About organization of mods

[Pumpkin]

I was thinking about mods with a profound impact on the gameplay, like Startreck or Starwars twists, with entirely new races and art.

This is, I don't know if the design document takes into account concurrent mods. I mean, I know it takes into account a sort of player-layer, where, if the base game is modified, the player's mods are not and still modify / disable certain features of the game without being overwritten. But what if the player want to have both the base game available (or a slightly mod-tweaked version) and let's say a Starwars version?

I imagined something like duplicated folders; one would be the official-but-potentially-tweaked version, the others would be "from scratch" remakes, and the lobby would have a "select data folder" thing in its advanced options. This way, someone could have both the base game (tweaked) and "from scratch" remakes available.

Does that sound feasible?

(I'm personally not fond of profound lore-shift with mods, but I don't want to deny them because I'm sure that a big part of the community might be thrilled with that.)

[kasnavada]

Rimworld has something that allows near complete modding, and could be an inspiration.

First: "scenarios" allow the equivalent of lobby options. Like I think you proposed in another thread, the possibility of setting each type of waves at whichever level and so on. If there are mechanics you don't like, you can remove.
Second: in that game the base game IS a mod. It's a folder which contains the base game, only it refers to the art & music with resource thingies so the art can't be copied that easily.
Third: most objects in the game allow heritage of some sort, so you can replace things you don't like easily, or disable them.
Fourth: it also allows rather easy overwriting of native classes. Not sure that fits here but it allowed players to rewrite mechanics they don't like... so. Yeah. To consider at least.

It's not "complete" yet though, some things are still hard-coded, but it's pretty far down the road.

[Pumpkin]

First: "scenarios" allow the equivalent of lobby options scripts.

FTFY

Second: in that game the base game IS a mod.

Yep. That's what I said, basically, but you rephrased it better.

Third: most objects in the game allow heritage of some sort

Chris already talked about that in the design document: every player-layer mods take precedence over official-layer; mods can redefine only a part of a unit or just add the "don't use" flag.

[kasnavada]

Ahah... I was useless. Sorry =).

Another idea: if at all possible, mods saved & loaded by the save game itself, not by the "launcher". So if I want to play 2 games concurrently with different mods, I can without manually reloading all mods.

[Pumpkin]

That's a very good point. I'm not sure but I remember something about saving the units' definitions in the save file. I'm not sure this is in the design document (and I don't have the heart to browse it all, believe it or not ). Anyway, I think saving the "mods" used in a game in that game's files might be an interesting idea, but might be memory-expensive. Maybe a form of compression (or binary representation) can be used, but I remembered a request for an option for not compressing saves in order to modify them easily.

I don't know what's possible here, but at least there are needs to be addressed (or at least mentioned), here.

[x4000]

Definitely a good point.  Playing minecraft recently with my son really drives this home.