Lo-Fi Games

Was just thinking about how a lot of games are incredibly successful because of the ability to alter them. Something you see all the time is games releasing things like mods, but you don't often see things like plugins and minor modifications. If you could set up the file system to allow mixing and matching small alterations to the game, like adding in small features and putting them together, you might be able to encourage people to create combinable mods and plugins more for your game, which would ensure the game get more attention and be more enjoyable by more people without ridiculous amounts of more work by you.

Then, you would also have a simple solution to some of your dilemas like allowing children to be killed by players. Simply place in an easily removed code that stops people from killing them, then somebody could just release a little mod that alters that.

Perhaps if you could write a program that can take a specific file for the game, find a specific set of text and replace/remove it, or add new text to it.

This way, mods could be created that simply add on or take from files, rather than replacing them entirely, allowing for the easy combination of various mods that don't conflict too heavily with each other.

In case the way I've explained it is confusing, what I mean is how a mod usually replaces a file entirely, usually being a config or other form of text-ish file that provides data for the game. The problem with this is that, if you have that file already modified with something that, say, adds a new dialog option to a specific conversation, then that minor alteration is completely wiped out by replacing the file. A program that alters only what needs to be altered in the file would leave behind previous modifications unless they specifically need to be removed.

I realize this may be complicated and may lead to messed up mods, but I believe, if done properly and carefully, it could provide a much easier way to mix and match compatible modifications to the game in a way rarely ever seen in other games. (at least in my experience)

Most of the companies that set game ratings and suchlike demand to see everything, regardless of whether it is available in the actual game. That was mostly caused by someone woman creating an Oblivion mod in which you could see female PCs' tits using only material available in the game itself.

The game will (does, I believe) support plugins which simply add files to the game, while changing very little if any at all.

However, removing a file would require modifying it (won't be a biggie of course).
An..Exploit with kids could simply be setting a perimeter to one an adult has, but I do not believe this game is going for ratings (online distribution doesn't need ratings, only stores do)

The way plugins work was largely inspired by Oblivion/Fallout3. A simple load order is set up (first mod is loaded. Second mod is loaded, overwriting anything that conflicts with the first mod. Third mod is loaded, overwriting anything behind it and so on). Right now the editor doesn't allow a lot, but Windex.Mod (my plugin which contains all the stuff I do) currently has object data for buildings, shadow color, and a few test NPCs.

Currently Chris.mod loads first, which sets all the controllable game perimeters. My mod doesn't touch any of these besides shadow color.
Next up is my mod. My mod simply adds object data. However it also changes the shadow color - overwriting what chris had.


To clarify from the jumbled mess above: What you want is already doable. Excluding my shadows, the current "mod" I have for the game does exactly what you want. Adding only.
Chris will explain it better than I can.

EDIT: I reread your post, and I think I completely misunderstood the first time.
Let's say a mod contains these 3 conversation strings.
1"HEY DONT PUT THAT IN THERE"
2"Well it does look mighty cold"
3"Oh god this is so wrong"

Rather than re-writing all 3 lines to rewrite 1, you simply want to rewrite one. If that's the case, it becomes a lot more complicated (and time consuming) to do this. Your mod would be looking for exact text - what if a mod changes this text already? Your mod would already fail because of that. But let's say it doesn't.
You than have to worry about bugs it could introduce, as 1 mod could require that exact script to return something, yet get a totally different result because of it.

If kenshi ever gets popular enough to warrent a mod fanbase, 3 simple categories should be involved.
Addition Mods - These mods only add things to the game, they do not modify anything. Generally the safest of them all, as they can't conflict with each other.
Modification Mods - These modify default and mod files - these can cause problems of course.
Total transformation mods - Turnin kenshi into Homeworld2. These mods use almost none of the default files, instead using their own set.

Yeah, it comes with a construction set inspired by the Bethesda games, except its a lot simpler to use. At the moment, if a mod changes one aspect of an object, then the whole object will be overwritten by the mod then, but it shouldn't be too much work to make individual parameters the only things affected. When I finally get round to it.

Windexglow wrote:Rather than re-writing all 3 lines to rewrite 1, you simply want to rewrite one. If that's the case, it becomes a lot more complicated (and time consuming) to do this. Your mod would be looking for exact text - what if a mod changes this text already? Your mod would already fail because of that. But let's say it doesn't.

No, objects don't refer to each other by the text, they use ID's so that won't be a problem if just the speech text changed. But conversations would definitely be more complicated mod-wise

Ya, I was afraid it was going to end up incredibly complicated. But ya, I just think if you do it well enough, you could make it so that the smaller mods could be more easily implimented with each other or even into bigger mods. This would make it so that all the people who like making minor tweaks and changes but don't have the time or energy to make major modifications able to do something much more useful, rather than making a minor tweak and seeing it never used because everyone's using the larger mods.

If everything uses an id, perhaps if you made a little program to handle overwriting specific lines, it could also output a changelog file. The program would list every 'id' that was changed and allow the mod-maker to input text after the id, if they so choose. This way, mod-makers could simply upload the changelog and anyone wanting to create minor tweaks that would be compatible with that mod could just use a quick ctrl+f to check if the id they're modding is in that list.