Rant on modding

This game has literally the worst support for modding I have ever seen - and I want to be clear on this, I do mean literally. Heck, I'm pretty sure I've poked around game files for games that didn't officially support modding that were hugely better than this. Meanwhile, here you are with a shiny steam workshop and all, yet one with one glance at the XML files you can already find inconsistent or unclear variable names and leftover flags that don't do anything. Then as soon as you attempt to actually add anything new, you find that half of the apparently generic functions are just blatantly not programmed for anything other than their exact vanilla usage and probably crash the game if you try, effects and triggers have bizarre unmentioned restrictions that you'll only discover via extreme trial and error because nothing is documented, what should be the simplest code becomes a ridiculous roundabout process of ugly cascading spells and buffs and compromises ... It is terrible and possibly the only upside is that I no longer wonder why simple improvements for the game proper go ignored because if these are your user-friendly softcoded files I wouldn't want to touch your hardcode with ten foot pole to tap at my keyboard with slightly less clumsiness than you've apparently put into your programing!

If I weren't already half way through the mod I'm working on, I would slap myself in the face until applying antibiotics became a less painful way to pass my free time. That anybody else manages to create anything meaningful out of this mess is a miracle to me.

 

I wouldn't go as far as saying that it's "the worst" (I've seen a few games where modding was possible but was something tantamount to voodoo magic), but I do agree it can be quite difficult to get around some things you'd think would be possible without problems.

 

Simple mods are trivial; and you can make something pretty incredible with effort: See chronomancy, warlockery.

It's not script tool that you can use to do stuff from the ground up, but it's a damn sight better than, say, Diablo 3 .

 

To be fair, I don't think DoD was originally intended for mods. I recall Essence saying he cracked data files and pasted in his first mod...

 

Originally, no, it wasn't. Mod support was only added when RotDG was created.

 

Yeah, I basically turned Throwing into Bushido by violating the game files in a way normally reserved for overly buxom hentai girls. It was a while between then and when mod support was activated, and it was a long and painful period. That said, I've never modded any other game ever, so if this is is bad of a scenario as the OP says it is, I'm kind of amazed. I thought that this was pretty much the shit.

 

It's not that bad. If you are creating basic stuff and just beginning, DoD's modding is actually pretty user-friendly. It's the higher-level stuff that make us want to smash desks with our heads, but often patience is the key there.

 

For reference, something like warlockery in a lot of engines would only take about 10-20 lines of code tops of actual script.

 

Err, don't agree with OP's tone and all that, but share the frustration (but not the sense of entitlement), and agree that the game could use more modding support, deffinitely.

Heck, I'm at the point where I'd try asking Essence to clue me in into the original dojo of going hentai on the code and chalk it of as "the standard way" regarding certain procedures, unless I wan't to make a mod that contains only one relatively unobtrusive small room into a total conversion -.-'

 

Eh, you say entitlement, I say false advertising unless somebody can show me a trap that actually can only be disarmed by feeding it Slivovitz (that's from Steam's store page, btw.) If you're going to allow for and advertise modding I think it's a fair expectation that it's ... not ... terrible, is my general feeling.

There might be some simple mods that you can make, but I doubt those have much real variety from what's already directly in the game. I mean, I'm trying to mod in new monsters that don't just feel like blatant palette / element swaps, but every second idea that I have I end up discarding because effect X is only coded for the player or effect Y is only coded for monsters, or I only realise either of these facts after 15 minutes of confusedly messing around with code not realising that using targetMonster instead of target doesn't apply buffs or something else equally arbitrary and frustrating.

So that post happened.

 

This is looking more and more apealing. Giving modders a way to create sub handles would actually make the game waaaay more moddable...

 

Um. No, I don't think it actually states you can do that, plus there's no way to have "10 gallons" of anything as items are measured in-game by the number of times you have, not the specific measurements (so you have two bottles of Vodka, not - say - 300cl of Vodka).

And, of course, it goes without saying that Gaslamp dick around in the marketing and even the important stuff. SysReqs from YHTNTEP on Steam:

 

I hear what you're saying, and I frequently share your frustration, yet I don't entirely agree. Dredmor is the third game I've released mods for, though I've rummaged through the files of a dozen other games and made tweaks for my own personal use. Dredmor's certainly not the worst I've seen, not even for a game that advertises itself as moddable.

Dredmor modding has some tricky and annoying bits, that's for sure, and at times I've felt the pain you speak of. One of the two main reasons I've stuck with rooms and items (dipping only briefly into spells and never publishing a skill) is because the first 4 or 5 things I wanted to do with skills all proved impossible (or at least beyond my understanding of the code). However, even with those caveats, Dredmor's baseline for making playable content worth sharing seems much more readily attainable than most other games I've modded.

