Interesting! Thanks for taking a look and the time to detail its implications here....
So.... this is tough!
As far as the detail I might need you to go in... I'd say not that much, for now. I have some idea of how this all works, but not a very good practical idea. I suppose the art aspects of CiV are a bit more self-evident. I definitely don't quite know the specific role the DLL's play in the mod... Without asking you to explain it all, I guess I'll ask these questions:
No problem. These are very good questions! Apologies about the wall of text!
- What's the best we could do with art in CiV?
On a practical level this depends a lot on whether we find an artist. I can do the technical side of importing models and the like in CiV from some standards, but making any new models/animations is beyond me for the foreseeable future. (This can include taking models from other games, but only games that use compatible formats.)
The
unit graphics subforum gives a good overview of the kinds of things people are able to get into CiV at the moment. (And even
one converted by me several years ago.)
It's possible to change the terrain appearances in CiV (make the grasses greener, change the deserts and such), but I've only really seen concepts of this, not too much by way of mods that make these kinds of changes. We also don't seem to really be able to affect the physical appearance of terrain much (make hills more craggy or anything like that, things that would affect the 3D positions of the textures applied to the map).
It's also worth noting that this process will be very slow. Even if an artist magicked all of the artwork we needed into existence tomorrow, it would take me a very long time to get it all into the game because that process is arduous and error prone.
New animations will be very hard to come by. Anything that doesn't map directly into the animation sets of the existing CiV units will require a significantly skilled animator doing a decent chunk of work to animate a model (even assuming we have the model to begin with). And probably working with me for quite a while to get that animation set correctly into the game.
Effects are somewhat of a problem. This is stuff like shiny particles or streams of light or anything like that. We can repurpose the CiV effects (flaming catapult and trebuchet shots seem like they would be particularly helpful), but I don't think we can add completely new ones (I need to confirm this). Deliverator shows that
you can get pretty far adapting existing effects. Where we end up needing to repurpose effects like the "religion spread" like for healing and such will look very clunky since players will recognize it.
On-map UI overlays will be challenging. The stuff we talked about for visualizing T'a'r fog is a complete unknown to me. Visibility, once revealed (no longer hidden behind clouds), cannot be rolled back without reloading from a save game afterwards, for example. Having a different color arrow for targeted healing (Yellow Sister ability) may not be possible. (We seem to only be able to draw the red arrow used for ranged attacks on the map.) There are other similar limitations for anything that wants to "highlight" a hex, which we do have several abilities for. It's possible but very rigid, we pretty much only get to choose a color and it will always be a very clinical hexagon highlight.
Having Blight that spreads is very challenging, but probably possible through some hackery. Having it recede without a save reload is most likely impossible. (We avoided that mechanic due to this technical limitation.)
Terrain can't be visually changed mid-game without reloading from a saved game after changing it. (This limitation thus far seems to have persisted into Civ6.)
- What's the most we could do with a mod in CiVI without DLL source access?
Unfortunately I'd need to spend a chunk of time modding Civ6 to be able to answer this one completely. Firaxis could have made Civ6 in such a way that DLL source access is unnecessary for WoTMod. However, that would have required them making their game from the ground up with modding in mind, generalizing and componentizing every system in their game to be flexible to deal with reasonable modifications to them and provide hooks for the modder to drive their own completely bespoke mechanics as well. That's not usually how big game studios work because doing it like that is super expensive in terms of dev time.
However, I can make some educated guesses based on Civ5 and the little I've seen of Civ6 so far.
A lot of our more exotic gameplay changes become either significantly more difficult or impossible. Where it falls on that scale will vary depending on individual decisions made by individual developers at Firaxis while adding the baseline systems to Civ6. Some things will turn out to be straightforward to hook up to an existing system. Others will run into some baked in assumption in how the game works that will make them unachievable.
Anything that requires the AI to understand new concepts will be severely hampered or impossible. The severely hampered end of that scale involves a significant amount of smoke and mirrors on my part making it
look like the AI is using our mechanics, when it actually it's cheating/doing something "close enough" that will tend to approximate the actions we want. We have a lot of new systems that this will affect.
