FAF Balance as Mod instead of base settings

Evildrew

I watched the Sanctuary video that was released today and from my past of having run a mod what always bothered me was when the balance team out of the blue decided to add some feature that then would be merged into my mod because they are editing the base game (victim talk I know).
Also this has affected all the other great mods that were created in the past such as BlackOps, Mayhem, etc.
So since the Sanctuary guys were talking about having a base game with base settings that isn't being touched and them having the official version of the units settings as a mod, it got me thinking and I concluded that sounds like a much better implementation that we should have too on FAF.
It is the best way to protected any contributors' work who is not creating content as part of the official FAF Teams but is creating alternative content independently.

Jip

I don't entirely see the problem.

It is the best way to protect any contributors' work who is not creating content as part of the official FAF Teams but is creating alternative content independently.

If you want to have a balance-related mod that is 'stuck in time' then you can do so by copying all the blueprints over into your mod.

For scripts it is less trivial. All mods should be written so that they move with the base game. It is always considered good practice to hook functions (so that they do not break changes) instead of overwriting them. Because if you overwrite the function the chances that your mod breaks when a (developers) patch is released is quite high. This is why I told the author of Wars of Glory too invest time to apply these good practices. Otherwise his mod would've been broken after the 28th.

Also this has affected all the other great mods that were created in the past such as BlackOps, Mayhem, etc.

What makes BlackOps (or any other mod) potentially less great now than it was before a patch?

Evildrew

If it is easy to lock a mod in time please explain how that works without having it be 1 GB in size? I got up over 100mb in the past because I needed all the files from land units to have laser weapons hit the units properly.
Past balance was built around higher acu hp buffs on tech upgrades, that is something that would have been altered years ago and might not fit with the way mods were conceived of… hard to give a quick answer but it goes along those lines

Jip

You do not need all the meshes, textures and animations from the repository. Blueprints are relatively large, but you don't need all - just those that players can actually build. After compression (which is what happens when you upload the mod) it shouldn't be more than a few megabytes

cunnismeta

@evildrew said in FAF Balance as Mod instead of base settings:

without having it be 1 GB in size?

        Mesh = {
            IconFadeInZoom = 130,
            LODs = {
                {
                    MeshName = '/units/xnb2031/xnb2031_lod0.scm',
                    AlbedoName = '/units/xnb2031/xnb2031_albedo.dds',
                    SpecularName = '/units/xnb2031/xnb2031_specteam.dds',
                    NormalsName = '/units/xnb2031/xnb2031_normalsTS.dds', 
                    LODCutoff = 200,
                    ShaderName = 'NomadsUnit',
                },
                {
                    MeshName = '/units/xnb2031/xnb2031_lod1.scm',
                    AlbedoName = '/units/xnb2031/xnb2031_lod1_albedo.dds',
                    SpecularName = '/units/xnb2031/xnb2031_lod1_specteam.dds',
                    NormalsName = '/units/xnb2031/xnb2031_lod1_normalsTS.dds', 
                    LODCutoff = 300,
                    ShaderName = 'NomadsUnit',
                },
            },
        },