build. Keep in mind, though, that my problem with this might be a bit self-serving, because I think my Better Console mod (or parts of it) should be a candidate for this, but other mods like Working Signposts seem like they should be a no-brainer. There aren't too many candidates for inclusion, but it may also be possible that the lack of the possibility of inclusion contributes to the low number of these sorts of straightforward-improvement-type mods, as there would be more incentive to make them if they had a chance of being included in the game.

Who knows, I may be wrong about all of this, but I certainly have recognized the trend of capable developers posting less and less over the past few months in these forums (or disappearing completely) and that fewer and fewer non-art mods are being made. Maybe it's simply a coincidence. I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

TL;DR: Don't Starve was so close to being a great game to mod for, but in leaving the mod community on its own with no possibility for necessary improvements and no developer support, it's really shooting itself in the foot in terms of fostering that potential for a thriving modding scene and I think we're starting to see the effects of that now.

[TheDanaAddams]

I'm still optimistic that Cheerio will return to work on improving the mod system.

I imagine it's all-hands-on-deck for the DLC, right now, but once that's complete, we should be back on track.

 

Though, I don't disagree - part of the stagnation is because these upgrades are taking so long, and because things some have requested or suggested have been ignored... and when we can't do what we want, due to a limitation of the system, it's not very encouraging.

I'm personally REALLY hoping to see an improvement in the animation pipeline that will allow us to extend the player animation set.

I'm not a great codestress, so a lot of this technical stuff is way over my head. But thus far, Cheerio has been very receptive to my suggestions and requests regarding the animation pipeline.

I think priority may be on porting the mod tools to all platforms, once the DLC is finished, but after that, I do hope we see some improvements that are much-needed.

 

And let's face it... life got in the way of Up & Away's team, for now, and I'm sure the stalling of that big project disheartened a lot of others. I'm hoping that, like, six months from now, things are back in full-swing, here in the mod community.

 

Try to stay positive.

Put the prophecies of doom on hold, for a while.

Klei is a small indie studio - the benefit of that is that the community can be closer to the devs... but the downside is that their resources are spread thinner... and it's crunch-time for the DLC release, right now.

The DLC pays the bills - mod support doesn't. We've just gotta be patient. =)

[squeek]

I'm still optimistic that Cheerio will return to work on improving the mod system.

I imagine it's all-hands-on-deck for the DLC, right now, but once that's complete, we should be back on track.

 

Though, I don't disagree - part of the stagnation is because these upgrades are taking so long, and because things some have requested or suggested have been ignored... and when we can't do what we want, due to a limitation of the system, it's not very encouraging.

I'm personally REALLY hoping to see an improvement in the animation pipeline that will allow us to extend the player animation set.

I'm not a great codestress, so a lot of this technical stuff is way over my head. But thus far, Cheerio has been very receptive to my suggestions and requests regarding the animation pipeline.

I think priority may be on porting the mod tools to all platforms, once the DLC is finished, but after that, I do hope we see some improvements that are much-needed.

 

And let's face it... life got in the way of Up & Away's team, for now, and I'm sure the stalling of that big project disheartened a lot of others. I'm hoping that, like, six months from now, things are back in full-swing, here in the mod community.

 

Try to stay positive.

Put the prophecies of doom on hold, for a while.

Klei is a small indie studio - the benefit of that is that the community can be closer to the devs... but the downside is that their resources are spread thinner... and it's crunch-time for the DLC release, right now.

The DLC pays the bills - mod support doesn't. We've just gotta be patient. =)

While I appreciate Cheerio's and Ipsquiggle's past work with the mod community, I think the root problems might be more than they could handle alone. Or, if they came back, it would probably still mean that non-trivial things would go unsolved, just as they did when they were last active (things like complex mod-related requests and codebase improvements that only affect mods).

