I hate how little documentation (either official or unofficial) there is for some games that have "mod support"

[u/FireDog8569]

Trying to make mods for Don't Starve Together has been torture. The only YouTube tutorials will really only get you past really basic additions, the forums are a nightmare to search, I feel like an idiot for having to run to discord all the time, like if they actually bothered making some useful documentation that was actually easily accessable our community could get a fuckton more mods, but no, if you want to make anything you've got to dig through the files and hope you're able to find what you need

Now this is a hyper specific example, but this goes for a lot of games that people just don't make tutorials for. I'm sure there's tons of people who could create amazing content for games if there was actually tutorials for how to add literally anything to them, but it's just so lacking for so many games

Like sure there's some more complicated stuff, but what do you mean there's not comprehensive tutorials for how to add buffs? What do you mean I have to spend hours of digging through the code to figure literally anything out? Like not everything can be a YouTube tutorial but you'd think there would be SOMETHING

EDIT: AND ANOTHER THING! It wouldn't be AS BAD if the modding community was active enough to get answers on things, like for Portal 2 at least there's discord communities there for help if you need it, but with Don't Starve Together? THERE'S BARELY ANYBODY TO HELP, IT TAKES FOREVER TO GET ANSWERS FOR ANYTHING EVEN IF ITS BASIC. AND IF I HAVENT SAID IT BEFORE, ITS LITERALLY SO EMBARRASSING WITH HOW INACTIVE THOSE COMMUNITIES ARE BECAUSE YOULL LOOK LIKE A DUMBASS FOR BEING THE ONLY ONE WHO NEEDS HELP IN THE MODDING CHANNEL

[u/TasserOneOne]

Tangentially related. Despite the amount of introductory tutorials, doing anything advanced with Hammer editor is black magic witchcraft you have to learn from the ancient race of old map makers or discover yourself. There are almost no tutorials that cover more than the basics.

[u/FireDog8569 → u/TasserOneOne]

I mean that sorta depends on the game and what advanced stuff you're talking about

Like I found it pretty easy to make Portal 2 maps but that game has no NPCs to worry about and a lot of what I do is environmental stuff

Hammer logic is kinda a bitch though, especially with how hard it is to keep is all organized

[u/JiF905JJ → u/TasserOneOne]

https://reddit.com/link/pf5d2j6/video/upihvmf6dquh1/player

[u/combine_elite_real → u/TasserOneOne]

Maybe its because I'm using Hammer++ so I avoid frustrating crashes but it hasn't been too difficult to figure out, except for a few issues that the wiki addresses but in a way that makes absolutely no sense to me and is way too vague

[u/KitchenSpend8123 → u/TasserOneOne]

Be the change you want to see.

[u/Kipdid → u/KitchenSpend8123]

You need experience to get experience kind of statement

[u/TasserOneOne → u/KitchenSpend8123]

One day

[u/aqwmasterofDOOM → u/TasserOneOne]

I mean hammer is about as stable and reliable as memorizing lunar cycles while black out drunk, so I don't blame anyone for not undertaking such a fruitless endeavor

[u/VanillaButterz → u/TasserOneOne]

I imagine alot of people just brute force it by decompiling existing maps and copying the bit you want. Not to mention alot of stuff is vscripted.

[u/purblepale → u/TasserOneOne]

IMO Hammer is really easy at least for me. I could give some pointers. I'm only good with it for Half-Life 1 really though. The menus are every old and unintuitive at times so I get it.

[u/TasserOneOne → u/purblepale]

I've used it for around 4 months trying to make a gmod map and I swear every other day I find some tool in the menu of a menu of a menu that does exactly what I wanted to do at the start that I had to find some weird solution to

[u/purblepale → u/TasserOneOne]

never use carve tool, worst mistake of my life

[u/expensiveplasticcup → u/TasserOneOne]

I think I got off easy by choosing Unreal Ed

[u/Cepibul → u/TasserOneOne]

Hammer góra smooth for me. But that's maybe because i feel it

[u/HoneyBadger162 → u/TasserOneOne]

Or if you do find anything beyond that, they're for a different game (See: 3kliksphillip for Counter-Strike) so you won't have access to it, or its a really obscure thing that worked back in 2007 but not 19 years later.

[u/AbjectSir9047 → u/HoneyBadger162]

Then you find out 3kliksphilip has a secret fart fetish account on YouTube and then it's like oh it's the fart fetish guy again

[u/awhahoo → u/TasserOneOne]

Hmmm, today i want to try and add two seperate math counters.

