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[Max White]

Hmm, fun question.
Has blue made any statement as to how long he expects the dev lifespan of this game will be? Will this all fizzle out in a few months or will it go long into several years without loosing steam.

[Deon]

In the Let's Plays they've announced that they will add many items, ways to obtain them (so you have to struggle/kill a boss/solve a puzzle to get them) and locations/biomes fairly often, because they've prepared a solid framework for such additions and it wouldn't cost them a lot of effort (so technically you would be able to make, like, 10 different biomes at once), it will be there to keep the people interested with new updates.

Also I think such approach would harm the game a lot, because when they were confronted with a question about modding, Blue evaded it. Actually he said something like: "What, modding? Don't you think this game already has a lot! And we will make many updates! And we don't want people to look in our code too."

So they deny modding to us, to get more control over "content" (which will be updated for the sake of keeping/increasing playerbase), and that "code" bullshit was really stupid, because it's fairly possible to make the modding to be totally external and unrelated to the engine.

For example, Minecraft greatly prospers from totally unique and great mods right now. Without them it would be 100 times more boring. So I am not sure if Terraria is moving in the right way, but I guess we can't influence it .

And redigit might be able to write a good engine in a few months, but fuck he makes bad code.

Haha, this statement makes that phrase "we don't want people to look in our code too" much easier to understand .

[Max White]

Toady has kept he's code under the hood away from prying eyes forever, and yet you yourself, Deon are a testament to he's dedication to keep the modders in business. Hell, the way the code is structured right now using a single 'Item' class rather then having items being their own class that extend item, it would be cake for redigit to make it moddable through reading raw files. That is if redigit knows how to open a file reader and use regex to read tags, and I sort of doubt that right now, as it seems at the time of writing the alpha we got, he didn't know what a case statement was, let alone state pattern like he should have been using.

Although modding might force them out of carrying items over in multiplayer. I mean you could work around it, but then you have people modding in OP gear, and there would be a little more information to transfer around because your no longer saying "I have an iron sword!" Your saying "I have an item with Name: Sword, Metal: Iron, Damage: 6, knockback: 3, ect...". But then you just make everything world specific, and the world object knows what you mean.

So I can understand why to not allow for modding, but because they don't want to release code is is no way even close to being a valid reason. Multiplayer compatibility should be the book they preach from.

[Deon]

Yes, I know that the main idea of multiplayer universe greatly contradicts with personal modding, but it would be great to have servers which run mods (like minecraft does, damn I hate to call it here so many times, I am not even a Minecraft fan, but it works there!).

[Duke 2.0]

 There is a fairly large difference between entity editing and the full on modding we see in Minecraft. To get those fancy things done that the game doesn't have in its vanilla content you would need to extend the modding to a lot more of the engine and make sure the system for doing so works. It's a very difficult thing to add, which is a reason in itself for not doing it. No matter how you split it modding is not a clear "This is a good feature and you are a bad designer for not adding it" thing, it needs to be in the scope of your game design for it to work and be worth it.

[Max White]

Yes, I know that the main idea of multiplayer universe greatly contradicts with personal modding, but it would be great to have servers which run mods (like minecraft does, damn I hate to call it here so many times, I am not even a Minecraft fan, but it works there!).

Like I said, make things world specific. It would appease the masses in many ways, as it would disallow item transferral, and even allow you to remove effective greifing tools like TNT on public servers. It would also allow you to theme worlds to your liking, like giving each player a sword and lantern on embark, but no other items bar new weapons and armour through drops, so you could go on a dungeon crawl rather then a house building game.

But then if everything is server specific, Blue and Redigit can't fly around in rocket boots with dev only armour watching arrows and shurikens being thrown at them with the hopes of a rare dev drop.   

There is a fairly large difference between entity editing and the full on modding we see in Minecraft. To get those fancy things done that the game doesn't have in its vanilla content you would need to extend the modding to a lot more of the engine and make sure the system for doing so works. It's a very difficult thing to add, which is a reason in itself for not doing it. No matter how you split it modding is not a clear "This is a good feature and you are a bad designer for not adding it" thing, it needs to be in the scope of your game design for it to work and be worth it.

While we are not going to see MC style mods, smaller entity customisation like DF would be nice.

[Deon]

There is a fairly large difference between entity editing and the full on modding we see in Minecraft. To get those fancy things done that the game doesn't have in its vanilla content you would need to extend the modding to a lot more of the engine and make sure the system for doing so works. It's a very difficult thing to add, which is a reason in itself for not doing it. No matter how you split it modding is not a clear "This is a good feature and you are a bad designer for not adding it" thing, it needs to be in the scope of your game design for it to work and be worth it.

I just gave MC as an example. Even simple "text file editing" would be fun to make specific worlds in a shape you like.

Then we could have Dwarf Fortress, Final Fantasy, Fallout and many other universes in our worlds.

[Duke 2.0]

 It's still a design scope that they don't need to account for. It would be nice but I fully understand why they don't want to deal with all the technical issues surrounding wanting both worlds you can travel freely between and server-specific mods that can't.

[Max White]

Yea, I can understand why to not make the game moddable. Hell, if only because it might take away from an aseptic they are trying to achieve, without even thinking about technical limitations. But at least justify your design choice, rather then just "Input from the entire community? Why would you want that when you can have what we give you? And we don't want to be even more like MC lest we stir a bigger shit storm, so let's not do the one thing MC is all aces in."

Just for the record, still love Blue. He is a boss.

[Bluerobin]

They HAVE justified their choice. They've said the short version of pretty much what you guys are saying (it would take too much development time at this point to justify adding moddability and they don't want to give out more of the code than they have to) in addition to the "positive spin" answer of "If you guys want it, we'll add it ourselves. We have the tools to do that pretty quickly."

[Deon]

I fully understand that it would be a hard undertaking, why does everyone have to defend them when nobody attacks them, just shares an opinion?

It's still something that makes me sad, and no justifications could fix it, get it?

[Bluerobin]

Oh, sorry Deon I was directing that at Max

... But at least justify your design choice, rather then just ...

I agree with you. It's a bit sad, but understandable.

[Cheese]

New interview with Blue and Redigit, if it hasn't already been posted. Linky.

[Xgamer4]

It should probably be said that, as of right now, Minecraft is a horrible example to use for developer-supported modding. While Notch has a great idea on how to support it, right now the "modding" is decompiling the java files, adding in what you want, then recompiling them. Powerful, certainly, because you're using Java for everything, but not at all modder friendly. There's also nothing stopping any enterprising modders from doing something similar with Terraria.

[Deon]

There is a lot stopping actually. Notch's files are easy to decompile and are easily readable. I tried it and pretty much anyone can do it.

Looking at the source of the pre-alpha, and how they don't want to make their code accessible, I am sure it will be a pain if not more. Not to mention that in Minecraft all you have to do is to drop a few classes in the .jar file, and you're set. Looking at the compiled folder of Terraria... Yeah, good luck. I can't do it .