The problem I see with being optimistic in this instance is that it's not really clear that there will be a 'next time' for when the dev team focuses on the modding API. The perfect opportunity for that (after the 'Last Update' in October) has come and gone, and now it seems like development will be focused on pumping out DLCs and supporting them (not to mention DLCs have the potential to complicate the modding process significantly [supporting multiple separate codebases, hooray?]). Like I said in my post here, a patch that focused 100% on the modding API back then would have really paved the way for a successful and lasting modding community (we might now have mod-specific save data, ingame mod configuration, access to all useful userdata functions, more mod-friendly base game files, mod dependency resolution, etc).

It's definitely not easy (or worth much to the developers) to actively support a modding community in perpetuity. I don't blame the developers one bit, I'm just trying to explore why modders seem to be leaving, and thought that perhaps some others might be discouraged for the same reasons that I am.

P.S. simplex single-handedly ported the Don't Starve Mod Tools to both Mac and Linux 2 months ago, but, you guessed it, it has been largely ignored. Not sure what the status of Cheerio is, though, so maybe that being ignored is just a product of DLC crunch/vacation/etc and not indicative of the problems I outlined in the OP.

[iWitch]

I came here recently, and not particularly aware of the relationship with the developers, but if you look at where Skyrim Bethesda almost completely ignores the presence of bugs and is not going to fix creation kit. Nevertheless, the game is very popular, including among modders.

It is very interesting to look at scripts control the behavior of monsters.

 

This separation of functions - just brilliant. Hopefully then will introduce something similar in Skyrim with their papyrus. Because the NPC in Skyrim does not have a particular intelligence.

 

But what I did not like here - so it's elementary lack of code review before its release. Well, how could release an update from 26.02 not even be trying to check a couple of mods. I do not understand this attitude if only support modding here stands at the lowest priority.

 

Turning to the developers - I can only say one thing, understand that there is a category of people who like to do something themselves, create. That was the unexpected success of the minecraft.  If the game would not be possible for modding, I would not even look at her. Because thought it was another boring platformer of thousands in steam.

 

With the new DLC to play with mods is not practically possible, starting from a huge amount of time to download, and the last big problems associated with handling mods for DLC. Please think again before releasing the DLC and leave the situation with modes such as it is now.

 

This wall of text is provided by google translate

[Heavenfall]

I think the devs did a lot while the game was still in development. Heck, back in the day you couldn't even add new characters properly. But all products reach an end of development, and I think Don't Starve mod development has as well.

 

This is by far the most mod-friendly games I've ever encountered. There are games that are more restrictive and that's where I learned that modding is as much about finding out what is possible as it is about working with what is possible. If the devs aren't open to change anymore then that is how it is, and you just have to accept it. It means some ideas and the willingness to do them will go to waste.

 

There are also new mods coming out all the time. But the mod community has become less involved with each other, I think. I wish each mod would have a thread here, or in a sub-forum. You could set it up to not sort through "last reply" but "last mod update" or "mod release date". This would help immensely with interaction between modders, and also users. In that regard, using Steam workshop was a mistake. In that regard, creating the Downloads page was a mistake. Modders have all become more disconnected from each other.

[seronis]

On the thread with the pinecone fix the reason given was time requirements for testing trivial changes. This isnt currently an actual excuse anymore. We now have beta test access for steam.  There is no reason to avoid incorporating a bunch of these fixes and just pushing them to the test release.  People interested in trying an unstable branch (like me) can easily file a bug report.

[squeek]

There are also new mods coming out all the time. But the mod community has become less involved with each other, I think. I wish each mod would have a thread here, or in a sub-forum. You could set it up to not sort through "last reply" but "last mod update" or "mod release date". This would help immensely with interaction between modders, and also users. In that regard, using Steam workshop was a mistake. In that regard, creating the Downloads page was a mistake. Modders have all become more disconnected from each other.

You're probably right about this. I might not even be correct that the amount of mods being made is going down, and it could be that it's just harder to stay up to date. Steam Workshop definitely has a terrible method of keeping people up to date in this regard--mod updates are completely buried and users probably never even find out about them (it's not even possible to sort by recently updated on the Workshop, is it? How do users find out about mod updates in the Workshop? Randomly browsing the page of subscribed mods?). However, it is possible to sort the forum downloads by last update, but it's really hard to navigate to (I had to go to Downloads -> click a mod -> Click "Don't Starve" in the breadcrumb navigation and then sort by Most Recent).

