On the topic of Modding

[Whale Cancer]

Edit: Avoiding a possible flamewar/pointless argument and redacting this post.

[marksteele]

Like its been said several times guys, we just need to wait. The fact that the devs even made this post shows they have been reading at least some of what we say. They did sticky the mod superthread so that is something for the time being.

[Kieve]

Edit: Avoiding a possible flamewar/pointless argument and redacting this post.

Aww. And just when my popcorn finished popping too...

Anyways, I know Justin only put this topic up today but I really hope he's able to at least come back and read through it. As I've stated before, I know bug-fixes and whatnot are the top priority, and I certainly won't fault either him or Matthew for being a little burned out on FTL after the work they've put into it, but I think the fact that GMM had been released a week and a half before Justin's initial statement here shows they really need to keep a better tab on their community / forum. A couple days is understandable, but the GMM thread has been on the front page of Discussion here pretty consistently since Grognak made it...
Ah well. Hopefully once things settle down for them, they'll be able to interact a bit more on these boards.

[curlsworth]

I think we can safely say that we all are here because we love this game and want to participate in its evolution. The game came out.. what a week and a half ago? Let's all cool our jets and trust that the game creators will see our genuine desire to play, support, mod their game, and the benefits that lie therein.

We've all bought it already. We aren't interested in screwing them over. I think we can wait a few weeks to let them get their shit together. We can be patient when it comes to waiting for an official section of the forum.

Remember, they haven't publicly asked anyone to stop. They just haven't officially endorsed anything.

[Justin]

Ok, thanks for the info about the new mod manager. I'll take a look into it.

[swixel]

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about detouring/trampolining? I'm happy to refrain from releasing what I've got so far, but given it just survived the update, and it works, and I can inject whatever I please ... I'm assuming you'd probably prefer we work with your assets rather than corrupting the binary? (i.e. you'd rather Overdrive than detours?)

[Justin]

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about detouring/trampolining? I'm happy to refrain from releasing what I've got so far, but given it just survived the update, and it works, and I can inject whatever I please ... I'm assuming you'd probably prefer we work with your assets rather than corrupting the binary? (i.e. you'd rather Overdrive than detours?)

Can you clarify? I'm not familiar with these terms.

[ComaToes]

Having explored the FTL data files during creation of my FTL Profile Editor, I'm hoping to move toward building a full-on graphical modding tool. GMM has broken the ground in producing the .ftl file format that allows mods to be shared without redistribution of original FTL data. I would like to see the community standardise around this file format, so that mods from different modding tools work together, whilst leaving the scope for alternative mod managers to be produced.

I think all that needs to come from the FTL devs is the assertion "Don't redistribute our stuff" and the rest will be figured out by the community. Modding is going to happen either way, and a subforum to collect modding posts together will de-clutter the other areas and help focus the modders to produce more cool stuff for your already awesome game

[swixel]

Out of curiosity, how do you feel about detouring/trampolining? [...]

Can you clarify? I'm not familiar with these terms.

Detouring/trampolining is finding a function call and then 'detouring' it, or 'bouncing' from the original call to your own function. For example, I could take your LoadFile member function and replace it with my own, which reads from disk before reading from the dat file (although that's a weak example, it's good enough to make the point --- though I think most of the community is hoping it ends up in the system anyway).

Presently I've got a few detours working on all but the Steam and GOG versions (I don't have the GOG version, so I can't test it).

[Justin]

I think all that needs to come from the FTL devs is the assertion "Don't redistribute our stuff" and the rest will be figured out by the community. Modding is going to happen either way, and a subforum to collect modding posts together will de-clutter the other areas and help focus the modders to produce more cool stuff for your already awesome game

It's been what, two weeks since the launch? I am checking out some of the mods now and I'm blown away at what everyone's been able to do already. The response to the game has been crazy and I'm still having trouble taking it all in.

I'll discuss things with Matt, but it'll be a little while since we're on opposite sides of the world right now. It's hard to coordinate.