The Most Moddable Civilization ever....apparently isn't that moddable.

[Sonereal]

Just a few quotes from what I've seen in the Creation part of the forum.

WHY OH WHY OH WHY does the Lua SDK reference have NO INFORMATION on what the bloody parameters are for a function????? therefore rendering them completely POINTLESS.

I've sat here for about five hours trying to bloody work out how to call ONE FUNCTION.

Player:Found

Given the functions around it, suggests to me this founds a city. How? What on God's Green Earth would I put as parameters to this function? Lua certainly doesn't tell me.

I've searched the net, apparently the way to figure out a function signature is to do debug.getinfo(function) but no, of course that functionality is disabled in the Civ 5 lua. Why all these road blocks? Would it be that hard to have given a list of functions with what bloody parameters they use? I'm starting to feel like they don't want us to mod anything and are purposefully withholding or breaking bits to stop us. Paranoid I know, but after all the stuff with nexus, munged dds files and now this... grrr.

Ridiculous.

The problem seems to be that the art is loaded before the mods are, so unless you have the 'reload X system' as a mod option then you have no chance.

Strangely though, there IS a 'reload landmark system' option, but it seems to do nothing. It seem landmark art defines remain unmoddable despite it being ticked.

Bleh.

Will try an SQL add but I would assume the 'reload X system' will occur before the database actions in your mod are performed. Perhaps not.... I'm doubtful it'll work though.

EDIT: Nope. Replaced EVERY landmark in the database to point to the modern citadel model, no change in game. Confirmed with the db viewer that the entries all changed successfully.

This pretty much wraps it up. Buildings, wonders, resources, improvements, natural wonders, terrain, all completely impossible in the current game. Poosticks.

So i guess no one has managed to make a working building yet?

So much for the game being the most moddable in the series. :/

So yeah. Huge problems here as well.

 

[Eskel]

The game is most moddable CIV ever ... as far for the DLC creators.
I guess it helps them to produce new tasty chunks of $$$ with relatively small effort, without the competition from community.

 

[Fistalis]

Well if it were completely moddable then they wouldn't make much money with DLCs would they? DLCs are nothing but dev created mods.. and giving us the same amount of moddability we had in CIV IV would pretty much kill DLC sales as you could MOD all the art etc into a user created mod. I'm not really surprised by this.. its to be expected to limit the modding ability of your users if you expect to sell DLCS.

 

[The_J]

Sonereal, you forgot to include that half of the modding tools are broken and Lemmy had to fix them and CommanderZ to expand them to make them acutally useful.

 

[JLoZeppeli]

The_J is it actually true? i was thinking of some sort of joke...

 

[Thormodr]

Pretty disappointing if true.

Hopefully capable modding tool modders will be able to mod the modding tools so the mods can mod.

 

[The_J]

The_J is it actually true? i was thinking of some sort of joke...

Parts of the tool for graphics import/export have a broken .dll, there's a thread in the utilities section about a tool to fix this. The thread about this problem is 10 pages long (or around that).
And for the expansions of modbuddy, look also in the utilities section, CommanderZ has there several threads, and there's also a thread about fixes for the Worldbuilder.

The whole situation is not a suprise, imho.

 

[JLoZeppeli]

And Afforess stated that he will not mod anymore until Firaxis give a description fo the LUA functions...

This game is a walking dead....

 

[Adam7Eight]

Yes, it's true. Us modders got hosed (at least for now).

 

[C~G]

I'm speechless..

I need a vacation.

 

[joyous_gard]

I'm speechless..

I need a vacation.

I feel like that too. Like in a space movie. Like some death star just blew up our last, best, hope...

 

[Clement]

you know Civ 5 is the oddest game i ever bought, one day i'm upset with it, the next brings some hope, then something happens to disappoint me again, then hope again, and now this, more unhappiness.

It's like a rollercoaster, up down up down, i wonder how i will feel about the game once it's finished, this lack of modding ability is probably worst disappointment yet though.

kind of funny, you could show my feelings for the game on a graph like the "retire option" in Civ 4, but thats gone now hehe.

 

[winthrowe]

In my mind, they're still in scramble mode from a rushed release, and I can understand not having time for a dev to spare to document functions that may not be formally documented internally very well, since they can do a debug build and use introspection.

