Modding Q&A with the devs

[co_martsu]

Hi,

As promised it's time for you to ask modding related questions from the developers at Colossal Order. We'll be keeping this thread open until Monday the 14th 10am EET (UTC+2) and then the team will go over the questions during next week. co_emmi will be relaying the team's answers back to you as soon as they are ready.

Thank you for your patience and I hope this is helpful!

Cheers,
Mariina

P.S. Please post modding related questions only!

 

[boformer]

Question 1: Decal Props

It's more a feature request than a question:

The game ships with some "decal" props, for example the ground tiles, the road arrows and the beach volleyball field. These decal props are applied directly to the ground:

With a few mod tools hacks, it is possible to create these props in the asset editor. But these always have a fixed size of 8x8m because there is no way to save the size and tiling factor. It would be so great if we could do this!

Can you add official support for these kind of props?
Can you at least add the serializers for the decal size so we modders can provide proper tools for this?
Or am I missing something and this is already possible?

Question 2: More missing serializers

In a way this is similar to the first question, but in this case I know that it would be quite simple to implement it:
A few properties of assets can not be saved, for example spawn/unspawn positions (important for cargo stations and airports), sub-buildings (important for large buildings), prop light effects, prop "special places" etc.
By implementing these serializers (a few lines of code for each), you would allow us to develop better asset editor tools (similar to my Sub-Buildings Enabler) without requiring the asset user to subscribe to the mod. It is not required that you fully implement these features with GUI, just give us the base to work on!
What is your opinion on that?

Question 3: Better error handling for mods

Please add try-catch clauses to all Mod API-Wrappers so that mods are isolated from each other. Right now so many problems are caused by this (one mod fails and blocks the successful loading of other mods). Also make sure that a user is always informed when a mod caused an error. Any word on that?

Question 4: More Mod API-Extensions and Hooks

The Mod API is a nice base, but for many tasks we still have to modify game core classes. This leads to conflicts between mods and often also slows down the execution. Can you add more hooks? Maybe ask the most prominent developers what hooks they would like to see. I would like to see hooks for vehicle/building/network creation and release. Also a hook before and right after a prefab is initialized (PrefabInfo.InitializePrefab)

Question 5: Official support for custom networks

Can you add support for custom NetInfos? Projects like NetworkExtensions or Extra Train Station tracks would really benefit from it. The minimum we would need is a serializer that creates crp files for the networks (including textures & meshes) and a tutorial how to invoke it with a mod. This would also improve the experience for many players because the packed textures and meshes are already optimized for the game and the loading becomes faster. Missing networks (because a mod fails to load after a game patch) are also a common reason why savegames are broken.

Question 5: Access to game source code, especially the loading sequence

Can you let us take a look at certain parts of the games source code? There are some parts we can not decompile, and a lot of the decompiled code is hardly readable. Especially the loading seqence and shader code are still a mistery for me. I would sign an NDA for that.
Alternatively, you could also release parts of your internal documentation to help us understand what goes on. For example the GUI system documentation (which does not really contain any sensible stuff) could be released.

 

[vortical]

What are your thoughts on some sort of 'early access' program for modders? The community benefits from mod authors having a chance to iron out potential issues with their projects before a major update drops. CO gets an additional layer of free quality control from the members of the community best equipped to provide useful feedback. Seems like a win-win to me.

 

[boformer]

volume 2:

Question 6: Seasons

You know exactly what is going on under the hood: Can you explain from a technical standpoint why seasons (summer + winter) are not in the game? Is there a way to bring them in via a mod, or is this a border that can not be crossed?

Question 7: Texture & Mesh sharing between assets

Any plans or feedback on that? More here.

Question 8: Prop probabilities and randomized tree/prop assets

This question is kind of connected to question 2. The game supports it to change the probability of props on buildings (so that a tree or a sign only appears half of the time) and the creation of props and trees with variations (e.g. random sign prop, random oak tree). Can you add support for that?

Question 9: Larger maximum building sizes

As far as I understand, a building size of 16x16 should not cause any technical problems. Or is 16x8 the hard limit? Anything bigger would be nice.

Question 10: Baked-In constants and limits

One problem is that your C# compiler bakes numbers like object limits, the zone depth and other stuff into the code. That means to change these things, we have to detour dozens of the methods instead of a single variable. Is there anything you can do to help us here?

Question 11: Did you ever think about hiring certain mod developers and asset creators for smaller remote projects (not full-time job)?

For example, asset creators could produce and improve buildings, modders could work on an optional improved traffic AI, or just on general modding features like new hooks. For example there are some excellent tree modellers, and the game lacks good trees.