I also recently found out that I no longer receive a notification when a mod uploaded on these forums gets a new comment, so a few of my mods had comments that I wasn't aware of until months later. So, yeah, there's a lot of lack of communication going on, and a real lack of a good way of staying updated with mod changes in general.

[kraken121]

You're probably right about this. I might not even be correct that the amount of mods being made is going down, and it could be that it's just harder to stay up to date. Steam Workshop definitely has a terrible method of keeping people up to date in this regard--mod updates are completely buried and users probably never even find out about them (it's not even possible to sort by recently updated on the Workshop, is it? How do users find out about mod updates in the Workshop? Randomly browsing the page of subscribed mods?). However, it is possible to sort the forum downloads by last update, but it's really hard to navigate to (I had to go to Downloads -> click a mod -> Click "Don't Starve" in the breadcrumb navigation and then sort by Most Recent).

I also recently found out that I no longer receive a notification when a mod uploaded on these forums gets a new comment, so a few of my mods had comments that I wasn't aware of until months later. So, yeah, there's a lot of lack of communication going on, and a real lack of a good way of staying updated with mod changes in general.

 

I was actually just talking with Dana about this the other day, I was comparing the current mod community to a group of cats, each person seems to be working on a pet project but there have been few group projects going on, I can only think of two, the waverly and up and away.

 

My team is relatively new to these forums about a month now or so, so we did not see what was going on during the development of the game nor what happened last fall with the mod tools etc

 

I am actually curious what you were planning on doing but could not do because of the restrictions within the code, coz we have a ton of stuff planned for our mod and a lot coded so far, have not really come across too many issues so far, cept for some stuff with the recent update, just having problems getting enough artists to help out. (which is another issue entirely, I see a LOT of great art on these forums but it seems most of the artists are interested in making things outside the game but not for inside the game), but as I said I am curious, would u mind posting it in here or sending me a pm about what you found you could not accomplish?

 

I agree, it is hard to sort through current mods being uploaded as well.

[kraken121]

On the thread with the pinecone fix the reason given was time requirements for testing trivial changes. This isnt currently an actual excuse anymore. We now have beta test access for steam.  There is no reason to avoid incorporating a bunch of these fixes and just pushing them to the test release.  People interested in trying an unstable branch (like me) can easily file a bug report.

 

 

I may be off on this, but it seems like the number of active mod developers (not counting cosmetic-only character mod makers) has been dwindling since this announcement. I'd like to elaborate a bit on why I think this is the case, or at least why my interest in modding for this game has (sharply) declined.

• Nearly zero hope of further mod support/improvements

  Developer contact with the mod community began and ended with Ipsquiggle and then Cheerio after him. They both no longer come around here, and, as far as I can tell, all hope of mod-related changes to the game left with them. This is a huge deal because there are plenty of things that modders simply can not do without developer support (Minecraft, in theory, has this problem as well, but in that case modders have reverse engineered the entire game code so that they can fix/change anything they want without developer support; this isn't possible for Don't Starve). I went into it a bit in my post in the 'Last Update: What Happens Now?' thread, but the jist of this problem is:

  Things that are not currently possible (or that we don't have access to fixing/changing ourselves) are likely to never be possible.

  This is highly discouraging whenever you're modding a game. If you have an idea that should be possible, but you find out that it isn't and you have no power to change it, it's pretty easy to just give up on the mod (and perhaps give up on modding for that game [as I have done with multiple games/engines]).

  As an example, all the userdata (C++ functions/classes that are exposed to Lua) is arbitrarily restrictive in what is exposed, with zero consideration to what would be useful to modders (only the userdata functions that Klei uses in the game's Lua code are exposed, nothing more). Something I've asked for in developing my Better Console mod is access to moving the edit cursor and modifying the selection of the TextEditWidget userdata. Even though I know for certain multiple devs have seen my request, and that it is beyond trivial to implement, it has been ignored. This inhibits modders' ability to make any use of TextEditWidget beyond the super-basic implementation that they have put in place, even though it'd be zero work for them. With just this simple addition of access to the edit cursor and selection, a fully functional text editor could be implemented (with mouse support), and the lack of this functionality halted development of a different mod I was intending to make that would have relied on a decent ingame multi-line text editor.

