Hi everyone!
This is kind of an update post on code based modding, but also a bit of an explainer on about how it works…
Whats with code based modding?
Well, as you might probably know not much has happened with CBMs for 2/3 of a year at this point. Zekew is sadly really busy and unable to work on modding right now. I too am a lot more busy than I have been in previous years but I’m also just frankly unmotivated to do modding work. Why? Well, as I will elaborate later on below, modding is just simply hard. One of the reasons I first started to do my modding work was to try and improve the game, to try and fix some of its more core issues. But sadly the reality is that modding is limited in such a way that often the changes that need to happen most (small modifications to functions for performance for example) are the hardest to make. Time and time again I’ve found issues (in performance for example) that’d help one of if not the #1 issue people have had with the game, but I can’t fix it or do anything about it without incredibly large amounts of effort. And its so incredibly frustrating to be in that situation. It honestly has started to deter me from modding at this point - there’s just not much I can do about the most important issues.
It’s also just a mental burden to be the only one working on this stuff right now. It’s a hobby, yeah, but it is a responsibility and debugging (as I’ll cover shortly) is not fun by any strech of the imagination.
Whats hard about code based modding? How does it work?
The jist of it is that any modification that we make takes 10 time longer than it would take if we were directly editing the game. We have a very limited set of tools that we can reasonably use, and an even smaller set of tools that we should be using for maximum compatibility, to achieve what we want.
For example, lets say we want to change 1 line of code somewhere. If that’s in the middle of a function (block of code), we’d have to replace the whole function with our own (which instantly ruins compatibility with any other mod that’d edit that function). We however than more easily tag things onto the ends and starts of functions, but these are about the only tools we have to make changes. This leads to massively complex systems just to change one tiny detail cause we have to pretty much wrap the entire game system in our own one.
Testing anything is complicated and requires pretty much just logging everything that we could possibly need and then smashing our head against the wall for an hour on why the logs make no sense. Or, we could use an incredibly complex and technical process which I’ve been able to do like twice to get line numbers into our logs.
So why are you telling me this?
I just want to explain a bit of what has happened and why… Are there solutions to these problems? Yes. We could do some community branch stuff with modders editting source code but honestly I’m tired of bugging the devs about stuff and they are probably tired of hearing about it (Don’t message them about this!!).
Will there be more modding stuff soon? I’m honestly not sure… I have one thing in the pipeline that you may hear about soon now done and released but beyond that I can’t say. This isn’t a letter of resignation or anything, However - I do want to be transparent on whats going on right now.
- Humoresque 
All posts and modding work of mine are in memory of Mimi, who never failed to make me smile
