Oh no. I canāt handle all this at once 
Guess who will spend the week updating his mods?
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Really picked a good time to pop into the discourse 
Gonna be fun
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While it is a positive thing for some people, and I appreciate the effort, I will probably not use it. While providing an easy āupdate them allā button, Steam does it in the most unintuitive way behind the scenes, making it hard to control the process.
And donāt get me started on the whole āclosed ecosystemā problem. Enough to say that non-Steam users canāt download mods from Steam.
Here is my request to all modders out there: I know supporting two repositories is hard, and Steam hosting sounds tempting. But please, keep your Github repo intact and up-to-date. It is much more useful than Gabeās thing.
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Chinese Translation Upload Workshopļ¼ļ¼ļ¼
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Iām afraid I have to agree with this. As much as I appreciate the good intentions, acknowledge the necessety of the functionality and understand the decisions about resource allocation, I fear it will be good and functional only for steam players, and not everyone else. 
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GitHub is a source code repository, not a mod repository. It does not solve the issues of deployment (or building for that matter - which is, admittedly, likely just āzip itā), distribution, listing/searching/tagging or discussions and ratings. For anyone with a git client and a knack to use git pull it might be convenient, but itās not as convenient as just starting the game and having it updated/downloaded with no other action required by the user.
Iām not necessarily advertising for the Steam workshop, but I would like to point out that thereās no alternative and for Stonehearth, there hasnāt ever really been. Because you canāt really mod a proper, third party mod repository into the game either, thereās not going to be any platform that could get close to Steamās functionality or comfort - unless the developers decide to allow that in some form, of course. Not to mention that Stonehearth has too small a community to realistically pull off two modding repositories (some people might even find one a bit too big).
Personally, I donāt think that this will mean an increase in mods or modders. The documentation on modding, while nice and definitely overdue, is still only barely scratching the surface.
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quick question: will it be compatible with mods not on the steam workshop? I imagine not every modder wants to use it.
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Yes, non-Workshop mods will continue to work fine. However, you wonāt get automatic mod sync for non-Workshop mods in multiplayer once itās released.
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Wait, are you serious?
I mean,
and
https://www.curseforge.com/
Not to mention dozens of smaller sites that, unlike these two, have no auto-updating utility.
Out of these three I actually prefer Nexus. Surely it has its own flaws. But there was an attempt to create a similar tracking/updating utility for SH.
On the size of community, I agree. I understand I tend to be biased here, but I view things as an occasional modder myself, and a repo without version controlā¦ eugh. As a modder I need a bug tracker and git push more than I need discussion (and definitely more than I need ratings).
It may be useful strictly for stable releases, which isā¦ problematicā¦ when the game itself is in Early Access stage and updates frequently. Unlike games, there is no āunstableā or ābetaā branch for mods (actually, there are no branches at all - correct me if Iām wrong), which is the effect of Steamās āone game, one versionā policy. Meaning, you either release a mod for latest stable version, or post the same mod twice, one for each version.
Then thereās a question of licensing and source code which is especially useful for resource exchange within modding community.
Long story short, Steam is mostly convenient for casual mod users, not hardcore mod developers 
Still, itās better than nothing. I imagine many people will use it.
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Ehmā¦Iāll stick with Discourse as the additional, but ^ is correct, thereās plenty of options for those who arenāt using Steam to still be kept in the loop, so long as the modders are willing to use both or allow permission to repost their work in specific places that are accessible to both.
The Workshop support for Stonehearth doesnāt seem to be too bad compared to other games; I have been playing around with it a bit, just had real life (attempts to find/get a job) get in the way of testing it properly.
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I was about to be really angry about this news, but your reply has pacified me. For now.
Please do not lock the game into Steam. I donāt mind extra features, but donāt take third party mods away.
Hm i have upload my mod but i dont find it ?!?
needs some time until steam shows the mod in the overview - but if you search for it you can find it
THX
(Ja habs gerade auch so gesehen, ist ja mein erster Workshop in Steam. War auch nicht so einfach rauszubekommen wie das geht.)
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Da ich schon schlimere Erfahrungen mit den Steam-Workshop von CallToArms erlebt hatte - kenn ich mich ein wenig aus xDDD
Because i have experienced bad experiences with the steam-workshop from CallToArms - i know a little xD
I for one find the ease of use and automatic updating of Steam Workshop to be a benison. While Iād still love to see my Hearthlings continue to farm and feed themselves and function beyond 22 or so population, as far as new unexpected features go I was happy to see this surprise. Given that the game is going to be multiplayer, this function of the Steamworks toolkit will be really great for anyone who uses Steam.