When the code stabilizes and the DLL sources are released, and they say they're done: if there is still no lua docs, and broken art tools, etc, raise pitchforks. I think they're still crunching after a release Firaxis would have pushed back if their parent company would let them. Remember, there's not that many people working on Civ 5 who can actually make the changes modders need, and they're busy fixing other things.

 

[AlpsStranger]

When the code stabilizes and the DLL sources are released, and they say they're done: if there is still no lua docs, and broken art tools, etc, raise pitchforks. I think they're still crunching after a release Firaxis would have pushed back if their parent company would let them. Remember, there's not that many people working on Civ 5 who can actually make the changes modders need, and they're busy fixing other things.

I was reading the thread and had already formulated this exact thought. I guess I'll just have to toss in a second to this.

 

[Jharii]

This same thing is going on with Elemental. There are some really odd parallels between it and Civ5, including those roller coaster rides Clement is talking about. It's like you are on the edge of a cliff. The view is breathtaking, but if you make that leap, you're not sure if you are going to fly or not.

I'll remain optimistic. Strategy games, when released, is the one genre that really is about potential at first. Would I love a fully polished game right away? Of course. I just don't know how truly realistic this is for any design team. There are just too many variables that need to be taken into consideration.

It's not an excuse. I just understand that it can be mind-numbingly difficult to get it all right the first time.

 

[Thormodr]

This same thing is going on with Elemental. There are some really odd parallels between it and Civ5, including those roller coaster rides Clement is talking about. It's like you are on the edge of a cliff. The view is breathtaking, but if you make that leap, you're not sure if you are going to fly or not.

I'll remain optimistic. Strategy games, when released, is the one genre that really is about potential at first. Would I love a fully polished game right away? Of course. I just don't know how truly realistic this is for any design team. There are just too many variables that need to be taken into consideration.

It's not an excuse. I just understand that it can be mind-numbingly difficult to get it all right the first time.

Stardock has much, much better communication than Firaxis/2K Games. That alone makes a huge difference.

 

[factorial]

I think this is a bit of an overreaction. They definitely took modding into consideration more with this game than with any previous civ, it's just not all the way there yet. The tools will get fixed, the full SDK will get released, the documentation will come together, it will all just take time. The modding tools should always come second to the actual game for several reasons. First of all, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for them to go nuts over documentation for the Lua functions since many will likely change over the first few patches. Second, a large portion of the people who bought the game will likely never touch the mod tools or even the mods. Third, even of the people who will use the mod tools, many of them will spend the first few weeks to months after release actually playing the game before they get into modding. The game has only been out a month, bear in mind that most of the major mods for CIV came out over a year after the game was released.

 

[eviltypeguy]

Sorry, but this is overreacting. Firaxis stated at the point of launch that there was a lot more to do in the area of modding and they are working to improve it.

You found some bugs and rough spots; not surprising. But it's way too early to start claiming they hate us all and the game won't be truly moddable.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Sonereal, you forgot to include that half of the modding tools are broken and Lemmy had to fix them and CommanderZ to expand them to make them acutally useful.

Thought to be fair, Firaxis was communicating with them at the time and were trying to fix whatever bug existed with tuner. Hopefully, they'll do something similar now. That being said, poor documentation and bugs in the mod tools doesn't help things. I suppose it's better than not releasing the tools at all, though. At least we managed to get units and a few XML changes into the game so far.

BTW, what wasn't moddable in Civ4? It seems like the phrase "most moddable Civ game ever" is useless if there's a ceiling.

 

[Zechnophobe]

Sorry, but this is overreacting. Firaxis stated at the point of launch that there was a lot more to do in the area of modding and they are working to improve it.

You found some bugs and rough spots; not surprising. But it's way too early to start claiming they hate us all and the game won't be truly moddable.

Listen, when someone advertises a product, and says it has certain traits, it is pretty natural to assume that when you buy the product it will have those traits. If you bought a ham and cheese sandwhich, and there wasn't cheese on it, would you:

A) Ask for your cheese.
B) Assume that a chef would be out any minute to hand it to you
C) Tell everyone you didn't actually want cheese.