Modding and Firaxis

The new IGN review has a short little section modding, yet I find it very information dense, as far as modding and Civ5 goes and John Shafer's opinion of it. Here's the important bit in the IGN review:

It's not surprising given Jon's background that the new version of Civilization will be even more moddable than Civ IV. All the tools have been taken to a whole new level, so the more you know about XML and programmable DLL, the more you'll be able to achieve with the game. More importantly, the game itself will contain a browser for full community interaction, so you can search for, discuss, install and rate mods all from within the game shell. Firaxis will maintain a small bit of control over this and will rely on player flags to evaluate objectionable content.

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First off, awesome, we are getting exposed Source code, and XML is going to be the container language used. firaxis, no sense in trying to fix what ain't broken, and this system works great with Civ4. I do wonder if there will be an easy access/introductory scripting language to hook into for certain things, like how Civ4 uses python.

Unfortunately no word on whether or not the devs have put more effort into making a more User friendly scenario editor. Doing so would be well worth it, as many great scenario makers aren't the type to dig into text editing WBS files or the Civ5 equivalent, plus the way to do this in civ4 is just tedious, and the World Builder editing tool isn't well designed, and doesn't function correctly for soem things. You can see from my No modding tools replies I'm no fan of fancy modding tools, as I think they just get in the way in general. But for scenario making it really is worth the time.
-Firaxis has confirmed they have put effort into improving an external and powerful + easy to use "World Builder"

As for the second part. Awesome, simply awesome about a user friendly gameshell to access mods, and user rated modding system. This is truly a great step forward, and I think unprecedented in the industry. One of my personal problems with my mod is that I don't think many people realize it's there, or aren't willing to check it out as they have bad experiences with mod's crashing and such. It would be awesome to have a reliable and user freindly way for players to see that my mod has a 5/5 stability and a 5/5 coherency rating, or what have you. I'm looking forward to seeing this in action.

Though I do have some concerns about it. For instance with my mod I've taken quite a lot of time to write an install script that is very powerful and pretty much wol't let the user muck things up. When I see comments in my mod now I can be 99.9% certain the issue is not one with installation. How can we be so sure about this new system?

Finally about Firaxis maintaing control over content. I don't think that's a good idea in general. There are all sorts of issues that can creep up about Hitler Leaderheads, Halo Models, etc. Right now with how things are Firaxis can just let the modding community do what it wants, and in general the modders are protected from legal action as it's simply a hobby and damages would be hard to claim to have been caused by a mod by any hostile party. This dynamic changes considerably if Firaxis starts flexing control over mod concepts.

Anyway just wanted to bring up this paragraph and see if there is any discussion over it, or if it peaked anyone's interest as much as mine.

Yep, sounds promising, presumably a hassle-free install for all mods, just like your current one. Maybe the only "small bit of control" is to define the format that mods need to conform to in order to get picked up and shown and installed in-game.

Or maybe Firaxis plan to take an ongoing hand in the management of a central server holding all the mods that get submitted. Presumably somewhere on their web server - unless they had a deal with some third party, or a fan site like this. I imagine it might be a legal grey area when dodgy content actually resided on their machine, even though in theory it was under total user control. Maybe somebody on here knows more about the law in that kind of situation.

Anyway so long as the game let you install mods from places other than the "official" central server too, there would be no problem. Maybe the way it would pan out in the end would be that third party mod servers would grow up at fan sites, just like now really but accessible in the game.

I would assume a "small bit of control" is the usual legal coverage to ensure nothing illegal is damaging the system. They may also need to keep a "small bit of control" to retain whatever ESRB rating they get. So if it's 10+ everyone, they may not allow blood-mods.

Yeah, but why would Firaxis even want to get involved enough to handle damaging content?

Agreed, sounds like great news for the already present civ4 modders

phungus420 said:

Yeah, but why would Firaxis even want to get involved enough to handle damaging content?