There are a lot of cool mods out there for Stonehearth, but I often havenāt had the patience to track them down and keep them up to date and so on, so I look forward to a more automated mod experience with the Steam Workshop.
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If users are used to steam, will they bother downloading thrid party mods, or does every mod maker have to go to steam, if they wish to have their mods noticed/downloaded by the community at large. I mean, ptherwise itās a hassle. I know it might be a little overworrying, but it is the main question I have now.
Alright, apologies for the dissection in advance, but I like to highlight the individual points Iām replying to instead of writing a wall of text roughly directed at everything.
I am, and the options you have listed fail the game integration check. Plus, thank you for listing two sites - which just shows that the whole modding community is a fractured mess, where everyone and their mother makes their own repository and client. I mean, to each their own, but as Iāve said - SH lacks the critical mass to pull something like this successfully off. The dead, previous repositories speak of that, as well.
In the context of SH though, they donāt either - unless we count ādownload and start the game through their launcherā (which requires quite probably an own account, too) as āauto updateā.
There was an attempt, but yet again, an integration as smooth as Steam wonāt be possible for third parties - because of the lack of API abilities.
Thatās fine and as developer, I wholeheartedly agree - however, itās a few dozen developers versus literally millions of players for some games (Hello, Minecraft). Take a look at the average Minecraft player, then think about whether any form of git, inclusive GUI clients, are the right choice for them. Stonehearth wonāt be heading in a very different direction; due to the design and the theme, it will attract the attention of kids/younger people as well - people who donāt want to, or canāt, use git for that stuff. Again, I donāt think itās a viable distribution option at all.
This is correct, but a bit irrelevant, as Stonehearth itself does not exactly have an awesome release management when it comes to mods/APIs. Thereās also the aspect of time. Are we talking about releases right now, or in the beta/stable phase of Stonehearth?
Right now, APIs are a mess, undocumented, change all the time, get created, get wiped, and so forth, as expected of a product in development. Yes, modding isnāt fun. However, itās also straight-forward in a sense that a new version completely replaces an old one. Nobody is going to continue modding for v23 once v24 is there, which means thereās only limited incentive to support different versions. The picture would be different if versions were really branches in SH too, and v23 continues to receive updates once v24 is out, but that is highly unlikely/very rare.
In that sense, you can claim the release management is simply āMods arenāt updated until the game hits stableā. If you wish to play with unstable mods, the mod can offer a second, different version that is for the unstable version I suppose. Is this pretty? Not at all. With conditional loading, mod authors might be able to include both versions into one mod though, so that would be a design decision to be made by Riot.
The question is whether other mod managers can handle this mess any better - after all, theyāre even more decoupled from the game. Seeing as most of these products are run-of-the-mill tools, I wouldnāt expect special integration for SHās possible quirks in that regard either, but Iāll openly admit that I have not worked with third party tools a lot. I know that the Twitch client is quite awful to use, though, and that Nexus wasnāt exactly friendly to use back when Iāve used it the last time.
I donāt think weāre particularly disagreeing in this part here. From my point of view, thereās not a pretty solution anywhere.
This is an issue completely unrelated to the modding repository and applies to all repositories/clients though. Even Steam does not āhideā modded content, but rather puts it into some folder (that is rather easily findable if you know where to look). I think some games are copying the files from that Steam folder to their local directory too so it looks more ānormalā.
I donāt believe thereās a difference between any of these products in that regard. All of them require you to agree that they get a license to distribute and copy your content indefinitely and the juristic lingo is probably awful in all of them. What the modās license is like is completely different from that.
Yes, but since weāre talking about mod distribution, the focus should be on the users, not the developers. An awesome modding repository thatās like GitHub, integrates with the game, allows for branches, auto-updates and more would certainly be interesting, but nobody except modders and hardcore users would use it. Thereās also the game developer aspect to it: You canāt really claim that āyour game is moddableā and āeasy to do soā if it requires users to jump through twenty hoops just download the starter mod.
From my point of view, thatās a horrible idea. Thereās various things that can go wrong:
- Authors are expected to support their mod on different platforms - platforms they might not even have heard of. Imagine the fun of hearing āYour mod isnāt working and completely and utter garbageā, just to find out that the other guy messed up the upload in that other portal.
- You cannot guarantee updated files across the board. If somebody takes a mod and uploads it somewhere else, he ābecomes responsibleā (wink wink) to keep it updated there, too. The result could be that out of five platforms, two have the newest version, one has the first alpha of the mod, and two have the previous version.
