Where did all the good mods go?

Yes, I know that there is fantastic mods out there, but the thing is, lots and lots of vehicles have been announced to be a "WIP" and then I look at the last post of the author, realising it's like in august and sept is their last post.

Mostly now it's just skins, little addons to a vehicle and maps.
I am actually quite fedup of maps now, and barely, pretty much no vehicle mods.
Honestly it's sad as now I feel quite upset that most of the wip's I see might be dead any time now.

 

It doesn't help that so many people are still ungrateful for the stuff that people are still creating. Modders do not get paid, they do it in their free time and they do what they want. If you were one of them you would understand, and because you aren't, i suggest you stop complaining. Otherwise you will start a shitstorm of these types of posts and i wouldn't be suprised if that made several more modders less interested in creating content to be shared with the community.

 

I stopped making mods/lost interest. Thats one reason there is so few "good" mods now. Other modders have left because the community has gone to crap in their opinion. If i had better things to do i probably wouldnt even be as active on the forums. its just all non hidden group roleplay and random sh*t posting everywhere now. Another reason is how difficult these "good" mods are to make. you have to be 1) good at modelling and texturing and 2) be able to put it in game. It seems the people good at modelling have trouble putting things in game, and collaborating with someone else doesnt happen often.

 

It's sad really, usually games of this calibre acquire more and more hardcore fans that are willing to make mods.
As you can see in my profile, i only joined early this year but i have seen the demise of many of the "hardcore" modders especially with community involvement.
I have sort of started "modding" but i do more of the jbeaming and porting stuff instead of modelling. IMO it takes way too much time to model something of high quality for this game and seeing that the aim of this game is to be a softbody sim, compared to something like GTA or Assetto Corsa modelling has much less of a time spent/payoff ratio. I admire the people who put the time and effort to do it, it takes some real skill.

@Nadeox1 @tdev Sorry for the tag but i think more should be done about the sentence above. If you want your game to become more popular, more action should be taken to enforce the "shit-posting" and pointless content created by the community (roleplay groups).
When the modders stop creating content, more people leave the forums, less people talk about the game, less game gets sold and less money is made.

 

Also it seems to also be that they are adding code that causes mods to become obsolete.


I agree on that the roleplay groups should be hidden so they don't have to be seen everytime I read the "what's new" section.

 

this too. I know the game is in alpha. but its frustrating fixing mods everytime the game has a major update. A bunch of my mods used node offset and are now broken because of some changes to the node offset code.

 

That's pretty difficult to avoid IMO. The nodeOffset change is a great example: that was a simple bugfix. My latest mod, D-up, happens to depend on that bugfix for the body lift. The devs are in a catch-22: they can make modding easier and more maintainable by not improving the game... but at the same time leave a lot on the table (D-up would have been a terrible hassle without the fixed nodeOffset system for example) or instead they can focus on fixing bugs and extending the game's systems while continuing to cause lots of collateral damage. Every new tool they provide or system they refine is useful for both the devs and for modders. So official content and new modding content both get a boon. On the other hand existing mods get damaged, sometimes significantly.

This pattern of breakage can't be sustained forever - but there are still many, many game improvements I'd trade the existing mods for.

EDIT: @Narwhal - actually I went back and checked... in the one case I know of you were using nodeOffset incorrectly. That's understandable because the wiki page for nodeOffset was never that great. It's now much worse because half the stuff is outdated - it hasn't been updated since the day it was created a year ago. If there's anything to complain about with the nodeOffset situation it's the documentation.

 

Well, uh, nobody has address the massive demographic shift of the game's community.

In 2013, a lot of people on the forum were very interested in the development prospects of the game, whether by means of their own mods or the game's official content. They also were in a small group of people who had to have tremendous patience and tech know-how to deal with the slow development and broken features present in the early development of this game.

Now, the forum is chock-full of children and casual players - not to insinuate that they're somehow bad, but they're certainly not making mods. Not quality ones anyway.

Anyone who has made a mod probably doesn't want to make another one; I would imagine "plz can u put dodge ram into game so i can smash tyty" would wear on you, not to mention the people endlessly complaining that it doesn't work because they can't figure out how to install it. I could go on.

Point being, there's neither the people to make them nor the interest in making them.

 

I agree with your point. All the good users are leaving!

 

I think you missed randomshortguy's point... the people he's talking about are already gone.

FWIW I agree with the first half of your post a lot more than the second half. Yes, all that certainly does wear on modders. (There are few things that aggravate me more than another 1-star review on a mod from someone running an outdated version of BeamNG.) I don't think that an unqualified "Anyone who has made a mod probably doesn't want to make another one" is safe to say at all though. Lots of modders come back for a second and third helping.

At the end of the day I always that sentiments like "the good people are leaving" or "there are less mods than before" are plain wrong. Online communities gain and lose members all the time. This is an early access game. It's frustrating to mod for because it's a moving target. Mod some stable game if you want. People who choose to mod this game are choosing the painful route. Eventually some of people leave and new people crop up. No surprise.

Many important mods have been release this year. It's certainly not tapering off.

