Important! Stuff you need us to look at yesterday!

[Cinth]

The Design Document is coming into it's lock down for 1.0 and we're busy making sure everything is noted and documented!  Please please please point out any threads here that are super important (in your opinion) that needs attention now. 

[Draco18s]

This post.

[kasnavada]

The part where minor factions and how the IA invades is discussed and / or written.

[Cinth]

The part where minor factions and how the IA invades is discussed and / or written.

please point out any threads here that are super important (in your opinion) that needs attention now.

[x4000]

Thanks!

[Vinco]

Small thing, but design doc 7.a - behaviors still references mines, which I believe are now out of scope.

[x4000]

Thanks!  Fixed that.

[Tridus]

How are mods going to be distributed and made available to users? It's come up before, but there hasn't been a real answer, and there's nothing about it in the design document at all (far as I can tell, it is pretty gigantic now).

If mods are going to be a more prominent "back of the box" type of feature, so to speak, how they're going to be distributed and consumed is important. Right now I have the distinct impression that "go to the mods forum, find the thread for the mod you want, download a zip file from that, and extract it to some folder whose location varies based on where you bought the game" is on the table as an answer, and that's just not good for 2016.

Especially when Steam Workshop is right over there, offering prime discoverability, easy installation, automatic updates, and feedback tools for mod authors.

[Vyndicu]

How are mods going to be distributed and made available to users? It's come up before, but there hasn't been a real answer, and there's nothing about it in the design document at all (far as I can tell, it is pretty gigantic now).

If mods are going to be a more prominent "back of the box" type of feature, so to speak, how they're going to be distributed and consumed is important. Right now I have the distinct impression that "go to the mods forum, find the thread for the mod you want, download a zip file from that, and extract it to some folder whose location varies based on where you bought the game" is on the table as an answer, and that's just not good for 2016.

Especially when Steam Workshop is right over there, offering prime discoverability, easy installation, automatic updates, and feedback tools for mod authors.

Non-steam version of AI War 2 will be completely unable to access steamwork mod. Of course that depends on if there going to be non-steam version of AI War 2.

[Aklyon]

Theres generally not 'steamworks mods' in my experience, since steamworks is a game feature, not a modding one. You've got mods on nexus, mods on steam workshop (same mods, different delivery/update methods), or mods on game's forums. (Rimworld, Starsector, etc) Best option would be either both 1 and 2, or 2 and 3.

The more important question is how do unity mods work.

[Tridus]

Theres generally not 'steamworks mods' in my experience, since steamworks is a game feature, not a modding one. You've got mods on nexus, mods on steam workshop (same mods, different delivery/update methods), or mods on game's forums. (Rimworld, Starsector, etc) Best option would be either both 1 and 2, or 2 and 3.

Nexus doesn't have a tool that integrates with every game, though, so you're still doing extra work. It's *better* than just dumping files on the forum, for sure, but doesn't have the ease of use that Steam Workshop has. Getting mods for XCOM 2 and keeping them updated is the easiest thing ever.

[Tridus]

Non-steam version of AI War 2 will be completely unable to access steamwork mod. Of course that depends on if there going to be non-steam version of AI War 2.

Non-steam versions would need to do manual installs instead of being able to get them from the workshop, but they're already in that situation because the other stores don't really provide any tools to do it. If the Steam version is going to be the same "go download something from the forum and then find c:\program files (x86)\steam\steamapps\common\ai war2\mods\", it's going to be clearly subpar against other games on Steam where it's "click this button".

[Vyndicu]

Yeah that was what I was saying.

What I meant is that there are some modder that MIGHT not ever brother to put their mod on forum because of steamwork and vice versa.

That said. Hopefully we won't see as much friction between non-steam and steam versions.

[kasnavada]

Non-steam version of AI War 2 will be completely unable to access steamwork mod. Of course that depends on if there going to be non-steam version of AI War 2.

That has easy fixes actually.
What the workshop does basically is set a folder where steam download mods.
The only thing that the game has to do is take mods from 2 folders => the (wherever you installed AI WAR)\Mods and the (wherever workshop downloaded stuff)/Mods, for example.

So the only thing that would be needed "user-side" to transfer the mods from one to the other basically is someone downloading it and zipping it to put it on the forum, or vice versa if the mod ain't available on steam. Which would basically take a few minutes to do. If you check Rimworld's mods forum it's basically done every other day there, for example.

[Tridus]

Yeah that was what I was saying.

What I meant is that there are some modder that MIGHT not ever brother to put their mod on forum because of steamwork and vice versa.

That said. Hopefully we won't see as much friction between non-steam and steam versions.

Some potential modders might not even bother to *make* mods if the only audience is a relatively low traffic forum. Certainly, lots of users won't realize they exist if you have to go to the forum to get them, because realistically, >95% of owners of a game never visit that game's forum (outside of early access/alpha/etc, where it's likely different).