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[Erk]

Kevin has almost nothing to do with this. He's only popped in because the developers tired of fixing bugs in mods we don't use have decided to do this, and he's lent his support.

I've worked with kevin for quite a while, and have a pretty profoundly different opinion of him than some of you here do. I've got very little interest in having a conversation about your negative opinions of my friend, though.

[Random_Dragon]

Honestly, I've voiced my own objections over this and have some reasons to object to this development practice, but eh. I'm way too tired, under the weather, and out of it to continue arguing over it.

I've started making preparations to absorb More Survival Tools and Medieval mod into third-party mods I have that depend on them, since those are my mods anyway. In fact, I already have a few changes in mind for medieval content that have been sorely needed. Shields in particular have basically NEVER been rebalanced properly, some of their stats are a holdover from before I PR'd that content, back when their blocking feature was faked by counting as torso and head armor with a low coverage percent. Last person to take any real interest in rebalancing them was DN, and that didn't go well at all.

Tankmod is a case I'm not sure of yet. Tankmod was also my creation, so I'd feel some responsibility for it, but I dunno who, if anyone, is gonna take over for Blazemod, which it's dependent on...

[notquitethere]

The "dark days ahead" in Cataclysm:DDA refers, of course, to the eternal development drama.

More constructively, it strikes me that some of the more popular exclusion mods could just be folded into the worldgen settings instead of being mods. Having a wide range of choice about the initial set up (world size, city density, special zombies or vanilla, number of enemies) has long been a central part of the Cataclysm experience, right?

[Random_Dragon]

The "dark days ahead" in Cataclysm:DDA refers, of course, to the eternal development drama.

More constructively, it strikes me that some of the more popular exclusion mods could just be folded into the worldgen settings instead of being mods. Having a wide range of choice about the initial set up (world size, city density, special zombies or vanilla, number of enemies) has long been a central part of the Cataclysm experience, right?

That's why we had all those external-option mods though: developers pushed back against adding baked-in additions to the options menu in favor of modding it out. Now they've switched attitudes. :/

[Erk]

As I said, we'll likely keep a few of the blacklist mods that actually provide a different experience, or that people need for hardware reasons. The preferred thought ongoing would be to have a way to generate your own blacklist/whitelist if you want, just not through a laundry list of individual arbitrary mods of a type we no longer allow people to add more of to mainline (and haven't for a while). This is a classic example of where we remove something that isn't working as desired in order to encourage development of a better solution. In the meanwhile it's really easy to make a new blacklist mod, even if you're completely unskilled with JSON. Easier, since I just added a bunch of new tags to draw on.

[Random_Dragon]

In the meantime...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

Items to add:
1. Kettle hats of some kind, as an autolearned source of helmet that gives glare protection.
2. Close helms and sallets, as two variants of helm that can be transformed to uncover the face as needed. The former would cover the entire face when closed, the latter just the eyes. Likely should be comparable to the barbute statwise, slightly more head encumbrance and protection/coverage when visor is up.
3. Tosei-gusoku armor, since we have a lot of samples of the evolution of western armor, but only one Japanese armor set. Would be a good added use of the steel cuirass too, as many such armor incorporated an imported European cuirass. might have identical protection to light plate, but slightly lower coverage percent and slightly lower encumbrance.
4. Gladius, maybe autolearned at a reasonably advanced level, as a simple short sword. Make its volume comparable to xiphos depending on average length, weight based on known averages, balance damage-per-turn accordingly.
5. Subarmlis. Basically a gambeson that only covers the torso, maybe at slightly lower coverage percent and warmth, may or may not be less encumbering.

Stuff to do:
1. Replace xiphos with gladius for legionary.
2. Add subarmalis to legionary.
3. Replace gauntlets with mail gloves or leather gloves for man-at-arms.
4. Replace armored boots with chausses for man-at-arms.
5. Replace kite shield with heater shield for man-at-arms.
6. Also remove now-unneeded gambeson from man-at-arms.
7. Give all basic shields WBLOCK_2.
8. Rebalance and reduce encumbrance of shields as a whole. Coverage needs to be higher since they no longer cover the torso, encumbrance should be retweaked based around intended size/weight vs. any comparable vanilla armor.
9. Beef gambeson protection up to 7/7.


