Things start to clutter up, its a freaking mess

[Ne0Que]

Hello,

After a few weeks of playing and downloading mods I came to the point I have to reinstall the whole game because its a freaking mess. People are making great mods, I'm happy about that but seriously? Roundabouts are starting to be put in the electricity menus? Custom UI buttons everywhere, a road button that opens up a window to add more money?

God, please, help us organize this before it gets doomed. Really! The Steam Workshop isn't the tool we need to organize addons and mods. We need an asset lib (server) that keeps track of versions, dependencies and also, there is no 'hook' system to prevent modders hooking in to the core at the same points. This results in big problems. The game doens't boot anymore.

Yea, this game needs an extension lib from where Mods can extend. Also something like the kerbal space program addon manager for the client that keeps track of every important thing. Please, let go the steam Work shop, its crap.

 

[Steve B.]

You're are absolutely correct. I thought of starting a thread myself about this problem. It's starting to get like the SC4 mess with assets all over the place.

My suggestion to modders is this: Annunciation Cathedral created an extra tab in the unique buildings tab, at present only the cathedral is there. Perhaps modders should file their assets at that location and not having us looking all over the place because we can't remember what is under what menu.

Love your work, but please stop this before it gets out of hand.

 

[KR153]

Not that this would come of any surprise, did it? The very least would have been to seperate original mods from simple game asset variations. That would take away roughly 95% of that crap you could in 5 minutes yourself. Furthermore there is absolutely no mandatory of any detailed desciption whatsoever. No tri count, no texture files size, no overall file size, is there a LOD or not ect ect...
I am pretty sure that there we can´t expect anything from CO or Steam. I abscence of some private initiative it will stay exactly as it is... just messier that it is already.

 

[Ne0Que]

Just a note that this is not a flame post or a rage against modders or developers. Its just me ringing the alarm bells.

 

[kosh22]

Until we can mod the UI I fear this will not be easily resolved.

 

[uk122]

Absolutely right...It is a mess.

Maybe the devs should look at Banished (steam). This was written by one guy on his own. It uses the Steam Workshop but oh so cleverly. You subscribe to a addon/mod then start the game and go to the mods window to activate it...it then highlights in red any other mods it conflicts with giving you the choice to use it or not....so simple.

If a one man developer can do it, I am sure the brilliant devs of Cities Skylines can, probably in a afternoon

 

[JimmiG]

I think Banished would collapse under its own weight too if it had thousands of different mods from almost as many different mod developers. The Colonial Charter mod is neat, because it re-arranges the user-interface to make room for all the new features. That's because several mod developers are working together.

So, this is mostly something the modders will have to work together for. A mod could be made that adds a "User-Created Content" button in the UI, and then sub-categories under that. It would then be up to the modders to comply with those sub-categories.

You can also help yourself by not subscribing to every single new mod that shows up in the Workshop. Before subscribing, read what the mod actually adds, where it adds any icons or windows, whether there are any known conflicts, bugs etc. and then decide if you really want/need this mod.

 

[Zed68]

I see so many color variations of CO buildings posted as "blabla building, nice"... and so many idiots saying in the comments "woaaah, it's great"...

 

[oakshios]

Until we can mod the UI I fear this will not be easily resolved.

The UI is pretty moddable.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=419090722

Also

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=421770876

Now, I don't know if there is a way to create a new class of assets that could go it a newly created menu roll out or not. At least we know the roll out would be possible.

 

[CultivarDesigns]

oakshios
Wow, I didn't know about Mod Coral, very cool!

 

[Azurespecter]

I agree it's a problem, but can you think of anything that Paradox or CO could do to help?

The way I see it right now, we've given you the tools to stay organized, users simply choose not to use them. Either out of laziness, or out of a desire to make their asset stand out.

 

[AshleyTayles]

Personally I note down any asset that has decided to go rogue and place itself in a ridiculous category and later unsubscribe.

I think as more assets get released, the level of quality goes up, and the people who are making the quality assets will be less likely to dick around with placing petrol stations in the parks section for example.

 

[FX2K]

I agree it's a problem, but can you think of anything that Paradox or CO could do to help?

The way I see it right now, we've given you the tools to stay organized, users simply choose not to use them. Either out of laziness, or out of a desire to make their asset stand out.

It's not always about 'making them stand out' but the asset templates behaving differently between categories too, which is one of my reasons for this thread:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...rol-over-options-when-importing-models.848905

The second more options are exposed allowing control over such options then I will re-categorise all my offending assets and no doubt others will start to use more relevant categories too.

I also think a few sub categories for downloaded assets would be nice, to separate them a little from the games base assets, but that's just me, not sure if others would agree.