Detailed examples from other games follow if anyone's interested. They're informative, but probably not helpful. Nothing I can say changes the fact that Dredmor modding is hard work, and often not intuitive.

Weird Worlds - Return to Infinite Space was far more restrictive than Dredmor is. Ship stats, events, etc, were handled in moddable text files that were relatively easy to tweak, but all the really cool stuff was hard-coded and extremely specific. I published half a dozen mods for it, and was constantly frustrated along the way by the things that looked like they should work generically, but were instead stupidly narrow. There were no generic functions. Instead of a "lose a random item" code, there was only a "lose a random item from a specific subset of items because it was taken by this specific named thief from the main game" code. Weird Worlds was better documented than Dredmor, but was far less flexible. Every WW mod out there ended up being 90% new weapons, because that was the area with most design space and flexibility. Anything else was painfully hard. Also, the total volume of commands and options in WW:RTIS was less than 1/4 the number of commands and options in Dredmor. The game was just smaller, so you had to make do with a lot less. And there were other weird barriers. You could only have one mod enabled at a time. The 257th new item overwrote the 1st new item. The game starts with your choice of three ships and missions, and to add a new one you had to replace one of the original options. There were some hoops to jump through, that's for sure.

Aquaria, on the other hand, had a lovely WYSIWYG level-editor, a custom animation builder, and allowed Lua scripting so you could do just about anything you wanted. The animation builder had an annoying interface, but the rest of the modding package was really quite nice. It was definitely the easiest to mod of any game I've tinkered with. But since NOTHING was procedurally generated, and everything in the main game so intimidatingly beautiful, you'd put a dozen hours of work crafting something worthy of the game, which would then take at most 4 or 5 minutes to play through and never be touched again. While it was a lot more flexible than Dredmor (and even with the painful animation builder it was still probably easier than Dredmor), in the end the return on invested time was too small to be worth pursuing for long. The closest Dredmor equivalent would be if your only option for modding was to completely replace all 15 floors of the dungeon with entirely new content. You couldn't just add an item or two to get your feet wet, you had to either devote 100+ hours doing a full conversion, or stay home. That was a pretty huge barrier to entry. Even collaborating with a friend and breaking it up into chapters that seemed theoretically more attainable, we were never able to complete an actual finished mod.

 

I'm not saying there aren't worse games to mod or systems with less scope than DoD (and I'm hardly a prolific modder), but of the dozen or so that come to mind that I've tried over a few years, this one has frustrated me the most.

There are a lot of skill mods available, but while they may be varied flavour-wise I don't feel like they'd add much variety mechanics-wise. It would be simple to add in a new skill with arbitrary combination of passive buffs and the ability to throw an asphxiative fireball that debuffs enemy haywire chance or something, but it wouldn't play out much differently to an already existing Obvious Fireball spamming wizard. DoD's core skill variety is high already (especially with the possible combinations from 'pick any seven' approach) and the effects aren't coded very broadly outside of what's already officially approved and used in the core game so finding another combination that feels new and interesting will be rare, or else require said hacky xml (which is painful to figure out when it even works) to act differently from the player's POV. At any rate it's not what I've been attempting.

I count 4 monster mods on the index. One is a strict difficulty adjustment, one is mostly straight palette swaps with a couple of new spells, one is really a single monster addition plus a couple of difficulty tweaks and room, and one is actually integrated into the free expansion pack now so it hardly counts. What I'm aiming for is ... more significant than these, but it's difficult, because the level of customisation and usable effects for monsters is hugely lower than what it is coded for the player and nothing tells you this except the wasted hours friggin' around with different ideas that load up in the game without errors but just don't do anything because the coders never bothered to call/allow them outside of the exact situation they use them for. Which kinda defeats the point.

 

Well, making monsters is hard because you need to balance them, sprite them, etc.

Edit: Also, just say what you want to do; there may be a way to work it in.

 

I think what you are looking for would be "most disappointing" and not "the worst" then, OneMoreNameless. Because the support isn't really the worst, but it might appear as such after taking a look at what you can and can not do (hence the disappointment).

 

It's not that I can't mod X that bothers me, it's that the modding code implies and allows for X but the actual game doesn't support X and nowhere is this made clear. If the allowed usages of X and how they worked were at least documented then I wouldn't have wasted so much time and become frustrated.

(Where X = quite a list of things)

 

Which is why it would be a disappointment, I think. You take a look at it, see that you can, and then after you try you see that you can't really. I would be disappointed in such cases (though here I often just change directions when that happens but I'm a weird person).