  The total disregard for these types of requests made by the modding community is baffling to me, as there is no downside: it's minimal development time on their end for hugely expanded possibilities on ours. It'd take at most a couple hours to comb through all of the currently exposed C++ classes and ask oneself the question 'would this member function be useful to modders?' for each member function of each exposed class.

  Another issue is in dealing with mod-specific bugs, or bugs only visible once a mod is enabled. An example of this would be a bug I came across dealing with screen flickering whenever the MiniMap is visible and MiniMap:RebuildLayer is called (which happens when a tile changes, like when a pitchfork is used or turf is placed, etc). While Cheerio did sort of answer my question about texture masking (something that would be a great addition and we'll probably never see), he seemingly ignored the flickering issue, even though I provided a documented test mod that illustrates the problem. As I said in that post, the flickering bug effectively made a large mod that I was working on incompatible with my Minimap HUD mod, and discouraged me enough to stop developing that mod.

  This second issue is more understandable (much more development time on their end is involved), but it's still unfortunate and discouraging.

   

• Improvements to the game by modders are ignored

  One benefit of developing a game with mod support is that modders can (and will) improve your game for you. Klei has not taken advantage of this at all, and has, in fact, seemingly refused the help of the modding community. If you followed the modding community a few months back, you may have seen some posts by me and simplex complaining about our bug reports going ignored even though we detailed the problem, with code references, and provided a fix (simplex simply gave up on reporting some bugs because his were so routinely ignored, despite him providing the fix or describing the bug in detail). I think this highlights a sort of (probably unintentional) arrogance on the part of the development team in the sense that they behave as if only their code is worthwhile, and any non-developer's code is inherently worse/unacceptable.

  A good example of this problem is this bug report, which has still not yet been fixed, even though I provided the code for both a robust fix (making the pinecone use the growable component like it should) and a simple, straightforward fix (no possible issues, it's a totally self-contained fix).

  Another, although more subjective, illustration of this problem is the total lack of mods that have been implemented into the official game. Maybe it's a developer preference thing, but it seems foolish to not reach out to mod developers that have made objective improvements to the game and include those improvements into the official build. Keep in mind, though, that my problem with this might be a bit self-serving, because I think my Better Console mod (or parts of it) should be a candidate for this, but other mods like Working Signposts seem like they should be a no-brainer. There aren't too many candidates for inclusion, but it may also be possible that the lack of the possibility of inclusion contributes to the low number of these sorts of straightforward-improvement-type mods, as there would be more incentive to make them if they had a chance of being included in the game.

Who knows, I may be wrong about all of this, but I certainly have recognized the trend of capable developers posting less and less over the past few months in these forums (or disappearing completely) and that fewer and fewer non-art mods are being made. Maybe it's simply a coincidence. I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter.

TL;DR: Don't Starve was so close to being a great game to mod for, but in leaving the mod community on its own with no possibility for necessary improvements and no developer support, it's really shooting itself in the foot in terms of fostering that potential for a thriving modding scene and I think we're starting to see the effects of that now.

 

Improvements to the game by modders are ignored

 

I agree 100%!

 

IMO its a perfect time during this beta to add these in and get the player testing needed to work out any bugs

[kraken121]

I'm still optimistic that Cheerio will return to work on improving the mod system.

I imagine it's all-hands-on-deck for the DLC, right now, but once that's complete, we should be back on track.

 

Though, I don't disagree - part of the stagnation is because these upgrades are taking so long, and because things some have requested or suggested have been ignored... and when we can't do what we want, due to a limitation of the system, it's not very encouraging.

I'm personally REALLY hoping to see an improvement in the animation pipeline that will allow us to extend the player animation set.

I'm not a great codestress, so a lot of this technical stuff is way over my head. But thus far, Cheerio has been very receptive to my suggestions and requests regarding the animation pipeline.

