Good modding etiquette - or "how to play nice with others"

[jeeplaw]

Putting this out to the former TQ modders who still frequent these boards. Want to learn from you and the mistakes you’ve made in the past

What’s good practice for ensuring your mod is compatible with other mods? What not to do, and should we do as modders?

[zackiz]

Very interested in hearing about this topic from experienced people.

[system]

I would be interested as well, as I have an interest in taking a stab at doing a little modding myself. Will probably try to make a few quests.

[jeeplaw]

I would be interested as well, as I have an interest in taking a stab at doing a little modding myself. Will probably try to make a few quests.

One of mods I want to make is centered around new items in the game. I’d like to make an item mod pak that can be bundled with other mods and not conflict…I just don’t know what that looks like yet

[mamba]

Can we even have several mods active at once ?

Otherwise this discussion becomes moot for the most part (it would shift towards how to design mods so they can easily be merged by a modder or be entirely obsolete)

[Elfe]

There is a whole bunch of best practise and I might be able to write some in the future but I fear I won’t have the time for that before returning from vacation (from saturday, 7 days away).

However I’ve posted an important note on the modding forums especially regarding mastery mods which I’ll copy paste here:

When you want to make a new mod, especially mastery mods, please do not add new content into already existing folders in the database.

Instead, add a new folder records/<mod name>/<your stuff> and put the file in here.

Why? Because if you put stuff inside the existing folders and later want to combine your mod with other mods it might happen that files with the same path/name will collide, especially mastery folders if you use folders like records/playerclassXY as other modders might use the same folder and if you than want to combine mods, you’ll have to relink everything by hand again.

Also you will do mod users a huge favour by doing this as there might be a tool for combining mods somewhen later so that users simply can combine mods without having to ask a modder for it but if there are folders/files that collide it might happen that two or more mods become broken and this is something a tool can not fix, neither mod users without the required knowledge.

Of course there are files that can not be moved to somewhere else like ui and ingame folder related stuff and have to be kept the same. In this case users will have to choose whether they want the settings from mod 1 or 2.

Thank you for reading this,
Elfe

Edit: To further answer mamba’s question: If mods are combineable always depends on their content and especially on what they change. If you do for example UI mods you’ll have a hard time making two of such mods compatible with each other as both have to use the same files and you’d have to make decisions for each single one which setting you want from which mod.

Other things like masteries that are built as described above shouldn’t be to hard to link together.

[Ceno]

Can we even have several mods active at once ?

Otherwise this discussion becomes moot for the most part (it would shift towards how to design mods so they can easily be merged by a modder or be entirely obsolete)

Pretty sure you can’t. At least not without injecting stuff into the game during runtime. But anything made by the mod tools will be made for isolation.

This conversation should be how to make your mods mergeable/extensible.

[ASYLUM101]

Can we even have several mods active at once ?

Otherwise this discussion becomes moot for the most part (it would shift towards how to design mods so they can easily be merged by a modder or be entirely obsolete)

Until someone makes a modmanager app or a mod merger, no.