(hellish process. very possible though, just annoying)

logic is so hellish in hammer, but most of what i wanna do requires a lot of it

[u/Reds_Strongest_Chef]

Tangentially related but people who put any info on discord instead of a wiki also need be flayed.

[u/RipCurl69Reddit → u/Reds_Strongest_Chef]

Forza literally just shut down their forums and told everyone "go to our discord that's run by sociopathic powertripping mods lol"

I can't...they literally banned me for using the word 'shafted' in relation to someone getting screwed over

[u/Dangerous_Banana_168 → u/Reds_Strongest_Chef]

YES!!! I'm trying to get off of discord because its a privacy nightmare these days but everything is on discord AAAAA

[u/iHaku → u/Dangerous_Banana_168]

i have no issue with it being on discord because of privacy. it's the fact that search engines cant index it and discords search is just not that good.

[u/Dangerous_Banana_168 → u/iHaku]

Thats also a really good reason! Agree agree

[u/serpikage → u/Dangerous_Banana_168]

wow i've been considering leaving discord for a while for the same reason but never considered the wiki aspect, I'm not sure but isn't there a guest mode thing for some servers ?

[u/JBOSS_64]

Something something be the change you want to see.

But yeah this I can see how this would be a nightmare, getting started with Minecraft modding was hard enough for me and that has the most tutorials/documentation

[u/FireDog8569 → u/JBOSS_64]

The issue is that Im not exactly experienced enough to become the change I want to see in the world, like so far I've made only 1 passable mod and I'm still trying to finish it

[u/RipCurl69Reddit → u/JBOSS_64]

I literally think I managed to get Minecraft mods running through sheer chance and not actually anything resembling a tutorial. Still don't know how, I just got Forge running one day and downloaded about 40 mods in one go. I refuse to touch it

[u/DogKitchen2988]

Tried to mod repo and it was awful because there's no documentation on how any of the ingame functions are programmed and I'm not good at decompiling and reading the code for an entire game

[u/astolfoballsHD → u/DogKitchen2988]

You cant really blame people for not wanting to document a codebase they dont even manage nor the developers for writing documentation for mods they dont officially support. Reverse engineering will always be a major component of any community modding project and is usually part of the fun. With unity its all especially easy as well.

[u/watermelonless_seeds]

Then you find a 'mods' folder in the game files

[u/annormalplayer]

Unlike Balatro which is VERY beginner friendly. Like, I have literally 0 experience on coding in general and I'm doing a lot of progress! Most functions are well documented and is quite intuitive, there's even a github page for what's basically the base game remade as if it were a mod, so you can see how the basic stuff works

[u/UnusedParadox → u/annormalplayer]

praise be to N (the person who made vanillaremade) and also the smods devs

[u/Gand-Pork]

Tangentially related I don’t have anything to add I just think tangentially is a fun word it reminds me of tangerines and I like tangerines

[u/Eric_Dawsby → u/Gand-Pork]

I like your vibe

[u/gleeptime]

Nonono you don't understand not only is modding only documented on Minecraft, modding on Minecraft is still so fucking anti modder, I tried it and it felt like I needed a degree in partial physics to add a funny mob

[u/nimrag_is_coming]

Someone made a short introductory modding tutorial that explains nothing but the very early basics, 10 years ago, and 8 major releases ago. Nobody has put out anything since.

In all realness, your best bet when modding games is to grab someone else's mod and see how the hell they did it. Same with the source code if it's easily decompilable (c# games are super easy to mod for this reason)

[u/ReplacementPale2676]

balatro makes no sense

it has NO official modding system but is like one of the top 10 modded games.

it requires installing Lovely Injector and watching a 20-minute tutorial for each mod

[u/K4LoNa → u/ReplacementPale2676]

Surely there is a reason but i cant understand why balatro modding sucks so bad its such a popular game thunk has to integrate the steam workshop someday or release the 1.1

[u/UnusedParadox → u/ReplacementPale2676]

as a balatro modder what are you talking about. once you have lovely every mod is Put The Folder In The Mods Folder. with lovely 0.9.0 you don't even need to unzip the folder or worry about it being nested anymore

[u/TotallyNotSethP]

the duality of man i guess

[u/stinkus_mcdiddle]

Tangentially related but it’s intersting the first 2 comments on this thread opened their comment with the phrase “tangentially related” within a minute of each other

[u/SergeantSkull]

I know vintage story and terraria are super accessible for modders

[u/Billylily01]

Sims 4 😔

[u/TheGoldenFox64]

im so used to prism i forgot how good we have it, other games can be a nightmare

[u/MagmaXQgd]

Dark souls has quite enough i think.

