Do Hardcore Players (non-modders) need User Friendly Modding Tools?

[Psyringe]

The poll is very oddly worded. Why should non-modders need _any_ modding tools, user friendly or not? If they only want to play (and not to mod), then they wouldn't have any use for them anyway. At least that's how I understood the poll, which is why I voted "No", of course not. It's a question like "Does a fish need a bicycle?".

I have a slight suspicion that the OP thinks that non-modders might become modders if given easy-to-use tools. But that's not what the poll is asking.

Regarding the "necessity" of modding tools in general: Ideally (for the customers), a game would allow powerful modding of all game aspects, while also providing easy-to-use tools to harness that power. In reality, developers usually have to make a decision: Either you limit the moddability of a game, but provide nice tools, or you allow large-scale modding, but without providing tools (because the tools would then take much longer to develop). A good example for the difference are Civ3 and Civ4. Civ3 had a nice menu-driven editor to change all things that were moddable, but was limited in what could be modded (hardcoded boundaries, no AI modding to speak of, etc.) Civ4 was much more moddable (up to the point where we can totally rewrite the AI if we want to), but less accessible, you had to deal with XML files and/or Python and/or C++ programming. Most modders appreciated the higher moddability of Civ4, but there were also people who complained that they didn't have an easy-to-use editor any more. Some claimed that they would have wanted to do a scenario or two, but couldn't, since they didn't understand XML or Python.

Personally, I don't really understand these complaints. I'm pretty firm in the camp of those who appreciate higher moddability and don't care all that much about tools. If there are tools, I'll use them. If there aren't, then I'll use any of the great guides that the community usually comes up with, or ask more experienced modders for help. It takes a bit more effort to get started, but that's much better than having an easy start and then quickly running against a brick wall of unmoddable features.

Actually, Civ4 was the reason why I started some minor C++ coding in the first place, when I wanted to merge two mods which required a recompilation of the dll. I had no previous C experience whatsoever, and I had never used an IDE. But there were great guides on Civfanatics and it took less than a day to achieve what I wanted. Starting from there, I managed to contribute some minor coding to other projects - I definitely couldn't have done that without the Civ4 modding experience.

So, again: Given the choice between having to invest a bit more effort, or having limited moddability in the first place, I'll always gladly choose "more effort".

I also tend to think that anybody who spends an extended amount of time complaining about the lack of editors, would happily be modding XML and Python/Lua by now if he spent the same amount of time learning those.

 

[Amylion]

I voted no, because the current SDK is already very user friendly.
Game design is NOT "game playing" but a serious work with lots of maths involved.
You may be the best beta tester of the world - doesn't make you a game designer at all.

If you're not able to handle the actual CiV SDK than believe me: It's better for you to don't mess with game mechanics, you are just going to waste time and efforts which will piss you off more than any "user-unfriendly" mod-tool could do.

(And not because I would think that you are a dumb player, but because it needs training and the ability to mathematically quantify the totality of the game. That means e.g. that opposite to the normal (even hard core) player who's only focusing on some aspects on the game, the game designer has to percieve the whole product with all its possibilities. Now, if you are on that level, you most likely are done with the game; probably that's the reason why many game designers don't play their own games.)

 

[eris]

I vote no, not as a modder, but as a player. Wide open modding tools will open up a floodgate of mediocre uninspired "Hey look I can give my Marine a ray gun" mods with amateurish art and ill conceived game mechanics. The present system allows those with both motivation and inspiration to create better than average ranging to excellent work. Then that can go through community review and reaction. And even then there is a lot of confusing stuff for me as a player to wade through. There are places where "anyone can design" is a great creative concept. I do not think Civ is one of those places.

 

[Oneluv]

Let's see what other posters have to say. I have stated my opinions quite clearly and rationally; You have ignored them completely and instead attempt to lambaste me as an elitist.

Thank you, Valkrionn, your well reasoned response makes a great deal of sense.

Made no sense at all why modders would have any feelings one way or the other about " modding tools" being made avail. Thank you for revealing my ignorance.

 

[Valkrionn]

Thank you, Valkrionn, your well reasoned response makes a great deal of sense.

Made no sense at all why modders would have any feelings one way or the other about " modding tools" being made avail. Thank you for revealing my ignorance.

It wasn't you being ignorant, you were just misled.

 

[Drawmeus]

I vote no, not as a modder, but as a player. Wide open modding tools will open up a floodgate of mediocre uninspired "Hey look I can give my Marine a ray gun" mods with amateurish art and ill conceived game mechanics. The present system allows those with both motivation and inspiration to create better than average ranging to excellent work. Then that can go through community review and reaction. And even then there is a lot of confusing stuff for me as a player to wade through. There are places where "anyone can design" is a great creative concept. I do not think Civ is one of those places.

Solvable with a good community reviews system.

The main problem is - it's impossible. Seriously. You can make things in a game like LittleBigPlanet because there aren't any game rules to speak of - just whatever physics they initially built in.