I think priority may be on porting the mod tools to all platforms, once the DLC is finished, but after that, I do hope we see some improvements that are much-needed.

 

And let's face it... life got in the way of Up & Away's team, for now, and I'm sure the stalling of that big project disheartened a lot of others. I'm hoping that, like, six months from now, things are back in full-swing, here in the mod community.

 

Try to stay positive.

Put the prophecies of doom on hold, for a while.

Klei is a small indie studio - the benefit of that is that the community can be closer to the devs... but the downside is that their resources are spread thinner... and it's crunch-time for the DLC release, right now.

The DLC pays the bills - mod support doesn't. We've just gotta be patient. =)

 

I also agree, we should try to stay positive/optimistic and try not to rage too much lol, These devs seem like a great bunch, probably just a lot on their plate the past couple months planning/exec this DLC

 

But i can understand the frustration when fixes etc are ignored.

 

[squeek]

I am actually curious what you were planning on doing but could not do because of the restrictions within the code, coz we have a ton of stuff planned for our mod and a lot coded so far, have not really come across too many issues so far, cept for some stuff with the recent update, just having problems getting enough artists to help out. (which is another issue entirely, I see a LOT of great art on these forums but it seems most of the artists are interested in making things outside the game but not for inside the game), but as I said I am curious, would u mind posting it in here or sending me a pm about what you found you could not accomplish?

Sure. A few things that aren't possible that I'm aware of:

• User configuration of mods on the Workshop, because the mod folder gets overwritten anytime you go into the mods screen. The fix for this would be to add a configuration file for each mod outside of the mod folders. This was going to be implemented by Ipsquiggle but it never happened.
• Mod-specific save data. This is detailed here
• A lot related to userdata functions not being exposed, which I talked about in the OP (DynamicShadow, TextEditWidget are two that I have been disappointed by)
• Adding custom character animations, as mentioned by TheDanaAddams; a lot of character mod ideas have been scrapped because of this
• Various base game files are not very mod friendly (cookpot, I believe, has given people trouble, but I don't have personal experience with that)

Some mods that I've attempted but was unable to finish because of some of this stuff:

• Adding jump to the game is limited by not being able to add custom animations or change the shadow height of the DynamicShadow userdata (it always appears directly under the player, which makes things confusing). The Physics userdata had some issues as well I believe. It's a been a long time since I attempted this.
• I was going to make a mod called "Prototyper" where you place down Prototype Prefabs and Prototype Components that you could open a GUI for and code their functionality ingame using Lua and then link these prototype prefabs to prototype components to make whatever you want (similar to the ComputerCraft Minecraft mod, I guess). This is severely limited/made impossible by the TextEditWidget userdata being so unnecessarily restricted.
• I was working on a mod called Ecosystems that makes the world react to chopping down trees, digging up plants, etc by 'degrading' the terrain over time (turning to dirt, basically) as well as a bunch of other changes. The terrain changing makes this mod incompatible with my Minimap HUD mod due to this bug. Minimap HUD is one of the most popular mods, so I find it hard to justify working on a mod that would be incompatible with it, even though this Ecosystems mod is the first mod I started making and I still fully believe it'd be a great addition to the game.
• My work-in-progress Holidays mod has been somewhat hampered by how seasonmanager and the clock are implemented, but this isn't a huge deal (I can get around the problems)

[_Q_]

I'm still here, but I'm waiting for bug fixes with some components:

http://forums.kleientertainment.com/topic/18801-modders-your-new-friend-at-klei/?p=376953

No mod support for crockpot, it finished at adding new items but they are still invisible on crock pot.

Modding api is unfinished and all developers vanished from modding forum.

Art is the next problem as I can't draw good art.

The textures are placed in wierd ways on atlasses no way I can edit the wall texture to something else or create new animation, only well documented textures and animations was characters animations as it is most popular modding area.

[Bigfoot]

Hey everyone, 

 

Thanks for the discussion here! Always appreciate the constructive feedback. I think all of you have put out some great points, and this is a solid learning opportunity for us. 