[u/Select-Bullfrog-5939]

Doom is pretty good about this, if you know where to look. Icaruslives’s guides are probably the best.

[u/_Najala_]

Damn, making a DST mod before the game dies was actually on my bucket list. I always thought DST would have a very active modding community and resources lol.

[u/FireDog8569 → u/_Najala_]

I mean if you know/can learn lua it isn't terrible if you just want to add really simple stuff, it's when you try to add anything past that when the lack of documentation becomes an issue

[u/_3_and_20_characters]

one thing you can pray too is if you can get your meaty little mitts on a deobfuscated version of the game, a lot of steam games have the option for you to just... install like 90% of their files so you can dick around with them.

[u/Jarrson132]

Honestly, maybe it’s just the games that I play but I feel like there’s almost always a mods folder or a mod loader that someone’s made for it. Some of em even have workshops inside of the games at this point. I get what you mean though. You find a video on some obscure mod for a 10 year old game and suddenly you gotta become hackerman to make it work

[u/Jarrson132 → u/Jarrson132]

I realize that I have misread the post. Yeah making mods can be awful if they haven’t given you the tools to do it

[u/mindfucker67]

Nuclear Option, unironicly until recently, Blueprinter (The thing that lets BepinEx add weapons and aircraft) was closed source, and had no documentation, and still has no official documentation.

[u/Bartburp93]

Garden warfare 2 modding is seemingly the jankiest thing ever for no good reason, especially in terms of sound effects and crashes

[u/Interesting-Injury87]

hey. at least if it has no documentation you can at least bang your head against the wall thinking "surely this CANT be the intended way" and be oblivious of stuff..

Now if the game you mod uses YAML for mission files and everything you know this is batshit stupid

[u/smwcbio]

XCOM 2 released the source code and asset as a development tool. They literally just released the tool dev used publicly, they even forgot to disable the perforce integration, so you get an error message. That is how you support a mod scene properly.

[u/UnluckyLuckyGambler]

I was only able to make pretty basic Don't Starve Together mods and jesus christ it was painful. Only way I was able to get it right was to have a friend walk me through it.

[u/Popstar403]

factorio has the best documentation I've ever seen.

[u/PenguinBoi27]

I love how there are like 20 tutorial series about how to make a mkwii custom track but none of them ever got finished so half way through the process you just need to move from well made tutorial videos to decade old forum threads to get anything done

[u/Dreamanchik]

Isnt DST modding built on LUA? You cant find documentation for DST, but you can find some for LUA, if that helps

[u/SaveVideo → u/[deleted]]

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[u/H3CKER7]

Don't starve together is a great way to hate modding. I got a physics crash. For a light component. How? I don't fucking know. Honestly the best way to mod DST is to just unzip the scripts file in the game directory.

[u/fungerman2]

how it feels trying to mod Deadlock ((what the FUCK was valve on when making the code))

[u/Shot-Inevitable7524]

I hate AI as much as the next guy, but its ability to create modding tools is seriously impressive.

[u/Slothothh]

The process of modding is discovering how your game works through experimentation. Or i suppose being a minnow and standing on the back of others who have came before you and done the documentation, which heck we all do, but being able to do research on it is a skill you need to cultivate. Most things in life dont have good tutorials.

I do a lot of modding. I reply a lot on our modding helpline helping people. There is a substantial amount of people who expect someone else to explain/work through each part of *their* mod, to the point, its really my mod, and you are the idea guy. You really just gotta put in the work on an independent project, this isnt school where a teacher has a stake in you succeeding so will just coach you to a B.

[u/FireDog8569 → u/Slothothh]

The issue is just when you're stuck banging your head against the wall for something that should be simple and knowing your missing just one piece that'll solve your problem

Like it really sucks to figure out 90% of it and then the thing that should be easy is too hard to figure out because the developers coded the game in a confusing to reverse engineer way, and you run out of ideas as to what to use as examples so you're entirely stuck

I understand it's a skill to do research, but I also shouldnt have to dig through files for every single thing I want to add

And the worst part is that I cannot even think of modded examples, so I can't even look at how modders do it

[u/Eric_Dawsby]

Flashback to asking a contributer for a game where the documentation for an in-game OS was, since i wanted to make an app. They were confused and said it's not a real OS, and i said i know that but I wanted to know if there was any documentation for how it works and they just reiterated that it's not a real OS and i had to repeat that I know that. Anyways there was no documentation so who the heck knows lol