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The push may come from 2K, we don't know. EA pushed/managed Maxis to make the Spore hub, maybe 2K is pushing Firaxis to make the Civ hub and will manage it too. That makes sense to me as the hub would be running on 2K infrastructure (being community based, since the community involvement department is 2K not Firaxis).

phungus420 said:

Unfortunately no word on whether or not the devs have put more effort into making a more User friendly scenario editor. Doing so would be well worth it, as many great scenario makers aren't the type to dig into text editing WBS files or the Civ5 equivalent, plus the way to do this in civ4 is just tedious, and the World Builder editing tool isn't well designed, and doesn't function correctly for soem things. You can see from my No modding tools replies I'm no fan of fancy modding tools, as I think they just get in the way in general. But for scenario making it really is worth the time.

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Kid R said:

Anyway so long as the game let you install mods from places other than the "official" central server too, there would be no problem. Maybe the way it would pan out in the end would be that third party mod servers would grow up at fan sites, just like now really but accessible in the game.

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Agreed to both.

I'm not completly excited, but i also think, that these info is very nice .
I was not supprised by the info about XML (anything else would not really make sense), but that there'll be a dll is good to hear, extensive mods can be done .

Dale said:

EA pushed/managed Maxis to make the Spore hub, maybe 2K is pushing Firaxis to make the Civ hub and will manage it too.

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No penis units in Civ5 .

phungus420 said:

This is truly a great step forward, and I think unprecedented in the industry.

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I think you're justified in guessing this will be an unprecedented step forward. Jon Shafer has had a presence on civfanatics and I have a lot of confidence he won't let the modders down.

Actually, I am kind of worried about a browser and web hub...etc., being built into the Game and the "slight control" over modding. I would hate to see Civ5 all entangled deeply into something like Steam need to have an account in order activate or use certain features of the game. (I didn't like the fact that Empire Total War required a Steam account to activate and was enraged to discover that the dvd comes with additional unit content but one has to pay $9.95 for Steam to activate it.)

I guess we'll have to wait and see when the game is released. Firaxis doesn't seem like the kind of company that would go that route, but game companies are getting greedier and Firaxis has 2K Games to contend with.

What bothers me is the lack of mention of python or a scripting language.
If scripts and logic can be done inside xml, fine.
But if all mods that want to change deep stuff need to be coded in C++; it will be very very bad. The compile/link/run cycle-time is bad in itself compared to changing a script and running again, but I'm mostly concerned about mixing mods together. If dll's conflict, then one has to edit the code and merge it and recompile in order to put two mods together. I know this stopped me from using a few mods in Civ IV already because I didn't want to recompile their mod just to add my 5 modified lines.
Python, or lua, or some other scripting language, is a must.

I imagine that it will still be possible to get mods from other sources. As long as Firaxis isn't the only source for mods, IMO they can exercise all the control they want.

@LDiCesare: I don't think Python is out yet, even though it wasn't mentioned. For one thing, all the Firaxis scenarios use python even when it would be better to use the SDK as Python doesn't need to be updated with every patch.

deanej said:

I imagine that it will still be possible to get mods from other sources. As long as Firaxis isn't the only source for mods, IMO they can exercise all the control they want.

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The only point of concern for me is that the in-game mod browser/content control/whatever might interfere with mods downloaded externally (like from here) - but I highly doubt that, because to have the ability to produce mods yourself, that browser should not interfere with mods you put into your directory anyway.

And having more distribution channels for mods is great - as good as the CivIV mods are, only people actively looking for mods can actually enjoy things like FfH2 etc. With a mod browser in-game, we'll probably see a big influx of "casuals", which is great!

Finally, this is a pretty ingenious way to increase the shelf-life of Civ5 - because they're now sort of selling all the mods we make as part of Civ, meaning it will have a (hopefully) continous content stream - meaning you actually get more bang for your buck if you pick it up in a couple of years from the budget shelf.

Cheers, LT.

Excellent. The best news I've had all week.