 

The status of Don't Starve is that we tried to put as much effort as possible into mods during the 6 months of updates as we could, even adding 2 full-time programmers in order to get it to a better state. When we committed to 6 months of updates, we didn't anticipate the amount of work cleaning up the mod API would take, but we bit the bullet and invested in making it better. I agree that the mod API is not perfect, and, just like any other tool, there will always be more to improve.

 

This is why we decided to open up all the scripts in the first place -- so modders could do more than what we could think of ourselves. After 6 months of an entire team supporting content updates and the mod community, ultimately we needed to start working on projects that would support our studio financially, and so we began working on the DLC. 

 

I hope everyone understands that the reason we opened up basically our entire source code (unheard of in almost any project) and spent months developing an API is that we believe in mods, and ultimately running a studio we have to balance our resources between creating new things and supporting the old ones.

 

Ultimately, I think there has been a failure in communication on our part, and we're going to try hard to improve that. I hate letting our fans down, especially when we spent a large amount of resources hoping to improve the community in the first place! All that said, @SethR is going to try and spend as much time as he can fixing bugs and tweaking the API with the limited time he has. Please be nice to him!

 

Thanks again for being such a great community, and letting us know how you feel. I really appreciate it.

[squeek]

Appreciate the response, Bigfoot. Improving communication with and opening up new avenues for the modding community to interact with the developers directly (something sorely missed since Ipsquiggle and Cheerio no longer serve as our conduits) would be a great thing.

[zeropoint101]

I'm new to all of this, but I thought I'd chime in anyway. I wasn't even aware that Ipsquiggle and Cheerio were no longer working with the modding community. I only recently came across the thread "Modders: Your new friend at Klei!" and thought it was pretty cool they had done that. Actually everything I've run across has been recent because I've only belonged to the forum for a couple of months maybe? Anyway, I hadn't looked at the dates, so I guess a lot has happened since then that I wasn't aware of. Was it posted somewhere officially when Ipsquiggle and Cheerio stopped working with modders?

 

On one hand, the devs here seem to be better at communicating with the playerbase/modders than most games I've seen. On the other, that doesn't mean it's as good as it should be. For instance, maybe the first post of "Modders: Your new friend at Klei" should be edited with a brief synopsis of who is doing(or not doing) what at the moment so that people new to the forums and new to modding(and I'm pretty new to the game too btw) will know what's going on without having to read through 46 pages. I like what Bigfoot said, and I think communication with your players and modders is THE most important thing aside from, obviously, having a good game.

 

That said, I think Klei is in my top...2? favorite studios(the other being MinMax) from what I've seen so far and I think they have a lot of great ideals and integrity. This has pretty much been said, but I think there are three issues here - money, time, and taking on things that take more of one or both of these than first projected. Coming from the perspective of someone who has been a small business owner, unfortunately their number one priority has to be money. And with that comes the issue of time as well. They have to balance "Do we spend money on hiring extra staff to do stuff the players want, but don't especially need to still enjoy the game?" with "How will this affect our ability to stay up and running and making the money we need to make?"

 

I also know from running a business that there are "small things that would be barely take any time at all" requested by customers that get stacked up to the ceiling and become a pile of things that "could never be completed with 100 people working 20 hr days for a couple years". They HAVE TO pick and choose what they put their resources into, even if a lot of those things are 20 minute fixes.

 

That said, there's a lot of valid complaints and suggestions here, and I think the best we can hope for is for Klei to communicate the best they can, and to accomplish as much as they can with these things. Keeping your players, and your modders happy is all connected to overall future growth and success.

[Soopakoopa]

  This happens for almost every and any professionally-produced indie

computer game; First the alpha stage, then the beta stage, then the brief

romance with mod support stage, then the completion and rampant DLC

production stage, which generally goes on for a few years until the developers

get tired of the game. The developers count on community content to keep the

game trucking along, but never give enough freedom to modders and the community

fizzles out into a group consisting of mainly the oldest veterans and a slow cycle of

newcomers who play the game for about 6 or 7 weeks and then move on to play either

Minecraft or Roblox.

 

Not trying to be a downer, but that happens to just about every community.