I can do some vertical slices here to work out what some of the common limitations are in Civ6. The kind of progression I'd be inclined to follow is, make the following mods:
- Add a new unit that's a simple variant of an existing one
- Same as above with districts and buildings
- Add a new civ with a reasonably straightforward ability and some uniques
- Add a new unit that has a new 3D model
- Add a new unit with a 3D model and animations taken from another game (might be Civ5 is the easiest source)
- Add a more complex unit that has its own custom mission that utilizes some bespoke mechanic (including making the AI use it correctly)
- Create a simple scenario (smaller than Siegemod) that has a unique victory condition, some unique civs, and some unique terrain (custom resources, custom terrain, custom features, or anything like that)
That progression means we learn a lot of new stuff about Civ6's capabilities at each stage, and each one provides us with some spinning off points where we might realize that some things we want to do aren't possible yet.
Mods 4 and 5 are more about exploring the art import pipeline and how new artwork gets into the game. I'd need to have done 1-3 to have a better grasp of Civ6's basic structure before going through those, but given that one of our major potential upsides of Civ6 is artwork, I figure it's best if we evaluate that sooner than the more advanced gameplay stuff that I already have a better understand of.
It's also worth pointing out that a lot of the stuff that is
possible without DLL source access will be quite "workaround"-y. The gameplay DLL determines the behavior of the game in the end, so anything we layer on top is largely going to happen without the "existing game" knowing it's there. This leads to a lot of kludges that "happen to work" and are more difficult to create in the first place.
- what kinds of mods are totally A-OK without DLL source releases?
Basic gameplay changes are the easiest - things that tweak numbers and not visuals. (Add yields to something, make a unit stronger, make a tech cost more.)
UI changes are also quite straightforward (exposing or moving information that is already available).
New units, buildings, civilizations, etc. are all very doable with DLL access. However, any uniques that have particularly unusual gameplay (aren't just "existing unit but better") can vary significantly in difficulty (ranging from quite easy to impossible, depending on what limitations we run into).
I do see the art thing as pretty major, in terms of this thing ever having the polish it likely deserves. That said, not having an artist makes that issue lose a little of its weight.
Agreed, if Civ6 has a more mature art import pipeline that makes it much more likely that we'll be able to find an artist who wants to work on this mod (since there will be more artists working on the game)
and it will take less time to actually get that content into the game. I don't think our current lack of an artist counts much against this, since most mods not started by an artist only pick up artists in the later stages of their development. (Or work by getting individual contributions from artists who work on Civ5 in general.)
I'm also unfortunately still kind of struck by how I don't like CiVI nearly as much as I want to right now.I'm played two complete games. I've detailed some of my problems with it. Ultimately, I don't find it as fun. We'll see if that changes. Does that affect my opinion on how to tackle this? Yes and ultimately no. "Yes, because it makes me squeamish - will it be better with expansions? will people still be playing this in two years? will i enjoy modding it? - and no because I think even counting those problems against ciVI might not be enough to make CiV the smarter option....
This is a very good point. I think motivation wise we need to enjoy the game quite a bit to be able to keep going with a project this big. Having played Civ5 from release, I will say that Civ6 is in a much better place now - as a game - than Civ5 was. Civ5 was very bland and flavorless in the beginning and G&K changed
a lot about that. BNW was the same again. So I'd be reasonably confident that Civ6 is going to be a better game long term.
Because, for me, all of this is simply secondary to the "which mod will people play?" question. Previously, we'd divined that CiVI was the likely winner there. If we're talking a significant magnitude of difference, then we kind of have to go with CiVI. If it's somehow comparable or something... ugh.
This is of course the 1 million dollar question! We want the mod to be in the hands of as many people as possible. Unfortunately it requires a crystal ball to answer. Civ5 has a massive user base, but will only really shrink from here. Civ6 has sold very well, but we don't know where it will be in a year or more. In terms of official support Civ5 is finished - Firaxis will almost certainly never patch it again, so the issues it has now it's stuck with forever. Civ6 has the chance to change some of those problems, but may have new ones.
Trusting you that without dLL source, we're Effed.... then I guess the discussion really goes in two directions:
- will there be a DLL source release?
