Hi ! I've had a lengthy discussion with a friend about the way mods are handled by the game, and I'd like to share the conclusions we've drawn. Currently, mods are installed by the client and the server, and there's that "allow assets mismatch" box to tell the server not to panic when there are assets it doesn't know about. That leads to several problems : - Crashes both on the server side and the client side. - All players who just want to play on a server have to know and download on their side every feature that the server wants/adds, and keep track of mod updates. Why not imagine that the other way round ? Mods could be installed only on the server (which would not change much for single players anyway), and when a client connects to a server, the server returns the list of the required mods to play, where the files list can be checked if the client wants to. The client confirms, the content is downloaded in a dedicated folder that corresponds to that server play, it's verified by a checksum or whatever that the data downloaded is correct, and there's no possible mismatch. That way, it's a little more work for server admins, but since they want to be server admins, they're ok to accomplish some tasks to make their server run properly. If they want to allow lots of custom races and such, at least when it's installed on their side, they know exactly what is installed, and they're sure that every player will see the same things and have the same gaming experience. It's also possible to mod the server and add new features without telling all the time to players to search the update and install it the proper way. That may use a little more download bandwidth, and take a little more space on the player's hard disk if they play on several servers, but I think it would greatly improve the multiplayer experience, allow creative server admins who want to add custom unique features to be less limited, and be sure that there will be less crashes due to incompatibilities. Thanks for reading !
That sounds a lot like the automatic resource pack downloads that Minecraft has, I like it. This might even be easier to implement than Minecraft's system, considering Starbound uses the Steam Workshop.
Everyone doesn't use Steam to play Starbound, though, and it's cool to have the option not to use it.
