There are many things that modders lack. While some modders don't care and feel "meh" about what they do, others want to get a bit deeper in it, creating really high quality gaming experience.
Things that a lot of modders would love to see:
1. Preapproval of the concept. If I have an idea, I want it to be criticized and destroyed before I start implementing it. We're no snowflakes, no need in BS.
A sticky topic where people lay out their mapping ideas and other people (including devs) give them feedback. You choose your target audience (PVE players, let's say) and ignore all the unrelated comments (from PVP players).
Illustrating examples:
"I have an idea! I wanna create a new ruined town location infested with intelligent deathclaws who will have quests and such."
answer from devs:
"make sure it's filled with quests and they have to be good. Maybe start from something smaller so you'd know how much time and effort is needed to make even a village like Arroyo"
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"I have an idea! I can improve GR map to fix the scroll blockers!"
answer from devs:
"No need, it's been fixed in s3."
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"I want to make a simple quest in the watertraders region where you have to go and get a water chip (or whatever it's called in ft1) and after you get it, you get a reward and a permanent ability to purchase water there!"
answer from devs:
"Okay, sounds like a legit idea. Make sure you test your work well."
Let's make a system where admins will give us pools of Ids for dialogues, global vars, maps, locations, etc, etc so we could claim them for our projects publicly in some kind of a google sheet. In this way admins won't have to rewrite tons of conflicting configs for more complex maps to test. Sure, some mapmakers will ignore that, but that's their problems. Having a map working like expected from only copying everything like it is sound good to me.
3. We currently have ample info on mapping, but almost nothing on scripting. Personally I use cvet's forum for guidance when it's not enough to study existing code and official documentation on the sdk. But in some cases some things on Reloaded get implemented nobody knows how. Like how our se_truck map gets connected to its init script. The map doesn't link to the script, neither does the location and yet the script executes perfectly. Or questions why despite the fact that caves do use players' luck in the formula, the requirement of that is not set on the data layer and so wouldn't it be a good idea to make the distribution of the loot to be a bit correlated with the player's luck. Or even gambling skill. He-he.
4. We need some guidelines more game-design side. Like: "Do not implement new item protos on your maps". Or "We don't need any more public dungeons, make more private ones." Or "Do not create towns." Or "delete all tiles that will be never seen by players and are not used by the map." Or "Do the #CleanTiles". I did see a few tips from Kilgore, but it's about 10% of what it should be. We also need to understand reasons why maps get refused or not end up implemented. We want to see our work implemented in-game. Knowing the reasons, we'll increase the... acceptance rate hence the amount of content.
PS
We do realize it's pre-wipe times and devs are totally busy, but we need some optimization in future.
Thanks to everyone whomst've (kek) leaves their comments and additional ideas on improvement in Reloaded's modding community.
PPS
I use this opportunity to invite all modders/mapmakers to our Discord #modding channel on Reloaded. We have cookies. And know kung-fu.
Topic: Improve fonline modding process for Reloaded (Read 1158 times)