- The integrity of the mod isnāt guaranteed. This can range from simple handling errors (wrongly zipped, wrongly uploaded, somewhere a bit got lost) to āextensionsā and āupdatedā versions that were modified by the inofficial uploader to make the mod āmore awesomeā (e.g. āI have boosted the damage by this sword by 10000% because it looks so cool and it needs to be super cool too!!ā) up to straight forward, but unlikely, sabotage (hello, Elsagate). Thereās nothing more depressing as a developer to me than having your product ruined because somebody is using it wrong, or is using something completely differently and thinking it is your fault. Also, the internet can be cruel. Super cruel. Especially in comments sections.
- Uploading it yourself to half a dozen places still wonāt upload it at that one crucial point that one user is using who now complains about it because the three other mods he uses are on it.
So bottom line, itās a curse and a blessing. Whatās most important from my point of view is that there is an unified platform, however - and that platform seems to become the Steam Workshop now. I doubt there will be enough modders in the foreseeable future that could influence the community to use any site. It all depends on Riot in the end and how convenient they can design the workshop tools. If theyāre a hassle to use (looking at you, GMod back when youāve started), people will have a hard time migrating and likely other distribution forms will take prevalence.
Keep in mind that none of this is in any form exclusive. You can have Steam Workshop subscriptions and manual mods at the same time, and I would heavily object against it being any different. Itās likely going to be a bit of a hassle for mod authors, who are now expected to distribute (and keep up-to-date) mods with two platforms. There will be people asking for a .smod and there will be people asking for a Steam version. And updating them is fun, too.
If Riot could provide some form of command line publishing tool (ideally that can also be passed a credential in form of an access token or similar), then the whole process could likely be streamlined (a lot).
Of course, an interesting project could be a mix of all of that. Have a service that acts as ācentralisedā service for mods, able to pull mods from various sources (GitHub hooks, REST updates, ā¦), build/compile them (kind of like what Smodify did), and then push them to various other sources (Steam/some Nexus/Curse/whatever). However, because the credential stuff would get really icky, I donāt think that I - as a modder - would use that platform at all.
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Probably is, yes, but my PoV is a very jaded one. Especially since it includes the expectation that itās going to happen anyways, with/out permission of the modder(s).
Again, Iām jaded and willing to lose all my points - āSorry to hear you feel that way, donāt use my mod then.ā would be my response if someone told me that.
If asked to support platforms I donāt know and am not comfortable with, I really donāt have enough qualms with stating that, no, sorry, itās not available. If someone else wants to use my content to try to make it available, power to them, but be sure to talk to the person who does so if you get it from there and have issues. Iāll do my best to help within my ability, but I support X and Y, and can only do so much for Z, R, and Q.
Probably part of why Iām jaded and limited willingness, yes.
āSorry, that one user. Iām not comfortable outside of X and Y. If you arenāt willing to use X and Y, hereās my direct link, thank you for contacting me. No, Iām not willing to work with site N just because mod1, mod2, and mod3 are. Truly sorry. Have a nice day.ā
Frankly, at the end of the dayā¦theyāre mods. Use at your own risk.
Be it this game and platform, or any other.
Would it be nice if they could reach more people, have more regulation, etc?
Sure. My content would probably cease to exist given how much I already struggle, but I imagine it would be good for others.
But at the end of the day, mods are a luxury, not a necessity.
So, probably unsurprisingly now, I fully disagree with this sentiment:
Because it has to be for both, but, no, the focus should be on the developers being able to use it. Otherwise, many will simply stop developing. No, I canāt speak for all modders, but I wouldnāt continue if it was too difficult to share my mods. Itās already difficult for me to even make them; I keep at it because right now my reasons to do so outweigh that difficulty. But itās why I donāt mod for other games that I would like to, or a few that I have modded my personal copy andā¦thatās the extent of it, because the mediums for distribution are much beyond my ability.
One of the other things I noted the most in here that Iāll get a quick comment onā¦ āIt isnāt distributed just on Steamā - no, it isnāt, very true. Quite a growing number of games are on multiple platforms. As a result, they have different amounts of support options available for this sort of thing. That shouldnāt result in not having the option to use Steam Workshop for Steam users and modders who are willing to deal with it.
Or the option to post mods to Discourse, or wherever else. Again, blunt as stone; I feel itās a user-beware situation. The modders are providing additional content that is nice to have. Like almost anything else anymoreā¦yes, thereās going to be re/distribution issues, including illicitly, and yea, people are going to be fickle in how they feel about what you provide, where, and what other people do about it without you necessarily even knowing. Itās a shame. Itās still not a great reason to limit the options.
But Iām just a feline of chaos rambling out my reaction, so take it with a grain of salt and two black cat hairs.
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