Based on the phrasing of their release notes, I'd say there will be. At least one Firaxis developer has also said he
wants to release the source (he said he wanted to do so at launch and obviously didn't get his wish)! These make me think they'll do it eventually at least. They have done so for Civ4 and Civ5, which also bodes well.
- if yes, is the delay acceptable?
Depends on the delay, we're already 3 months into Civ6, so if your estimate of 1 year's worth of redesign is correct and Civ6 has the same DLL source release schedule as Civ5 of 1.5 years (there are
a lot of ifs in that sentence) then we have a 3 month delay tacked on. If we do end up in that situation though, there are a significant volume of things that can be done without DLL source (related to what I said above) that we can work on in that time. Artwork may be very workable in that time.
We also need to play a lot of Civ6, which takes a long time. Doing that before we do our redesign is probably a good idea and will take significant real world time.
If no, then it sounds like we have to go with CiV. Doing a full design only to find that it is totally a waste would probably kill the mod. That would suck.
Agreed, that would suck.
As far as the delay, then... if we got to this same point in 6 months... we'd have potentially another 6 months of downtime. That's bad. However, I doubt we'd be at this same point in six months. I'd guess closer to a year. Fundamentals will largely remain in place - especially the new systems - , but we'll need to essentially recheck everything, especially the "adapted" systems - the tech tree policies, etc. All of it would need to be redone. Not from square one, but.. square 4 or something. Think about all those civ uniques - we'd need to at least consider the changed mechanics again for each civ. The changed diplo system and religious victories and such are obviously a big change. I know you've said the reception has been largely positive, but one mixed review I found (that I agree with) pointed out how they seem to have "kitchen sinked" the game, adding tons of stuff, without all of it feeling particularly cohesive. This has the benefit of letting us keep some of the systems from CiV relatively in place, but it also offers the huge trap that a lot of this stuff is kind of wonky, and there's way more things to adapt than will be easy to predict without, say, the 1000 hours of CiV we've put in, combined.
Yeah, the game being "kitchen sinked" is quite a fair criticism. I think that's what always comes together with civ (all of them) in its expansions though. Civ5 vanilla was very bare, so this time they've gone wide on mechanics instead of deep, so hopefully the expansions will result in fleshing out those systems more.
And then there's the other scary thing about such a delay - it's likely by that point an expansion would be released... so then, back to the drawing board with all this stuff again? What if they add a diplo victory?
Civ6 will definitely be a moving target for a long time. That certainly has these negatives, but the positives of it are that the game will likely become more flexible over time (as has happened with Civ5). I think we would need to take a different, more iterative approach to design for this to work for us. At the moment we're designing everything up front and then going to implement it. I think we'll end up rethinking a lot of our designs even if we stick with Civ5 anyway, because the reality of the gameplay won't work like we expected it to. Some things we thought would be fun won't be and others we thought would be boring (that we decided against) will be awesome. We'd need to adapt and work more like that, putting individual pieces into Civ6 to try them out and seeing if we like them and building on upwards that way.
So what now? I say yes, dig into the SDK and get some opinions on it. Please. What about these social policies? Should we do the pass so we have something "complete", or totally table it?
There are two sides to this, I'd say. On one hand, we have a significant amount of "active" design that we're considering for Social Policies at the moment that might be forgotten if we move away from it for a while. We do have a lot written down, but we might need to reread several pages to get our heads back into place later.
On the other hand, I feel like we're both pretty stretched thin on this topic. (Probably because we know it's invalidated by Civ6.) You've mentioned it before and I do feel it now.
This post has certainly been a very fun (and much faster to write, despite its length!) digression from Policies and I'm fairly enthusiastic about trying the Civ6 mod tools. (Talk to me again after a week of using them and that may not be the case, if they're a pain in the face to use!)
The mod progression I outlined above would also provide some very near term goals that I can post about and discuss what it means for WoTMod on here (or on another WoTMod topic in the Civ6 forum, which may be more appropriate).
Personally I'm leaning towards evaluating Civ6's tools at the moment!
And speaking of timing and the like, I'm going to be out for several evenings from now unfortunately! Through a series of events, I'll next have a free afternoon/evening to post on Sunday. Though I may be able to squeeze in a short post after D&D on Wednesday.