They can make better modding tools, solve various workflow problems, etc., but they can't do what LBP did. They can make adding units a snap, but they can't solve the fact that most people can't make a halfway decent model even when given the easiest possible tools (I mean most creations in SPORE look awful, and that game is almost literally nothing but a bunch of easy modelling tools), so most people won't be able to add compelling units. They can let you create new abilities for units, but only within the framework they've thought of ahead of time. This might cover lots of stuff (changing a player's gold, attitudes, research, experience, etc.), but by far not everything.

They can make it easy to change properties of the game, such as inflation, tech rate, etc., but they can't make it easy to add new properties and determine what effect they have. They can't make things like the Emigration mod easily creatable within their tools without explicitly building in Emigration rules into their code.

In short - they can make it easier, but if they want to let you do cool things, they're going to need to put the code in your hands and you're going to need to know how to code.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

...they're going to need to put the code in your hands and you're going to need to know how to code.

Exactly (word for word) what my DBase teacher was insisting upon in a classroom... as soon as i *FINALLY* got a copy of a precious manual (three weeks later), i figured the coding skills weren't enough either.
At 40$ a pop (IIRC) -- borrowing *IT* from their library (one precious book for about 75 people, so that tells you) wasn't fast enough for scheduled exams.
Failed!

At 6000$ for the whole diploma (fast-tracking in a year, btw) - lack of resources meant some were enforced to purchase supplemental assets.

Add the "Chexx" compiling stubbornness of their staff and i couldn't deploy four months worth of work in due time.
They simply screwed up *MY* career plan, bank loan skyrocketed the cost at 11,000$ and counting while the crazy job market of the early 90's shuffled programmers on limited projects. As in, contracts within restricted schedules.

So, free tools for modders - ya know... that's (or was) the least of my concerns. Unemployed then, knowledge bought, society simply excluded the workforce.
Implemented Win95 stuff & some applications enviro for Inventory in summer 96 for an industrial sector and that was the end of it -- AFAIC.

So, money spent on education that doesn't payback the personal investment. I'd say employers MUST be modded to provide reasonable salaries.

 

[Afforess]

I'm posting this in the General Discussions section because you're the audience I'm specifically targeting here, and not the hardcore modder audience.

I constantly get into this debate with the hardcore modders, and according to them they absolutely DO NOT want the average player to have access to super easy user-friendly modding tools.

I bring this topic up primarily because it's a growing trend among video games to make "modding" and custom made scenarios extremely user friendly for all players. Little Big Planet, for example, is the #1 selling game on the Sony Playstation 3 and one of the highest rated games of all time for consoles. SONY even bought out the company that makes Little Big Planet because they too see the potential. The game caters to the idea that players can create anything their imagination can come up with and the community can play their creations. No programming languages required, no coding experience, and no $10,000+ software required. All the tools to create anything your imagination can think of are all available right there in the game.

Many hardcore Civ fans may not have the technical know how on the actual coding, or they may lack the thousands of dollars in game making software often times required, but do have the imagination and ability to create amazing scenarios.

I would like to see the CiV series to go the "Little Big Planet" route in allowing players to easily create units, tech trees, leaderheads, technologies, maps, and more. We would see a 10,000%+ increase in the number of scenarios and mods to play.

This is something I would like to see starting with Civilization VI

User Friendly Map Editors? Sure. User Friendly Modding Tools? What, so we can fill the forums with 1000's of "It doeznt wrks, HELPZZ!!!"?

 

[Zyxpsilon]

What, so we can fill the forums with 1000's of "It doeznt wrks, HELPZZ!!!"?

It's completely ironic - indeed... that uncompiled source codes aren't readable for most Hard-Core gamers.
Even when indented loops makes it all the more obvious.
Zip aren't DLL archives - actually - ooooppppsss, resource stacks in binary formats.
jmp @dx, XXXX doesn't even register.
So, that tells you.
We should declare war on curiosity, without proper context.
Thal & Spatzimaus & Markus are that patient - but i simply can't spare 10+ minutes of fairly complex explanations if the effort won't be put to good use.
Lotus cells were enough of a mess, already.
I prefer formulas to book thick referencing attempts.

 

[Dale]

I constantly get into this debate with the hardcore modders, and according to them they absolutely DO NOT want the average player to have access to super easy user-friendly modding tools.

I vote "NO". If anyone could mod, then there would be 1000's of badly designed, completely unbalanced, and even pure crap mods. Players would download a few mods, find them all crap and give up on modding.

As a PLAYER, what would you prefer? 1000's of crap you throw out and give up on? Or a small selection of fantastic mods (ie: Civ4)?

Kruelgor, there's one important concept you need to understand and accept: Modding is a talent. Making a good mod cannot be learnt, or handed to someone in accessible tools. Modding takes real talent in design, concepting, iteration, planning, creating etc etc. One just has to look at Spore, the epitimy of user-accessible mod tools. Do you really want Civ to have 1000's of penis equivalent mods like Spore does? Or do you want to know that every mod you download has quality?

I think that question answers itself.