[teoleo]

 set the spawn monster to 0.6 and i start always with to many zombie.......

[Damiac]

So filthy clothes are being forced on everyone, along with a ton of other bad stuff?

Erk are you actually Kevin? You think a lot alike.  Keep it up though, I hear some people might still be having fun wrong.

[SOLDIER First]

This isn't just being a dickhead.

This is advanced being a dickhead.

[Eschar]

I'm confused about the rationale for removing any of these optional mods. They're optional, so keeping them isn't interfering with any playstyles preferred by the devs. Do they do anything when not active*? Because if they don't than there's no instance when devs who don't like or deal with them would have to actually modify them. If a player who uses the mod notices a bug, they can fix it themself - open source yay - or find someone else able and willing. Regardless, keeping these options in the start-game mod menu makes them available for those who like playing with them, and doesn't affect those who don't. Removing them is not a solution relevant to devs not wanting to be burdened with maintaining them. Just keeping them in the start-game option list requires no maintenance. Their original creators can maintain them. If those are gone, voluntary interested supporters/devs can volunteer. If none show up, the players who like the mods can figure it out (yay open source.) Removing them just makes the game less flexible and solves no problem.

* If they do and this actually creates bugs in non-backwards-compatible new systems, and no one is going to maintain the mod in question, remove away. If the mods aren't doing any damage, they are optional, and any portion of players like them, keep them.

Also, what's this about filthy clothes? Are filthy morale penalties being mainlined, or a no-filth mod removed, or both, or something else?

[Ziusudra]

If a player who uses the mod notices a bug, they can fix it themself - open source yay - or find someone else able and willing.

Most players won't do that though. They'll complain - to the game devs - about how the game is broken.

Their original creators can maintain them. If those are gone, voluntary interested supporters/devs can volunteer. If none show up, the players who like the mods can figure it out (yay open source.)

This can be done out of tree. And if the original creators were maintaining them, then this wouldn't be a problem in the first place.

[zaimoni]

Filthy clothing...there is history there (their mainlining predates my tracking the C:DDA repository, etc. by two years or so).

I expect the reversion mod/option to go away once it's no longer paying for itself in active players.

[Soadreqm]

The mods aren't maintained by anyone, so there's no guarantee that they're going to stay functional as the game evolves, which is why they're being removed from mainline. Also, so far it looks like they're not so much being removed, as marked as "deprecated", meaning they don't show up in the mod selection screen. The difference being that you can re-enable them by finding and editing some text file. I don't know if they're going to be deleted completely at some point.

It's a hassle for anyone using the mods (inasmuch they work), but I think it's a reasonable decision. Being included in mainline implies a certain guarantee that a mod is going to work, and if no one can be found to take responsibility for that, then it makes sense to disable them. If some enterprising player wants to step up to maintain a mod, well, they can. I'm pretty sure they're only culling orphan mods.

[Random_Dragon]

The main thing that makes me feel like this is a bit of a bad-faith PR is that Erk outlined suggestions for mods that're being actively maintained, and none of this information was utilized by the PR author. :/

[Erk]

The PR author didn't use the outline because the outline was generated after the PR was. The current phase of the PR is based entirely on a consensus document the main devs made, again because we're almost universally the ones fixing these things whenever something goes wrong, or updating them whenever something new is added, and I feel that gives us some right to decide if we want to keep them in the game or not. Like, all the right basically. If someone else wants to manage a repo with a hundred different blacklist options and whatnot, great! That is literally exactly the outcome we're aiming for.

The core function for blacklisting and whitelisting stuff is sticking around, because there are plenty of mods using that format that are staying in mainline (generic guns and classic zombies, any biome mod, etc). We're just no longer going to absorb responsibility for keeping another couple dozen esoteric "I don't like X specific thing" mods working.

Anyone using one of those mods already isn't going to see a shred of difference. Anyone starting a new game and wanting one of those mods will have to take on the incredibly onerous job of either downloading it from somewhere, as with any other game, or remaking it by finding it in the mod directory and changing "obsolete" to "false".