Dear Stardock, Will I Finally Get Modding Sanity With LH? Regards, MQPiffle.

Four fucking wheels?

Btw, totally agree and hope the modding support and means of modding are improved dramatically!

Don't think there's been any announcement about the impact to modding from the LH expansion.  Not that I've seen so far.

What we badly need is an entire patch or two dedicated just to improving modding. I doubt LH will ship with many mod improvements.

While FE shipped with the ability to add more content, it's slipping in modifiability compared to some other games. I've started modding another game and it really puts in perspective the shortcomings of FE modding. Object sanity. In-game mod manager. Scripting. Interaction with UI.

Other areas go basically un-used because they are grossly un-polished. Map maker. Scenario creation. Tile editor. Personally I'm tired of waving the flag to wait 6 months for a tiny fix to a corner of it all. Stardock keep saying they'll dedicate time to mod support but it's not happening and that's the reality.

Out of curiosity, what is the other game? I have 0 desire to mod FE at this point because of the reasons stated in this thread. I either have to do a crap ton of work up front to get around the limitations, or I have to redo the mod every patch. Neither are super appealing to me.

Natural Selection 2, but I'm also playing around with some Don't Starve (almost the entire game is executed from moddable LUA files).

I'm just hoping it doesn't get worse 

Would love a patch dedicated to mod-ability.

I have started a bunch of mods I have had to abandon because there are so many hidden little limitations. LH looks like a solid improvement and makes me want to play the game. I doubt however I will be modding it much beyond updating existing mods. I know Stardock is busy but still mod support has been none existent and we have no documentation whatsoever.

For instance they add support for adding user created campaigns but don't bother to actually explain how to do it. Not to mention there are some extremely puzzling limitations on it. Why bother to make it possible in the first place?

I'm not a modder, but I will say that the UI still stinks after all these years so I wish they had made it more open so that the modding community could have made it a lot better.

What's most irksome and irresponsible of SD is that they have claimed that their game is mod-friendly when in reality it is not. 

i'm crying. please SD, help out with modding.

We haven't seen the modding community grow at all since FE came out. In particular the lack of map and stamp mods is very telling. The most  obvious reason for this is the map editor is almost impossible to learn to use and has dozens of weird glitches. Such basic forms of modding shouldn't require you to jump through so many hoops.

It's a shame such awesome tools like the particle forge get wasted. I would like to use it but having to figure it out from scratch would take too much time, and be too frustrating.

Makes me wonder how the Stardock folks get it done, since they're using the same tools I believe.

Hopefully this gets straightened out by the next game, I think it's too late for the Elemental series, especially when they've had so many bugs to work out over the years in the base game, and still do have some issues.

It's friendly enough when it comes to the *real* simple stuff, such as adding an item.  But yeah, it gets a bit frustrating once you get into more complicated stuff.... and as per your OP the inconsistencies are one of the major frustrations.  Not being able to change anything to do with tech trees from the mod folder is a good example.

Agreed particle forge is great.  I found it's probably the least frustrating of the supplied tools.

It's a bit of a shame actually, because this engine would be ideal for mods like Lord of the Rings (been done to death but anyways), Game of Thrones, any of the D&D settings, historical stuff etc.

There's just very little (almost none) flexibility. We can change values and the face of things, but if you want something to work DIFFERENTLY then 99% of the cases it won't work. For me, modding FE is about thinking what can be done before I even think about what I'd like to do. If it were flexible, I would be thinking what I'd like to do and then how to do it.

Wasn't one of Frogboy's hopes that a modder could essentially build an RPG from this engine/build?  I just don't see that happening when simply modding the base game is so frustrating and time consuming. 

It seems to me the modding community was much more vibrant with WoM (for a while) than it has been with FE.  Sad.

I think building an RPG would be perfectly feasibly, simply because it means just removing half the game (city-building). You can play an RPG currently by just not building any cities.

It'd be pretty bad though, since you can't do much with tactical combat (no terrain bonuses, no line of sight, no flanking or any such things). Interaction with other factions would also be restricted to current mechanics and quests. Alternatively doing a scenario (allows for slightly more scripted things to happen on the world map), which equals non-random maps.

True, true...one could make a bad turn-based rpg.

But could you do it all from the mods folder?

I'm with Heavenfall on this one. I've pretty much had to abandon every mod that I've started because the scope was outside of the capabilities of things we can affect. Unfortunately the mechanics of the game are pretty much untouchable, which makes it impossible to include even minor variations of existing systems (mana sources that act differently than standard shard based mana, for instance).

The lack of any sort of scripting API has also been crippling.

This is the general impression I got when I saw that moddability in FE consists of modifying a bunch of XML values. Obviously, this will not scale.

But I hope Stardock eventually gets around to exposing their core game engine API to at least one scripting language (which they should use to write their own game code anyway for a host of beneficial reasons).

I've stopped modding altogether, mainly because of the frustration of modding. Nothing really got fixed since WoM modding wise, and it's just too damn frustrating to mod for. In fact, it kind of killed my desire to play the game a little bit, which is a shame because FE is way better than WoM.

Miss having you around.  You really added a lot to the WoM modding culture.  Hopefully we can get SD to actually care about the modability of the game at some point.