Hello together, so, the other day I was roaming my newly added planet with all the mixed POIs I set, and I thought to myself "wouldn't it be fun if I now had to take the shuttle from that missile base to the orbital command center and waste that too?". Long story short: I know modding is not officially supported yet. Nevertheless, there are many modders out there, including me, who'd like to give it a shot, even without support. Of course, I'd mark my server as "modded and experimental". Still, and now it get's interesting, we'd need to know how the models and configs are stored in the source files. For one, I already added a post to the weapons thread, that they are highly imbalanced, and I'd like to adjust them a bit. Would be nice If I could test such alterations in my private environment. The other thing is to know in which suite the POIs are created and coded. Wouldn't be enough just to "blueprint" a building and set it up as POI, you still need some NPC action . I have a copy of Unity, Blender and Max if that's enough. As already said, I know it's not supported yet, but I would take the responsibility for the experience on my server. So, anyone knows how to do it? Or maybe even dev-feedback ^^?
I'm no moder. But there was a thread here about this before. It came down to the devs having double imcreption with no APC access. Pre alpha you know. Secret squirrel stuff.
While I totally support moding, I think to do so now is pre-mature. Remember, the whole idea of pre-alpha is to get the basic features put in and working, at least at some level. Alpha should be about squashing bugs, but no additional features. The feedback (bug reports) provided help the devs to accomplish this. Now imagine bug reports coming in that may have been caused by some mod, not the core program. Do we really want the devs wasting time trying to track down a "bug" only to find it's caused by some mod? I don't think so. And I don't think we can rely upon those reporting bugs to point out they are on a modded system (and if they did the devs should, rightfully, refuse to even research it). If modding support is to come (and I hope it does), then the time for it is later in the development process (maybe as early as beta).
I agree with you. I have been watching all the bug stories and theres lots of them happening. Players are copying pasting moving deleting moding server files like crazy as a work around for bugs and to improve there own personal game play. Some of these bugs we are seeing could be home made on hosted server's.
I don't completely agree. You're right with the point that intense modding in an unfinished state CAN cause trouble. BUT, depending on what you are modding, this is a good thing. For my specific case, I'd like to create own POIs. That can be something good, because after all, it's no different from the job the devs are doing anyway, and it is a nice functional and stress test. Of course, if you rewrite large parts of the core, it's absurd. But that's not what I intended. Can't speak for others though.
Would love to see mods for this game. It's funny but that's how I got to this site looking for mods in the first place. I'm sure others have done the same.
I'm also waiting for mod support. But I don't think it will be soon. If they were writing the whole thing from the ground up, then they could choose file formats and layouts and structures, and mod support would be built in as they go. But they're starting with the Unity engine and fitting all their stuff into it. They'll probably need to figure out how to make the game support mods before they can do anything about that.
I have done some modding , but I think we must realize that the dev's have a lot going on atm dealing with regular game aspects and we shouldn't expect any support from them until they are ready. also that any update they do could break our mods. That being said, maybe we should pool our knowledge and Ideas. I currently have added a planet with 2 moons to my server that has modified POI's, but do most of my testing/experimenting in SP. I am working towards putting alien CV's in orbit. it would be nice if we could set faction to alien without swapping out existing POI's, and be able to place spawners in those POI's
The developers assure us that the game will be fully moddable in the future, there also incorporating Steam Workshop, so its just a matter of time for it to come to Empyrion, at the moment they have a game that's going in a good direction, they have a massive workload if they want to get all the features they want into the game, my guess for modding, probably after the workshop is in and working, theres blueprints in survival yet to come also, all of these things are linked heavily to eachother. 6 months from now though, all of that will probably be in or close to it.
I'm thinking they are getting close to the intended features (for the initial release). I remember a poll they did a few months ago asking which features to work on first. The then published the results with the idea they would work on them from most voted for to least. It seems they may be close to having all features covered (and they did add some things not on the list as they went). I think modding was one of the things on the list, but can't recall for sure. The only major thing I can remember is larger worlds and open up the poles. And this is not to say that more features will not be added before the initial (no-alpha, non-beta) release.
Just saw that the new patch contains POIs from users, so modding must be supported. DEV-reply please, I want support you :-D!!!
I would assume the POIs in question were from people sharing blueprints. That's where previous POIs came from if I've read correctly (Icarus X-2 station in Omicron Orbit).
Star Made & Space engineers both use the blueprints to fill the galaxy with unique ships, it would not be much of a stretch for this game to be using workshop blueprints. This is a unity game much like Rust or 7 days to die, in fact i would imagine that the dude over at oxide probably is making a Empyrion oxide plugin. Not only that you can decompile most of the libraries in unity games and there are asset pack unpackers
the primairy setup could include server to be switched properly between a setup mode to place things, add planets and then reboot back to pvp mode when done without corrupting the server files that would greatly help the modders...if they get that done then you be perfectly fine....same goes for adding planets after the server has run...if you do that now it kinda .. de-stabilizes the server .....and eventualy crashes it....to a full wipe...so ... right now ...all i can hope for is when the alpha gets released they would have a better server implementation then they do now...and maybe...just maybe they will have a suprice for us server owners and modders....hint hint at devs....we wanna know more about release date... hint hint....
I went ahead and posted a request over in the oxide forums for a game extension for Empyrion over here: http://oxidemod.org/threads/empyrion-galactic-survival.16061/ Looking at Wulfs contact page it appears the oxide team is already looking for copies of the game so they can add support for it in oxide: http://oxidemod.org/members/wulf.1115/#info Iv'e used Oxide with TcAdmin for both rust and 7 days to die, its pretty easy to setup and GSPs can easily add mods for it with little to no effort. (in plain English that means its good for server owners that dont own the hardware.) Unlike traditional mod solutions that are made either by the game developers or have to be added in like minecraft, you only need to drop a dll into a folder for the main part of oxide to load. mods are then added by dropping a cs, java, jscript, c# or lua script into the mod folder and then oxide loads it while the server is running. (in more plain English it means more accessibility for developers across multiple coding languages.) I sent them a copy of the game, they still need 4 other copies, personally id rather support Oxide creating mod support for Empyrion, because not only do they host the mod loader they also host the mods, all in one place. As far as unity is concerned they were the first group to actually create a mod loader instead of just hacking game files.
Or... we could just wait till Eleon Studios either offer mod support or stops scrambling code so we can decompile it using the usual tools
