Mod Breakdown? Thoughts?

[Syrkres]

Ok, so far I have been making my mods fairly compact so people can pick and choose as they want.

But now (for stealth technologies) it looks like I am going to add a new Technology to the TECHWEB.

I can easily seeing this new technology crossing the mods, so should I break it out into it's own Mod and make mod dependancies or should I roll things up into one BIG mod?

Since I am new to modding I really don't want to go down a "wrong" direction and regret it later on on how I broke things up.

I have been good in my naming standards to try and keep collisions down to a minimum.

 

[Ryika]

I hope I'm understanding you correctly: If you mean that you're likely to create technologies that are used in more than one mod then yes, I'd make it a "core" mod that is required by your other mods.

However, to not make it too confusing I would then put everything that is "optional" into that one mod, maybe coded in a way that people can delete the stuff that they want (basically putting every "feature" into a separate file, those can then just be deleted as long as there's no reference elsewhere).

Vice Virtuoso basically does that in his Madoka Magica Modseries for Civ5:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=533734169

...and seems to get away with it pretty well, but of course the fact that his mods are fantastic probably helps with that.

In general I'd advice not to create more parts than are really necessary, people are very quick to shy away from stuff that seems complicated at first sight.

I'd recommend not to bundle different Civilizations into a pack without giving people the option to also download them separately; but if you don't mind the extra work it's certainly a good thing to offer both, standalone that require a "core" mod and an easy "all-in-one"-solution.

 

[Syrkres]

Thanks for input Ryika.

Currently I have a "core" mod which is basically the sponsor/civ.
Then I have a second mod which currently mostly offers Units, but to balance the units it was suggested I add a new science (which seems somewhat logical).

Also have a 3rd mod which adds some buildings/improvements. I currently thinking of combining the second Units and Buildings/improvements.

But wasn't sure if it's good to have tiers of dependancies, sounds like it's not.

And yes at some point I was(am) hoping to create a "combined" mod, which is why I have been careful with my naming standards to avoid collisions.

 

[Syrkres]

Ok,

On mod packaging, I recently looked at the mod "Druidry" and that mod seems to package everything into "self" contained files, so as you say Ryika you can easily delete stuff.

Should you self encapsulate each into it's own self contained file or break them down by types (buildings, improvements - like Civ does) or other?

I would like to get other developers input, though like many coding standards it may be religious.

 

[Ryika]

Well, there's no downside to putting everything in its own file aside from the annoyance of having to look through a ton of files while making changes and having a loading list that is extremely long, so it's again depending on how much work you want to put into it.