 

[BadPeanut]

It's not always about 'making them stand out' but the asset templates behaving differently between categories too, which is one of my reasons for this thread:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...rol-over-options-when-importing-models.848905

The second more options are exposed allowing control over such options then I will re-categorise all my offending assets and no doubt others will start to use more relevant categories too.

I also think a few sub categories for downloaded assets would be nice, to separate them a little from the games base assets, but that's just me, not sure if others would agree.

Hey i originally had the problem of wanting to add features from other asset templates to ones i was using which didn't offer that. There's a mod called modtools on steam that allows you to do that quite easily. Just have a tinkle around with that and you'll find you'll be able to place you assets in a better category

 

[FX2K]

I am aware of the mod tools method and also hex editing some of the settings, but even with this.. some things are not configurable.

Just one example, but I have many more:
Parks - Spawn seagulls.. too many seagulls for decorative ploppables, water buildings don't.
Yes there is a mod for it, but I would rather a checkbox to turn it off on an asset by asset basis and believe me I have tried many things but maybe I missed something. Having to click the wrong UI icon (water) but not having a billion seagulls is IMO worth it.

But since you mention it, have you had any luck changing the category through the mod tool's, every time I have tried (various ways) it either breaks the asset or moves all other assets from the original category to the chosen one, i.e all water buildings (not just mine) show in parks etc.. if you have gotten it to work then I am all ears (or eyes) and would love to know how you did it successfully.

It may even help further, I had somebody post on the area filler listings the following, now if he/she manages it, then that would be awesome, but I have a feeling changing the category is not as simple as choosing it from a dropdown atm:

Olympic1: I'm made a working panel for these brushes, but I just need to figure out how to move your brushes over to my new panel.

 

[TPB]

I also am very interested in this, what I want to do though, is change some props to show up in the games menus so I can place benches, fountains or anything else directly in the game, similar to how SC4 MMPs(mayor mode ploppables) work. Another alternative is being able to turn off the wind-sway effect of flora, and then I can create my MMP's as flora which already shows in the game.

I tried changing the category but it breaks the asset, badly.

 

[soldyne]

I would love the ability to modify how the game's UI looks. I think the icons are little big and I want to see more of them on the screen at once. I would also like to see the name of the item under the Icon instead of needing to hover over it. I spend a lot of time in the props section and with nearly 30 custom props of my own design my props menu is nothing but a long string of default icons with no names, takes a few minuets to get through the list to find my new model for testing.

Also, the game does not seem to have any kind of predictable sorting algorithm that I can see. every time I go into the asset creator my props are all in a seemingly random order. it is certainly not alphabetical by name, otherwise all of my Fruit Stands for example, would be together V1-V7 in order, but, they are not.

perhaps if there was a way to shrink the icons down into a list like you can with Windows files we could see more props on the screen and not have to scroll all the time.

and of course Thumbnails for Props please! If each custom prop had its own default Icon similar to the CO props then searching for the new ones would be far easier!

More options for sorting and filtering of content. A customizable sorting would be perfect with the added ability for a person to tag a downloaded asset (in their own game not on the workshop) with a custom category. For example, If I have a bunch of farm related props or buildings I could mark them all as "Farm" and then sort by category "Farm" and only see those assets.

 

[Brazilian Joe]

I agree it's a problem, but can you think of anything that Paradox or CO could do to help?

The way I see it right now, we've given you the tools to stay organised, users simply choose not to use them. Either out of laziness, or out of a desire to make their asset stand out.

You can't enforce certain things, and your team is too small to curate every mod (impossiburu task).

But I think CO can do a little bit more.

1) First and Foremost: do an official document with Guidelines with Best Practices for modders to be good neighbours and play well with each other.
Best practices for UI modding & which APIs are best not touched/which stuff would end up adding data to the save game, thus becoming a requirement for compatibility & such.
It does not have to have everything at first, but would evolve over time with community suggestions.
Recommend a copyleft license like MIT or BSD rather than GPL, so that code can be freely interchanged without bureaucracy.

2) Extend the UI over time with modding specific APIs, especially for UI expansion.
Take ModCorral for instance. You could integrate that into the official API in 2 possible ways:
a) supersede it with a 'mod settings' button;
b) supersede it by reworking the settings button to the top right with a tabbed interface, allowing mods to append tabs to the settings. (my preferred option)

One of the favorite places to add mod buttons is at the top of the screen. You could rework this area as a transparent 'Top Menu' where the players can add buttons aligned to the left or right, so that they neatly stand side by side to the right of the map inspector, or to the left of the settings gear.