Mods may be taken down at any time without any prior notices. Will Paradox Mods have a solution for this?

[tom_mai78101]

A popular asset mod for Cities Skylines 1 called the Concrete Brush has been taken offline without any prior notices. We don't know the circumstances, but it can no longer be found on the Steam Workshop.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CitiesSkylines/s/UoQptyxqPk

The concern is that, without this mod, there are some old saves that uses the mod become unplayable, sometimes cosmetically, and sometimes unrecoverable.

It has got me wondering about Paradox Mods and Cities Skylines 2, about how mods will work if they are suddenly taken offline without any notices.

• Would Paradox Mods allow the player owning a copy of Cities Skylines 2 to keep the removed mod saved and backed up in their system (PC, console) so as long as their game saves are still actively using said mod?
• Would it forces the player to remove said mod and lose their game saves that relies on the asset on their systems?
• Would it intentionally break the game saves because the asset mod is longer a valid mod (consoles), therefore, due to technical reasons, the game may continue to load the game save data but anything that uses the asset mod will diaappear?
• If the asset mod is used in assets mod packs, and said asset mod is removed, will the entire affected assets mod pack (and thus many other assets) be impacted?

Due to the nature of Cities Skylines 2 where game saves will be accessed for long periods of time (a few years perhaps), it is likely there will be some asset mods be no longer available over the course of a few years. I am wondering if Paradox Mods will gracefully be able to handle these types of situations.

Thanks.

 

[co_avanya]

Creators are always able to remove their content, that will also be the case on Paradox Mods. As a former creator myself, I believe that's how it should be. If someone, for whatever reason, doesn't wish to share their custom content anymore, they should be able to stop that. Of course, it sucks for everyone who loved their work, and with code mods, there can be a risk that a save won't work. But modding comes with a risk, and while we try to do what we can to minimize that, it will always be there, so we will always encourage you to be cautious and consider the risks before diving into modding.

If I remember right you can remove pretty much any type of asset made with the asset editor in Cities: Skylines and it will simply disappear from the game. It can definitely still be disruptive, but the save isn't lost. We'll have to see exactly how Cities: Skylines II handles missing assets once the asset import and saving are done, but the goal is to have a similar kind of "failsafe" so the city isn't lost if a custom building is unsubscribed or removed from Paradox Mods. I'm not sure how a removed item affects Playsets, but I'm sure the Paradox Mods team already has a solution for that.

 

[BoraBora]

Good to see you again Avanya!

I agree 100%, modders have every right to stop sharing their creation, without notice or explanation. I don't think tom_mai78101 question that right, though.

There's an ambiguity with the mod's copies already shared. In CS1, you can save your mods folder and you can have local mods. So basically, if you're cautious you can still use mods deleted by their authors. I think it would be good if this process was automated by the game. So modders could decide their work would be unavailable from now on without penalizing players who used it before this decision.

 

[R-TEAM]

If you like to play an game that is in active development .... and this with an save that should last for years .... then modding this game is out of question .. simply

 

[BoraBora]

You're mixing 2 completely different cases: mods broke by some game update and mods deleted by their authors. Some broken mods will prevent your save to load or simply make it bugged. They're mostly code mods, 0,1% of the available mods. The concrete brush quoted by the OP is among hundreds of thousands of assets that can't break anything because they're only graphics. So missing them can do some harm to your city's looks, and redoing lots of textures placing can be tiresome. That could be prevented by the game.

Last year, a modder had its PC infected by a virus and thought his creations, a lot of widely used road assets, were going to spread the virus. He panicked and deleted his whole workshop, then posted an explanation on Reddit and learned his assets couldn't be infected, being devoid of executable code. But it was too late. Now imagine redoing all your road system. Definitely not fun.

Even among the code mods, lots can't break anything but themselves because they don't touch the simulation. Some others have been updated or replaced since 2015. So no, it's not out of the question and definitely not... simply.

