Tom’s already spoken to this in response to said mods. The mods that do this were not implemented in a way that would flow well with the way Team Radiant was working on it, they would have to do a crap ton of work to fix these mods to make them work well with what they plan to do in the future. And as for giving them direction, it would be a lot of extra work taken away from what they are currently doing to rely on people who aren’t getting paid to complete these tasks in a timely manner.
To quote Tom:
That’s not to say that they haven’t taken inspiration from what modders have done and what the community has seemed to like though, they are great at doing this.
Best case circumstances for using a modder. They take a great modder like @froggy, have that person move to cali (If they don’t want remote workers), teach them how things are done “Team Radiant Style”, shadow them for a week to make sure the person fits with the company and is following the practices the company has already established. All is said and done after interviews, phone calls, and scheduling conflicts. It’s at the very least a month to get them hired, another week where they are mostly useless to the company, plus possibly a trial period.
TLDR: It takes a while to add a new gear to a well oiled machine. And in the end… the gear may not fit!
Also Note: I am in no way, shape, or form against Team Radiant finding super talented people to join their ranks. They’ve already done an amazing job of finding coders, sound folk, and artists (ie: Tom found himself ). I do not see them integrating new people as a bad thing, we just have to realistically consider (And i’m including myself here!) how much work would have to go into setting up their company for growth in the employee department.
Also Read As: Hire me Radiant, i’ll make you pretty art things i promise.
This is by design; use the loot tool on these items.
That’s not the entire reason. The water mod was (still is) a huge hoax, the creator did almost nothing himself - he just pluged Radiant’s API. So you would gain about zero. The whole machinery thing is something that does not really fit into Stonehearth’s vanilla universe and would make things much more difficult to maintain, especially because the engineer is way further down the road.
Incorperating third parties into the development is difficult and probably a legal nightmare. Personally, I wouldn’t mind helping out here and there for some small components, even without pay, but I know that it simply wouldn’t be worth the effort, for a small company like Radiant.
This, and exactly this.
It’s much easier/better to keep the official game work to the development team rather than try to implement community made mods into the actual game as official updates.
Not to mention taking that work and putting that in the game either means the creator loses rights to it, or in some weird fashion the company has to share that right with them which is just… weird.
The whole point of having a ‘mod friendly game’ is to allow players to mod and do anything they’re capable of.
But trying to take mods and actually put them in the game as features is something very different, and in some people’s minds, a giant mess. At most the devs will take ideas from community made mods and actually make their version of it.
@ repeat pan: of course I tried to use the loot tool.
but it wont work if the item is on a road. the loot “rectangle” you pull with your mouse needs to start on plain land (not on a road-field) this is an issue if you paved all of your tunnels and rooms while mining … you’ll never get rid of those nasty items in the middle of the road dropped by goblin raiders (road demolishing is bugged as well)
You’re looking at it from the wrong side. If he just took their API and crossed a few wires, so to say, then why couldn’t Radiant give him some direction (do this but not this), then incorporate it? They could keep working on what they’re doing, but a feature they already started was basically outsources and finished for them. The debug the edges a little, and some of their work is done for them. Cue the lawyers for every thing else.
Actually, in one of Tom’s Streams, I asked him about cogs and machines, in which he said would be much later, but was something they eventually will incorporate. Windmills were his example for milling.
I had the same trouble, it was frustrating but I understand why it’s in place. The easiest thing to do is rank up to ‘member’ status by reading a bunch of topics/posts and making a few replies here and there. Took me roughly 30 mins to accomplish this which was fine because there was plenty I wanted to read up on anyway.
He added about six lines that made the water colorable, which isn’t something that I would recognize as a necessary game tool, and certainly not one that has a raison d’être before even the color-mixins-stuff is released.
Yes, hence the “way further down the road”. They have quite some construction sites already; I don’t see why we should artificially add more to that. Every feature they incorporate, they have to support and therefore spend time on it. Rather than this being some general API or game feature lots of people profit on, this would be a very detailed, not even fleshed out thing. The mod has been around for a month (or less), so we can’t really say that the design it has right now will stick, or even work, because there’s simply too little experience.
I notice this all the time will working on stuff, further down the road you just see that feature A needs to be done differently in order to work for B too… and before you know it, you have a completely different API for something which breaks savegames and what not.
Assuming Radiant could add modded content to the base game, it would still be a difficult position to be in for both parties.
Modders couldn’t mod anything that was too far away from the base game (machines for example). Maybe in this case it could work assuming the base was already there (blacksmith, mining, metal) - so “entirely new” things that do not intersect with current WIP could work, kind of
Radiant would need to tell what they are working on to avoid modders doing the same thing at the same time (twice the effort, none of the result). That would spoil a lot of upcoming features and may generate more discussion about things that might change entirely (because they figure out feature A does not work this way at all).
There’s lots of talking and overhead and all that involved which is not quite worth it… I believe.
You make valid points, and thus I agree. But that being said, I hope RE doesn’t do what Mojang did, and NOT add things to their game because “there’s a mod for that”.
Believe me when I say that they are currently working on things that are not on the Trello board, but visible in the code, which may changes gameplay and certainly the way mods work.
To aid pan in his effort.
The best example of stuff not being shown on Trello are buggfixes. They push out so many often without even getting into detail. And just from my programming experience I can ensure that they are constantly rewriting stuff that just to smoothen it out, make it more efficient and you know code stuff. Not visible to the regular mans eyes, but only visible to those who read the code and analyse it often.
). I do not see them integrating new people as a bad thing, we just have to realistically consider (And i’m including myself here!) how much work would have to go into setting up their company for growth in the employee department.