 

[Avanya]

I've got a question about snow and assets. Love how it's automatically applied to surfaces, but I'm wondering if there's a way to avoid it on certain horizontal surfaces? We have some assets with water (canals, lakes, sewage treatment) which look kinda funny covered in snow. Same with things under shed roofs. I'm just wondering if it's at all possible

 

[hyyena]

1. Question about export textures, in substance painter what configuration i use for export textures for cities skyline?

2. Why one lightmap can work in the LOD but not in model (like i post here: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/ilumination-map-its-not-working.910907/ ) ? The same map with the same configurations...

 

[Darf]

1. Would it be possible to create a refresh button in the asset editor. This would save so much time for asset creators.
2. Would it possible for you to make the standard buildings optional, like custom buildings are? This would save a ton of memory.
3. The people gather in a place prop seems to be broken after Snowfall. They don't appear on buildings anymore.
4. A guide on how to make animated props would be really usefull.
5. Better normal map display, would this be possible? From my experience normal maps are now only displayed under certain direct sun angles or if they are placed on a heavy specularmap.

 

[[Delta ²k5]]

Mine are also rather requests than questions:

1. I'd really like to see the possibility of adding / cloning light sources on vehicle assets also between vehicle types (for example more than one landing light on airplanes, blinking red light from the prop section on an airplane, or the blinking yellow light from the snow plow on garbage trucks - such things.

2. A possibility to add a second train engine on the end of a train asset just like on the vanilla passenger train (might be also a problem by missing serializers as boformer pointed out).

3. "active" state for vehicles so sirens/landing lights are toggled on and the light emissive textures for headlights/indicators/sirens show up. This would be more handy for placing lights.

4. Changing the blinking type of a light and flagging "active on arrival" (landing light) would also a great thing (if the arrival flag works also for trains and other vehicles [garbage trucks, maintenance vehicles]) as I mainly create US themed vehicles I'd really love to create the blinking headlights on trains when they pull into a station + strobe lights (Yes, those old american trains create some kind of a light show while approaching). This seems to be possible using the already included functionalities, isn't it?

5. A preview of the crp size inside the asset editor after compressing the textures would be good - If the asset is still really big we could roll back instead of starting over after saving.

6. I agree in animated props - that would be really nice (imagine windmills from the Netherlands as unique buildings)

7. Also I strongly agree in the possibility to deactivate vanilla buildings, or maybe you can find a way how we can use more items from the workshop. Maybe using some slideloading while loading the map instead of preloading on game startup (the growable buildings have all the same stats, so only the model is the difference.)

8. A question I ask myself many times while reading through the log files: Does C:S load all assets on startup using a stack only? Or are the asset informations only stored in this stack? If the whole assets loaded through a stack, may I ask for the reason? Why don't you use a heap instead? (As the stack overflows the game crashes as we know by only a nothing saying windows error because an access violation happened - using a heap would lead to more available memory when using more than 16GB RAM [32 GB on my system] and the system can handle the data amount by itself referring the things I learned in the past years).

I posted even more things here: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...es-fixes-wishlist.910126/page-4#post-20766900 but most of them are not modding related

cheers!

 

[boformer]

I've got a question about snow and assets. Love how it's automatically applied to surfaces, but I'm wondering if there's a way to avoid it on certain horizontal surfaces? We have some assets with water (canals, lakes, sewage treatment) which look kinda funny covered in snow. Same with things under shed roofs. I'm just wondering if it's at all possible

From the wiki: The game automatically creates both texture-based and 3D snow on all assets in the winter theme, so the same asset can be used for any theme. The generated snow can be disabled locally with vertex colors on the models. Set the color to (255, 255, 0) to disable all snow and to (255, 255, 128) to only disable 3D snow.

 

[boformer]

7. Also I strongly agree in the possibility to deactivate vanilla buildings, or maybe you can find a way how we can use more items from the workshop. Maybe using some slideloading while loading the map instead of preloading on game startup (the growable buildings have all the same stats, so only the model is the difference.)

Let's form this into a question:

Is there a way for us mod developers to skip certain default assets on loading (so they don't take up memory)?

 

[templeofdoom]

I would like to see more information about the values and the variables in the asset editor flushed out. How is entertainment calculated etc? I know lots of assets that just don't get this right due to the creator literally having to guess at these values are simply take on the value of the template they selected.

In question format: What likelihood or will modders and asset creators ever be allowed to have some kind of explanations from the dev's on some of the more common and directly important values in the asset editor and how they affect the models/simulation? My advanced apologies if this has already been explained and I'm missing all of the info.

 

[AJ3D]

Great write up Boformer...

Having more serialized options in the .crp files, like sub-buildings, custom light settings, and LOD draw distance would be huge.

 

[Xannepan]

Thanks Mariina, for this opportunity.

I have several questions and some requests (I hope requests are okay too ).