 

[Potoroo]

Creators are always able to remove their content, that will also be the case on Paradox Mods. As a former creator myself, I believe that's how it should be. If someone, for whatever reason, doesn't wish to share their custom content anymore, they should be able to stop that. Of course, it sucks for everyone who loved their work, and with code mods, there can be a risk that a save won't work. But modding comes with a risk, and while we try to do what we can to minimize that, it will always be there, so we will always encourage you to be cautious and consider the risks before diving into modding.

If I remember right you can remove pretty much any type of asset made with the asset editor in Cities: Skylines and it will simply disappear from the game. It can definitely still be disruptive, but the save isn't lost. We'll have to see exactly how Cities: Skylines II handles missing assets once the asset import and saving are done, but the goal is to have a similar kind of "failsafe" so the city isn't lost if a custom building is unsubscribed or removed from Paradox Mods. I'm not sure how a removed item affects Playsets, but I'm sure the Paradox Mods team already has a solution for that.

Way back in the day I spent a stupid amount of time hunting down missing dependencies in $2.20's CS collections (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1212608292, if anyone's interested) and I reckon there's got to be a better way.

I wonder if the implementers of Paradox Mods (is that PDX or CO, BTW?) would include an official mechanism to declare unwanted mods as abandoned rather then just have their creators delete them. The idea, obviously, is to have an approved mechanism whereby someone else could take them over if the mods in question still have value to people. It doesn't matter what the platform is, from Skylines to Trainz, missing dependencies are a major pain the rear.

 

[Civ5rako]

We'll have to see exactly how Cities: Skylines II handles missing assets once the asset import and saving are done, but the goal is to have a similar kind of "failsafe" so the city isn't lost if a custom building is unsubscribed or removed from Paradox Mods. I'm not sure how a removed item affects Playsets, but I'm sure the Paradox Mods team already has a solution for that.

Shouldn't you of all people KNOW how it is supposed to work???

 

[Co Starring]

Shouldn't you of all people KNOW how it is supposed to work???

Do you know what her job description is?
And what she does at CO???

 

[Pyoro]

OpenTTD content management system BaNaNaS keeps all copies of all uploaded mods for that reason - including older ones, so savegame compatibility will always be preserved. It's part of their ToS.

Naturally, you don't have to use BaNaNaS and indeed some people don't. But in my opinion there's nothing wrong with demanding that people act responsibly within a community. If you decide to share your work with other people, so long as its use is not malicious or anything, you should accept that people have a certain right to keep using it.

 

[Civ5rako]

Do you know what her job description is?
And what she does at CO???

Well, CO is small enough that people might have the chance to talk to each other.
And in the current state it would be not too bad an idea to feed the public relations persons with some information.

But that doesn't seem to be the case, else she would have said something like "I cannot tell you yet, but... "
Given the fact that even the "explanations" in the WoW's are so vague that they could have been written during lunch break, I more and more get the impression that CO themselves doesn't have any clue what the current state is.
Those socalled "explanations" could have been copied from the project description - if there is any. Given the "massive progresses" in patching the game, I severely doubt there is such a thing either.

 

[Brynjar]

Naturally, you don't have to use BaNaNaS and indeed some people don't. But in my opinion there's nothing wrong with demanding that people act responsibly within a community. If you decide to share your work with other people, so long as its use is not malicious or anything, you should accept that people have a certain right to keep using it.

People can already do that, if they plan ahead. Making additional such demands can be a pretty effective way of making sure some people can't be bothered publishing mods for a game. Especially for a game in commercial development.

 

[Rarzie]

Sounds like you're going to make sure you have local backups of every mod you install. It reminds me of the whole NPM debacle, when a dev deleted a module that was part of thousands of other modules. To the point that GitHub stepped in and undeleted it, as well as taking ownership of it, so that couldn't happen again. Besides, deleting mods is a pretty scummy thing to do - so don't get caught unawares and make you own local backups.

 

[Pyoro]

Making additional such demands can be a pretty effective way of making sure some people can't be bothered publishing mods for a game. Especially for a game in commercial development.

Why? It's not like you got to do anything. In fact, that's the main draw.

It just ensures people can come back to a new system, with a new installation, and if there's a scenario, or a savegame somewhere, well, no problem if it's 16 years old, it's still fully playable, perfectly compatible for every player (and modder) ...