People keep complaining about my cat race not being vanilla friendly. I don't play online, so I have no idea how any of that works, but it kind of feels like a race mod wouldn't be compatible with games that don't have said race? Can someone fill me in on what precisely vanilla-friendly is, and what is and isn't compatible with games who don't have a mod?
Mods that are 'vanilla-friendly' (also referred to as multiplayer-compatible) are mods that only modify existing assets, or if the mods do add assets these assets may only ever be locally referenced. An example of the latter is loading a configuration inside a .lua script, since Lua code is never shared with the server or other clients. When you connect to a server, it will try to find files related to your species, which obviously aren't present on the server. This will cause the server to crash or become unstable. The same can be said for other players; they could crash, disconnect or start lagging. What people regularly do is make multiplayer compatible custom items by modifying an instance of an existing item/asset. An example of that is my Hatter, which manipulates directives to turn a custom image into a multiplayer compatible hat. Even though it appears like the custom image, it's actually just the eye patch with custom parameters that the vanilla game knows how to handle (directives). By nature, species mods can't be made multiplayer compatible because they require new assets. I'm afraid you can't really do anything about that. You could (and perhaps should to decrease the amount of complaints) add a warning to your overview, stating that the mod will not work on servers that don't indicate they support custom species.
That's what I thought. I mean, the species' image itself is a new asset. You can't really fix that, unless you overwrite an existing species... That is an absolutely amazing tool. Like wow. I wonder if something similar can be made for swords... I will definitely add a disclaimer about not being compatible with vanilla. Thanks for the help!
Swords can be customized in a very similar way. They're actually more configurable since you can basically change the entire animation on top of simply changing it to a custom texture. It definitely requires more work, and my tool for those kinds of drawables isn't specifically targeted at swords because of how customizable these activeitems are. I don't know if anyone has made something specifically for weapons since 1.0, but you can check my drawables generator on GitHub if you want. https://github.com/Silverfeelin/Starbound-DrawablesGenerator
Don't worry for suchs things, almost every mod that add new things are incompatible with vanilla multiplayer servers(vanilla friendly), unless both the server and the clients have those mods. If your goal was to create an awesome race by adding cool stuff and new mechanics then keep going, your race is not compatible with vanilla friendly but is compatible for modded private servers. If for example you want to play a multiplayer coop with a friend with mods, both need to have the same mods installed.