Lord Tirian said:

Finally, this is a pretty ingenious way to increase the shelf-life of Civ5 - because they're now sort of selling all the mods we make as part of Civ, meaning it will have a (hopefully) continous content stream - meaning you actually get more bang for your buck if you pick it up in a couple of years from the budget shelf.

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Yeah, this is my take on it. I have 3 good friends that play civ4, and none of them have ever tried a mod. Not even unaltered gameplay mods like BBAI or BUG, and I have certainly tried to get them to download and install LoR a few times. The reason for this is that they just don't bother browsing the forums here, and don't really care that much. They'll play a game of civ a few times a year when they're in the mood, then just forget about it (two of them haven't even patched to 3.19). What an in game mod browser shell will do is open up the new and sometimes novel content of mods to many more gamers, especially the casual gamers who like the game, but aren't civfanatics like my friends.

I really hope Firaxis doesn't use just a simple basic rating system though. There absolutely needs to be a separate "Stability" rating, otherwise this system is going to alienate many new users when they see a 9.5/10 rating for a mod that a bunch of hardcore fans of that mod bumped up, but that has many critical problems with it.

Lord Tirian said:

The only point of concern for me is that the in-game mod browser

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I'm concerned about it in another way: It might lead to a loss of importance of the community forums...

The_J said:

I'm concerned about it in another way: It might lead to a loss of importance of the community forums...

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Hopefully community sites can still have a place by editorialising the user generated content.

The in game browser will be fine for looking at stuff like "most downloaded mod" or "highest rated mod", but only a community site will be able to publish spotlight articles about little known but excellent quality new arrivals, or keep you up to date on the progress of exciting future releases.

I don't modify games myself, but love to play them. but they should make a official mod site, where mods can be found, downlaoded, searched for, and so on. I love Civfanatics.com, but still I am confused sometimes. don't find information how to install certain things etc.
it would be great with a official mod page (own tab on the Civ 5 official site maybe) with all the information needed for download, installation and etc., for us who don't know a lot about it. I know how to install a modyfied game, but not all these flags and leaders, maps and so on...

Does nobody want to talk about the new modding things from the eurogamer article?

Eurogamer: You've talked about the modding tools you're giving away - what will people be able to do now that they couldn't do before?

Jon Shafer: The main thing is, in terms of the creation of maps we wanted to make that a lot easier. We have an individual that's been working on the world builder tool for a long time now, and one of the first things I said to him was to include an undo and a redo fucntion. I've made a lot of maps, and something as simple as that makes a huge difference.

What's really new is a complete level of polish and dedication into that map-making process.

Dennis Shirk: My 15-year-old son could make a map now. That's not to say we've simplified the process, everything is still as moddable as it was before, just that the toolset is so much more streamlined and simple now.

Jon Shafer: We're going to have a utility that packages up the mods you make, too. In Civ IV, there were hundreds of files, tons of directories, and you toss in a readme, and hope people read it, and don't install the mod into their system directory. This utility puts it all into one file that you can distrubute, and unbundle with Civ at the other end.

Eurogamer: Is it just maps, or will people have access to other aspects of the game? Like the leaders?

Jon Shafer: [Blank look.]

Eurogamer: I guess what I'm asking is, will I be able to make a sitcom where Gandhi lives with Washington?

Jon Shafer: We're still finalising the plans about what we'll be releasing. But the art stuff is a little tricky, because of the complexity of what goes on there.

Dennis Shirk: People will be able to retexture the leaders, because that kind of thing is a lot easier, but when it comes to creating new animations, that's a little trickier.

Eurogamer: I'll take that as a no.

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Doesn't sound bad at all.
From the leaderhead part we can see, that we'll get again also full file access for the graphics.
The additional distribution system also looks good to reach every player out there. And it's optional, so we're not forced to anything.
Also a map tool is confirmed now .

I should have looked at that more carefully. Time to update the main page of the modiki yet again...