Q2: In the first blogpost the team said “Non-developers can create impressive experiences with minimal technical knowledge” - How accessible will modding be for programmers and non-programmers? First at Early Access and then what’s the vision for the future?
A2: I think given the rush to Early Access, you will find different maturity levels within our systems:
- Mature: These features are already well supported in our asset editor. They are easily editable within our ingame / prototype node graph editor and require no programming experience. Such features are Blocks, World Generation v2, Items, VFX, Modelling, Animations, Droptables, Crafting, Weather, etc.
- Moddable: These features are already feature-rich and extensible but generally lack a good editor integration and workflow. You sometimes need to jump into the underlying JSON files to make changes or write a custom plugin to extend them. Such features are NPCs, Interactions, Inventories, Camera, etc.
- Prototype: These features are often hardcoded or not extensible from the server yet. We usually try to make something work before we make it good to avoid the fallacy of premature complexity. We need to make sure we understand the feature in 1, 2, 3, or more different ways in order to understand what abstraction to build. You will encounter quite a few systems like that. Our goal is to bring them into the moddable stage as soon as possible. Such systems are physics, input, shaders, visuals, etc.
- Deprecated (for removal): Some systems in the game are going to get removed in favor of a newer system. These systems are in there because we couldn't complete the transition. Such features are custom UIs (we are moving all UIs to NoesisGUI with XML layouts and away from our .ui files), event bus (old event system which was replaced with EcsEvents), etc.
We are not just adding features to the game that are required by us. We are adding any feature that makes sense and can be maintained by us. We are always looking for use-cases and limitations to adjust our system design. If you want a feature in: Tell us what you wanted to make and why Hytale prevented that from happening. The better we understand the limitation, the faster we can fix it.
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