 

[Thander]

If they made it really user friendly, it would be less powerful. There are some things in the game that can't just be simplified for a general user. Perhaps Firaxis could create a set of user friendly tools to complement the full featured tools, but this would cost a lot of time and money. This is something that is best done by the community. Just as an example, some WoW addon authors created a user friendly tool that could do a lot of basic addons very easily.

 

[JohnnyW]

Any time spent on modtools is time the developers are not spending on improving the base game; [...] Civ has always had to stand on it's own two legs without mods. The game should absolutely be good in it's own right before more time is spent on mod tools, other than those already promised (IE, fixing the existing ones, getting us the DLL, etc).

Yeah. It's a shame that 6+ months after release it still isn't. At least in my opinion.

Good luck to all the modders out there. It'll take something genius from the community for me to enjoy this game again. I'm not holding my breath (SDK likely won't be released for a long time still).

As for modding tools being available, yes, of course.

 

[Txurce]

This is an absolutely deplorable misrepresentation of our discussions, and you know it.

You expected something different?

 

[Valkrionn]

Not at all.

 

[Drawmeus]

I vote "NO". If anyone could mod, then there would be 1000's of badly designed, completely unbalanced, and even pure crap mods. Players would download a few mods, find them all crap and give up on modding.

As a PLAYER, what would you prefer? 1000's of crap you throw out and give up on? Or a small selection of fantastic mods (ie: Civ4)?

Kruelgor, there's one important concept you need to understand and accept: Modding is a talent. Making a good mod cannot be learnt, or handed to someone in accessible tools. Modding takes real talent in design, concepting, iteration, planning, creating etc etc. One just has to look at Spore, the epitimy of user-accessible mod tools. Do you really want Civ to have 1000's of penis equivalent mods like Spore does? Or do you want to know that every mod you download has quality?

I think that question answers itself.

I know some absolutely fantastic game designers with minimal computer skills, and some great engineers with absolutely no game design ability. Some people are good at both, but they're totally different skill sets and someone who is good at both is, simply, multi-talented. Ideally those two people get together and you get magic, but lots of mods are one guy working on his own time building something.

I actually think that opening it up to everyone would result in simple inflation - more good mods, more bad mods, ratios stay roughly the same. Good community rating tools have been demonstrated time and again to be quite effective at getting the good stuff into player hands and filtering out the bad stuff.

...it just isn't possible to do what the OP is asking for, so the debate over whether it's a good thing or not misses the point. More flexibility without loss of power is always possible, but quite expensive from Firaxis's perspective, so there are limits to what it'll be worthwhile for them to deliver.

 

[Gedemon]

I've read the OP, reformulated the question (Are civ3's mods better than civ4's mods ?) then answered. No.

 

[OrsonM]

wait, i thought you stormed out of the forums?

did I dream that??

Anyways, it's not so much the programs being hard or easy, but the trainning required for them. It's so much of just knowing how to use the programs, but knowing what to do with them.

For example you can make a webpage with notepad, and in fact many professional webpage designers prefer to work with notepad and firebug. That is because they know how to design well more than anything else (and all in all, you don't really need anything else). You can use flash or dreamweaver (which I also know how to use), but the webpages will then might not be readable for all browsers or it might not have a proper ESO.

Same thing I guess could be said about modding tools, you can make an extra easy to use tool, but at the end of the day you might not get the cleanest of codes or the best design (which should be a priority).

If that makes sense...

 

[Psyringe]

I'm a bit surprised by people claiming that having easy-to-use tools (even without giving up depth) would be detrimental to modding by producing more "bad" mods, or because modding is a blessing that only a few chosen people will ever be capable of. While I still disagree with the OP, it seems that some of his claims (that I thought to be ridiculous) weren't so far-fetched.

I think that's a quite elitist way to look at a skill like modding. Guys, that's an approach to skill development and learning that's outdated by more than a century now. Giving people tools to create things easily is often too costly in game development, but it's not a _bad_ thing at all for the players. Yes, it will cause more "bad" or pointless mods to be released, but they will simply be ignored, the quality mods will have no trouble shining through. See Morrowind and its 15,000 mods. At least 2,000 of those are variations of "My first house" or "My super cool chest that gives you a ton of gold right from the start", but nobody cares. These mods simply get very low ratings, very few downloads, or may even get purged from the download sites due to the total lack of interest in them. They haven't hurt the many, many great mods in any way. But they _did_ provide a very easy way for newcomers to create a mod. That created the satisfaction and motivation to move on to bigger things afterwards. Just go to the Morrowind community and ask how many great modders have started with "My first house".

Other than that, Drawmeus already said everything I wanted to say.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

I've read the OP, reformulated the question (Are civ3's mods better than civ4's mods ?) then answered. No.

Hilarious isn't it?
How continually evolving APIs can turn the tide on more than just privately designed concepts for *ANY* games once distribution goes on the highway of *unverifiable* quality.
Anyone can mow the lawn but not everyone knows the blades can be adjusted to cut as low as grass roots once the bolt has been tightened enough to prevent flying knives.
Even frogs can't jump that fast to escape the "compiled" device.

 

[OrsonM]

But what if I want the flying knives...