Announcement Making mod installation easier

Old way will still work...

 

The server will ask the customer fashion?
I want my server send modes and did not allow customers to use other modes.

 

This is great and all, but really I want to see a game finally take mods into account when hosting servers and send them or provide a pop up on which mods need to be installed which the player must do kind of like a motd with urls to maybe a server mod package which is an all in one pack of the mods the server uses.


Better still I would love to see steam workshop support like garrys mod does it with scripts so we can host on steam and the server auto updates the mods and dishes them out to clients, combine that with the server knowing which mods are required it can disable those on client which are not loaded.

 

This would require mods to be loaded dynamically. As it stands, mods are loaded when the game is launched. How might a server invoke mods when one would have to have started up the game already? The mod system would need a bit of a rewrite. Not just that. The entire way assets are loaded would need a rewrite, and I don't think that's very doable at this time.

 

btw, i think it's will be useful to have install / uninstall scripts and scripts based on loading events.

While you add a mod that modify tier2 defaults blueprint for example, a character in tier4 will not have them. The mod will only have effect for the tier1 blueprints and new characters. So we need a lua script to be called the first time we play the char with this mod. And, when you remove a mod, some changes can be irreversible, so it can be interesting to have the game to copy the uninstall script if existing, and then if during the loading he dont find the mod, he will execute the script. The script have been copied during the mod install so if you have deleted the mod's folder, the game will still have the script.

And it will greatly improve mod debug :>.
In the same order, executing a script after the loading can be interesting to reset some of the mod settings for exemple.

 

Well then we have to resort to manual MOD loading and a MOTD or list of mods required and the host would need to inform and keep everyone up to speed on new versions of said mod which for people like me who have the capacity to put this game onto an enterprise solution it is just not feasible to mod my public servers.

Given that MODS which change inventory and the like will break your game from going back to vanilla I HIGHLY suggest that vanilla and modded game saves are not compatible and made seperate with scripts in place that list the required mods for that character save slot further more we need to add a prevention so modded games are NOT allowed on vanilla servers otherwise you will quickly start seeing config hacks for cheating. All in all without some sort of mod awareness sadly I cannot use mods because I need a way to manage them properly and not a thirdparty method, this is the same problem I had with Minecraft, while modding was great without client integration we were limited to server side mods, ontop of this I don't think the game works in a way that would allow server side plugins to run without the same on the client. So this severely hinders the possibility of modding to go anywhere past single-player.


On a new note, can somebody get around to seperating the server in the game so it becomes a Steam "Tool" and not appear to steam as the games .exe because if I host a dedicated server and I quit the game for whatever reason I cannot start the client again once I close the launcher window because Steam thinks the server process is the game and hence pops-up and says "The game is already running" this needs to be ironed out at some stage and the best way imo is to seperate the dedicated server from the main game.

 

So since the patch my mod isn't loading... I've made the .modinfo file, but nothing is being loaded... Can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong ?

Code:

{
  "name": "grey_race",
  "version" : "Beta v. Offended Koala",
  "path" : ".",
  "dependencies" : []
}

 

Is your folder "grey_race" and your modinfo file "grey_race.modinfo" ?

 

Yep, it's worked before - all of a sudden the interface won't show my race and nothing seems to be "activating"
No errors when running the game either...

It's ... odd...

 

modinfo goes inside the folder.

 

If I do that, I get an error: access violation...
So something in my file structure is wrong I guess...

 

Use pastebin.com to share your starbound.log if you wish.
There could be any number of issues.

 

Thanks

Here: http://pastebin.com/MNRyZe0s

 

This isn't really the right place to be discussing it but your log doesn't show anything obvious. Does your mod change or overwrite any existing files? If it does, make sure you get the latest copy of those files and re apply the changes to them before they get overwritten. My best advice to you would be to start your own thread about the issue. The issue is most definitely with the files you have added/overwritten though.

 

I tried putting some mods in but nothing worked what am I doing wrong?

 

I'm havin issues getting a handful of mods to run, I've added .modinfo files for the ones that didn't have one, making sure they reference the mod I placed them into but they aren't working.

 

Just so there's absolutely no doubt in my mind...if I want to, for example, make a seed printable, and make its price 1, all that has to be in the modded seed item's file is this?

Code:

{
"printable" : true,
"price" : "1"
}

EDIT: Never mind, I missed the link to the post about merging/overriding config files.

 

Anyone know of a way to get the mods working for a Mac, or does it just work on PC?

 

To find the game files, right-click Starbound in Steam, select "Properties", change to the "Local Files" tab, then click "Browse Local Files...".

 

what is your mod about ?
if it's a .modinfo error, the game will just crash at launch atm i think. copy us the path to your .modinfo mod and the said .modinfo.