• Look at vehicles, if I'm not mistaken SergentFido, Raider, Darren9, chris_lucas, ky, racerguy24, gmaksi83, and RORCAT have all release one or more mostly unique vehicles this year. AFAIK only Raider's vehicle is based on a heavily modified official jbeam. Darren9 has released multiple unique vehicles this year. If we look a little further we find that a laundry list of users have released vehicle mods which significantly changed or repurposed official content: AdamB, Mr. Twiglesworth, J_drift, SkepticalYeroc, burilkovdeni, Narwhal, Bernd, ItaliAsian, wrinkle345, crashmaster, and AR162B (at least). That's ignoring any old content which has been patched up recently. I'm probably leaving a few folks out.
• Maps? Multiple releases from Ouerbacker, DoullPepper, and bob.blunderton have been bolstered by releases from several other talented map makers. Personally I was plenty impressed by Crash Hard 01's latest map and I know that there have been at least several other good ones this year. Simply put, more quality maps came out this year than any prior year, AFAIK.
• Scenarios? This now core feature of the game was added only 18 months ago. 2016 was the first full calendar year which even included this now-central feature. Chew on that for a minute. I uploaded the first scenario pack to the repo back in October 2015. Since then over 80 more scenarios or scenario packs have been added to the repo - almost all in the past 12 months! In other words, the past year has been the best year for scenarios as well.
• User Interface: I never saw many of these mods, but there are certainly more of them this year than previously. Camera mods were added this year, and the first camera mod is out from Funky7Monkey. Other users have released fresh or updated UI Apps this year.
• License plates. Oh wait, is that another key thing which has only existed for the past year? I guess that says something about the 60+ license plate mods available on the repo...
• Skins... yup, only in the past year - just like license plates. There are hundreds of packs and individual skins available on the repo and in the forum. Thousands of skins in total. All from the past year.
• "Mods of mods" is the assorted category on the repo. Lots of stuff has been added to this category in the past year. Some other stuff has been updated for compatibility (and some noteworthy stuff hasn't). I'd say that some really noteworthy stuff has been added in here this year - I'm out of energy for making lists. If any category has taken a hit this year it's been this one with a lot of AR162B's stuff becoming outdated/broken. IMO all the awesome new stuff has at least balanced that out for now.

That's all mod content, so it's ignoring official content (of which there's been a lot). I also didn't go over all of the key new systems which allowed it to happen. I'm not going to make a list of the important stuff, you can read the devblog for that. If you don't want to go read, take my word for it - lots of important stuff has happened. Lots of it enabled mods we couldn't do before in a big way (remember, scenarios are only 18 months old for instance! Couplers are newer but still well under 12 months old! The semi couldn't have a trailer a year ago.).

AFAIK there's never been as much new content pouring in as there is now.

 

yeah, there was like a new car mod everyday before... now a car mod every 100 days. im learning to mod, but i still cant model.

 

I'm pretty sure this was never true. Maybe Russian mods or something....

 

We need to be more critical with our ratings. I noticed that on the mod page nearly every review is 5 stars, even on mods that are completely hacked together. If we gave constructive feedback the mods will be improved. The author won't be inspired to improve their mods if all they see are 5 star reviews.

 

I would love to see some old mods updated but updated well as in not just hacking the new features in but developing them to be more realistic.

Say like ADRs prelude and the Delsol and many more great mods from the days gone by.

 

Everytime I look at a mod's review, I see a bunch 5 star reviews, and then 3 1 star reviews. And in the one star reviews, it just says "doesn't work!!!1!!" or something like that. There are no middle reviews with 3 stars giving constructive criticism/feedback. Because of this, mod's which are little more than one config get a perfect 5 star review and the creator doesn't feel they need to make if better. So we need to give some sort of feedback to the author if you want good mod's.

 

• 1 star for going to fast
• 1 star for when an update breaks
• 1 star for being "riced"
• 5 stars to others for being a modder with more reputation than another modder(you get what i'm saying)

now you see why modders don't want to release content??

 

Honestly, the rating system ought to be reserved for members of the community who are going to actually take the time to create quality reviews that aren't the equivalent of an elephant pooping on a keyboard and posting the result.

 

That is bloody perfect. So going in my signature.

But on topic though, I agree with you. The rating system should be reserved for those who know what the hell they're typing about instead of having brain-dead potatoes just spew out random crap and posting the result.

 

(bold my emphasis) We already have a great system for that. It's the discussion thread. Post your constructive feedback in the discussion thread. Lots of modders get zero feedback in their mods' discussion threads.

I don't think that it's realistic to assume that many people will graduate from config mods to bigger mods. There's nothing wrong with making configs, but there's no modding involved. I don't see it as a stepping stone. I have other posts around the forum about what I do consider stepping stones... here we go, start from post #6 and read on - that's how you get started modding IMO.

How many people would you qualify for this? Maybe 20 or 30? I don't think that's going to cut it. Better leave it the way it is, or think about positive incentives rather than restrictions.

 

This happens because the discussion page isn't visible when you go to the mod. You have to click on it to find it. Honestly, I think that they should show the discussion thread instead of the reviews when you go to the mod page, then put a review button nearby.
That would encourage more people to use the discussion thread instead.