1) At the top of my list is the request for fixing, or at least improving the asset editor workflow. I have finally picked up creating a bunch of medieval assets again, only to give up after several days of looking at loading screens, crashes, waiting times, unneeded repetitive tasks.

At this moment crashes happen every second time I try to load an asset or every second time I try to create a new one. They occur with or without mods. No crash report is generated. Obviously I did not go as far as disabling all of my assets, since having/creating custom made assets is the whole point of the asset editor, isn't it

After snowfall the asset editor also again shows the bug with lighting (way too dark) in the preview window, as a result of which the thumbnail that is generated is not usable.

Then my biggest frustration: workflow when improving upon already existing assets. Why oh why do I have to re-create a thumbnail, all preview screenshots and re-enter a new description everytime I am merely trying to update the model of a previously created asset (I test a lot by trial and error).
What I would suggest is a way to re-import the asset-model after I have loaded an existing model. Maybe there is a way already, that I don't know of (?). In that case my request is a question : how? how? how?

2) Question: I am creating medieval city wall towers. Using a park template and mod tools I have managed to allow them to be placed anywhere on the map, so not requiring a road connecting. The towers do not flatten the terrain (this is also what I intended to achieve). However, the problem I ran into is that below z=0 coordinate (z referring to height) the model doesn't show the texture I have applied. It is just gray. Any way to solve this?

3) Question: Is there anyways to pack several assets into one crp? I am speculating this would greatly improve loading times.

4) Question: I am using a single set of textures for dozens of medieval buildings. Seems like a waste that each individiual asset crp contains the same textures. Any way to deal with this?

5) Request for adding timed asset attributes (month, day, hour): this would allow us to create some seasonal behavior ourselves.

6) Request for adding attributes to create dependency assets/props: e.g. props that only appear when crime or pollution is high.

7) Request for creating random asset groups (you have some of them already). It would be great for creating random lot variation, instead of new crp files for each variation.

8) Request for making animated assets. I have a cool Dutch Windmill ready...

9) Request for custom light settings (colors, intensity etc)

Cheers.
-Alex

 

[co_martsu]

Well this is off to a great start! To make it easier to actually get the answers to the questions we'll be focusing on those when chatting with the devs and writing the answers. So feedback is always welcome, but not the main purpose of this Q&A

 

[pauliaxz]

Any news when this bug will be fixed:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...les-specular-reflection.882339/#post-20519173

I can't properly make an articulated bus with working reflective windows. Currently the only option is to make windows specular dark, thus removing the windows effect.

From my point of view, it would be nice to have an option to manually set height of those floors.

 

[NoSkillz]

is there - as of now - a way to recreate this bridge as a draggable bridge by modding?
if not, will there be in the future?
so, I'm of course talking about bridges that do not just have singular point pillars, but stand on constant pillars, so to speak.

 

[pauliaxz]

One more question/idea came to my mind.
It would be nice to have ability to test vehicle illumination map in asset editor. To be able to turn on and off turning indicators, head lights and tail lights. I once mixed white with black in _i texture so blinkers worked as head lights, and head lights as blinkers. This was very time consuming for me, because I suffer from long loading times.
So can we expect such feature anytime soon?

 

[NoSkillz]

Also:
Is there - as of now - a way to change the looks of tunnel entrances via modding? (I'd like a brick entrance, or a more natural one) And is there a way to manually set the angle of this entrance by modding? 'cause I'd want my tunnels to stand upright, 90° to track terrain, most of the times. Would it be possible to adjust this angle AFTER putting down the tracks?

Is there a way to switch between placed roads not changing with changed terrain and those roads adjusting to terrain height when adjusting the latter?

 

[Feindbold]

One that nobody mentioned so far:

Its really not that important, but It would be nice to have the possibilty to create semitransparent materials.

 

[boformer]

is there - as of now - a way to recreate this bridge as a draggable bridge by modding?
if not, will there be in the future?
so, I'm of course talking about bridges that do not just have singular point pillars, but stand on constant pillars, so to speak.

Also:
Is there - as of now - a way to change the looks of tunnel entrances via modding? (I'd like a brick entrance, or a more natural one)

I will answer these for you: Bridges and tunnel entrances are network segments, basically just simple meshes that will be stretched to fit the road segment length. These can be replaced or modified with a mod, and this is already done (NExt, ETST).

I still plan to add selectable bridges and tunnels to my Network Skins mod. It would hook into the rendering process and just render a different mesh. It is not an ideal solution from a performance standpoint, but the only way to have multiple different bridges or tunnel entrances on one map.

2 questions could be formed out of this:

1) Did you think about adding network segment variations to the game? This could be selectable tunnel entrances, selectable bridges or anything similar. Once again the important thing would be the API and data structure, not a complete implementation with GUI etc.

2) How exactly do tunnel entrances work technically?