Modding, I'm confused.

[Patrikwa]

Lately when people refer to 'modding' they seem to mean 'create 3D models' and not 'make modifications to the game engine'.
I've been super excited since we were told to have access to modding tools and full modding support at release but now I'm starting to think they ment like "yeah we allow you to import your own models" and not "here is the tutorial visual studio project that shows you how to alter the simulated people's AI".
CO have indeed said that it would be easy to for example unlock the 9 tile restriction but that seems more like a number in a configuration file to me.

So what I'm basically asking is: Anyone seen any info regarding MODDING that is unrelated to creating models?

 

[Inge Jones]

I doubt you'd be modding the game engine itself. Usually the deepest behavioural thing a mod affects would be the scripting that is fed to the engine. People do sometimes mod an engine but this is usually strongly discouraged or eula'd out by the game company.

 

[Greyhamster]

More info on modding is coming somewhere this week. Although not in the form of a dev diary, IIRC

I doubt you'd be modding the game engine itself. Usually the deepest behavioural thing a mod affects would be the scripting that is fed to the engine. People do sometimes mod an engine but this is usually strongly discouraged or eula'd out by the game company.

Also this.

 

[Patrikwa]

Sure, the core engine is most likely not been made visible in full so my example was a bit extreme, it was mainly to make my point without adding confusion to the question itself
But anyhow, surely "MOD" is not an abbreviation of MODEL? I always thought of a mod as something that adds or alters existing functionality to/in a game -> modification, hence mod.
Guess I'll just have to wait til next week to find out then

 

[Inge Jones]

I always thought of a mod as something that adds or alters existing functionality to/in a game -> modification, hence mod.

Yeah thats how we use it in Sims land, but in my experience of the citybuilder community it means everything that wasn't released as part of the game.

 

[MoistOwl]

Okay look, game developers have to make a game for a mass market, that why the 9 times are in place thats why the city limit is 1 million thats why the drawdistance on cars suck
BUT! they can easily make this stuff editable in a settings.txt file that we may be able to change. it might be as easy as changing a value like "CarDistanceDraw 2000" or "Maptilemax 12"
reason this isn't options for everyone right away is because they need a common ground game that runs on a majority of people's computers and adding this options right out will confuse the less tech savey people.

 

[Vvolkov]

Okay look, game developers have to make a game for a mass market, that why the 9 times are in place thats why the city limit is 1 million thats why the drawdistance on cars suck
BUT! they can easily make this stuff editable in a settings.txt file that we may be able to change. it might be as easy as changing a value like "CarDistanceDraw 2000" or "Maptilemax 12"
reason this isn't options for everyone right away is because they need a common ground game that runs on a majority of people's computers and adding this options right out will confuse the less tech savey people.

Yes! If you look around you see people asking "will this run on my 5yr old laptop" and this is why games get made with a stable running state that most people can run so they can sell the most copies. Just good business. People with better machines meant for gaming can hopefully change some of those settings as MoistOwl mentioned and open a little bit of it up. I'm hoping people will create more models of the buildings and give us more variety or even some big themed type mods. At the very least CO is letting us try to open things up and that is awesome!

 

[Greyhamster]

Sure, the core engine is most likely not been made visible in full so my example was a bit extreme, it was mainly to make my point without adding confusion to the question itself
But anyhow, surely "MOD" is not an abbreviation of MODEL? I always thought of a mod as something that adds or alters existing functionality to/in a game -> modification, hence mod.
Guess I'll just have to wait til next week to find out then

A mod is indeed a modification. However it can only mod within the framework of what the tools allow. This framework can be extremely wide (see SC4, The Elder Scrolls Games) or narrow (see Cities XL modding) or very narrow (CiM modding only allows models to be added if I understood correctly) or non existant (Simcity 2013 pre-last patch is a good example)

So what can be modded depends on what Paradox allows us to mod. It's known that we can add in models right away, however stuff like modding policies won't yet be possible at launch. There are always going to be some things which absolutely can not be changed, however. And that is the game engine. Most things relating directly to how the game works can not be directly influenced. It can be changed indirectly through scripts and such but to truly change the mechanics of a game you will either needs bits of old code (IE Total War games often retain bits of code relating to older games which can be reactivated although it will be buggy) or access to the source code which pretty much never happens. Spacebase DF-9 is the only example which comes to mind, and that's a game which was pretty much written off while still unfinished by the developers.

And that's a very short explanation of how modding works The gist of it is we won't know what will and what won't be possible until launch, and even then we won't know for sure as paradox keeps on refining the mod tools/giving more access and the community finds more ways to change stuff.

 

[Klinn]

So what can be modded depends on what Paradox allows us to mod. ... There are always going to be some things which absolutely can not be changed, however. And that is the game engine. Most things relating directly to how the game works can not be directly influenced.

Sometimes those limits can be exceeded by the cleverness of the mod tool makers, and I'm always amazed at what they can accomplish when they put their minds to it.

For example, EA hasn't provided much help for modding The Sims, but the tool builders ultimately allowed us to create not just reskins or add objects or tweak game parameters, but also write C# code that hooked in and, for example, changed how the AI worked, or added new functionality. Or even going in and rewriting parts of the game's DLLs, so-called "core mods".

BTW, one of the prominent Sims mod tool makers is Peter Jones, the significant other of Inge who posts on these forums. And Inge can certainly hold her own too!

 

[uebs]

Would love lua, or python support...

 

[ChaplainDMK]

For now only models are confirmed I think, they did mention that in the future they want policy modding, and they also mentioned that you can translate the game by yourself.

But I think youll be able to modify more, they do have a dev diary n modding planned

 

[Inge Jones]

The core of The Sims was .Net and could be disassembled with readily available tools. So we had access to the .dlls and could see what the code was doing, and see what methods could be called from our own addon scripts. Obviously a core mod then needed a reassembler to inject any edits. But it was accessible. There were other, non .Net parts, that we could do little more than inspect strings from. The .exe for a start and one or two .dlls. I can openly say this, because although it was reverse engineering, EA made enough references to our work that it was obvious they were giving tacit approval. On the other hand, Paradox/CO have indicated that they don't want us messing in their engine.

 

[Hapydude101]

Hopefully the Reddit AMA on modding coming up soon will clear this up.

 

[Thaqui]

The core of The Sims was .Net and could be disassembled with readily available tools. So we had access to the .dlls and could see what the code was doing, and see what methods could be called from our own addon scripts. Obviously a core mod then needed a reassembler to inject any edits. But it was accessible. There were other, non .Net parts, that we could do little more than inspect strings from. The .exe for a start and one or two .dlls. I can openly say this, because although it was reverse engineering, EA made enough references to our work that it was obvious they were giving tacit approval. On the other hand, Paradox/CO have indicated that they don't want us messing in their engine.

Since the engine CO will be using is also .Net (or rather, Mono), it will be possible to do exactly the same sort of thing in the parts that are written using C# (I imagine there'll also be some C/C++ .dlls that can't really be broken into). It really just depends on how much is possible with the official modding - maybe it won't be necessary for most people to do those core mods.

 

[Azurespecter]

The word "modding" has kind of evolved to mean a non-official source adding or editing anything in a game, and it gets used for both. CO is striving to make both modding and creating custom content a reality. We want to provide a lot of flexibility. Please do attend the Developer Q&A on February 25th! Not just to ask questions, but to help give insight on what you, the players, want out of modding and custom content creation.