paramat wrote:
You seem to be expecting that a mod you write should work in most or all games
Probably not in all - but at least in most and in as many as possible.
paramat wrote:
Different games are often completely different universes, with different ways of doing things
To the player, gameplay may vary considerably, but behind the scenes most games share a lot of mechanisms.
paramat wrote:
However you seem to be suggesting this is 'officially decided and enforced for most or all games'. This is where your requests become ridiculous and completely unacceptable.
Not necessarily decided by the core devs (those certainly do have enough work already!), but yes, decided as far as possible by consensus and provided as an easy way to access a collection of libs.
paramat wrote:
This would also be a lot of work, and imagine the endless arguments over what the standards or libraries actually are.
Yes, I'm afraid so. But in the end that's life.
paramat wrote:
The primary mistake in all this is the expectation that mods should work in most or all games. This attitude arises from the current lack of variety in many games and the unfortunate focus on MTG.
No modder should expect or even want a mod to work in most or all games, because, given a reasonable variety of games, many games will be so different they would naturally be unsuitable for that mod.
We seem to have a very diffrent opinon here.
Most games we see share a lot of concepts behind the scenes, i.e. trees, doors, dirt with grass, plants, farming, mobs, transparent blocks for windows, ores, processing ores, crafting, a player's inventory, storage systems (some form of chests), tools, blocks to build structures out of, vehicles etc. The actual gameplay may vary considerably, ranging from a purely creative server to a world where PvP is the main focus and players don't even change the world, from conventional farming to space exploration, from a world without farming and mobs to an rpg adventure game up to a puzzle game.
Some of these common concepts are implied or even enforced by the engine and the api. Some others may indeed be motivated by MTG.
That these common concepts exist doesn't mean that each game has to support all of them or even all of them in the same way. But there ought to be a reason for derivating from common concepts. "Oh, it'd be so cool to replace each second letter 'e' with '('" *might* be something a child might think, and you *may* get away with it by declaring it as art - but actually doing so would soon reveal that that's not such a good and helpful way of dealing with words as it needlessly makes communication more difficult. There's a reason standards exist in RL.
Standards also aren't everything. If a game would be a complete and true simulation of life at normal speed, what would be the point of it in the end?
A good game may derivate from RL in some parts, it ought to abstract things. Most of this is caused by computational and dev time limits, but that's not all. "What if (we change that common concept)" is also a huge factor in art and game development. "Why is that (common concept) so" is a question that may lead to new insights in sience.
The very way voxel games work - by turning the world in blocks of 1x1x1 m - that is an abstraction of RL and something that gave rise to a lot of games and created a lot of fun for many players.
But that same abstraction also was filled with things people know from RL. It is seldom realistic, yet players mostly fill the world with something they know about. Gameplay-wise, there's no reason to build a house at all in most MTG-based games. No matter what dangers you add, a cave or a hole in the ground or something similar will suffice. And likewise, on purely creative servers, you may occasionally find players who build abstract art.
Some games may derivate from common standards so much that they may be seen as art, but...they may not be the best games. It does take some balance between new, unexpected elements and common elements for the players to feel happy with beeing challenged by new challenges and similarily feel sufficiently at home to be able to interact with the game.
New textures may already change the way an MT world is percived by its visitors considerably.
Just renaming "default:dirt" to "blablub:something" isn't art. It doesn't enhance gameplay in any way. It is just a derivation from standards and ought to be frowned upon.
Games and mods still ought to be free to derivate from standards - and even encouraged to some degree - but there ought to be some thought behind it, a reason for doing so. No pointless derivating from all standards just to be diffrent without even appearing diffrent in gameplay to the player in the end!
paramat wrote:
The MTG 'default' mod is a structural disaster, the only reason it remains like that is because of how much depends on it remaining that way, and how much complexity would result from splitting it into logically divided mods.
That's just how it is with almost anything that has developped over some time. The default mod from MTG certainly isn't ideal.
paramat wrote:
'default' is also a nonsensical name for a mod, no mod should ever be called 'default'.
That's right. default - that's usually a fallback if nothing else is specified. That's diffrent from what I want here.
In MT, each server owner and even each player who selects mods for his singleplayer game is to some very very limited degree a game developer. Players are free to choose which mods they want to be active in their world. That ought not to be hindered by game developers not liking any particular mod and making their games deliberately incompatible with it. It may not make much sense to have a "creative" mod in an extreme-survival-world - but then, it's up to the player to decide. This is open source - not some take-it-as-is!