I was recently thinking about the mod community Endless Space has and even tho we have awesome talented people providing some very nice mods. But time and again complaints rose that modding the game isnt as easy or "supported" as in other games and updating your mod through the various patches has been such a hassle that many modders discontinued their projects eventually.



Without a doubt mods are the thing that increase a games replayability the most (after the basic design of course)...just look at X-planes (different genre I know).





Now apart from the individual persons skill at modding some games implement the modding factor right into their design from the start and support this either by a structured code, extra programs or detailed documentation. I d just like to hear the developers view on this topic, how important modding is to their game, IF they even think about implementing a modding variable or anything else really.



Some of my oldest games sitting on my comp are the ones which have a great variety of community created mods for them, jus saying

Excellent point.

I really like Steam Workshop or another build in mod support: search, install update-

I didn't try mods in ES yet, but I have no idea where to look and how to install them.

I actually think that ES is quite easy to mod. There are some limitations that I'm not happy about though.



Currently you can't really create a fully functional AffinityMapping, I tried myself and failed and never seen someone doing it.

UI also doesn't support more than 8 factions, I mean you can create a fully functional 12 faction galaxy map and it will work, but you will keep getting UI errors and it will look weird in some scenes.



If we had a basic modding tool that allows us to alter the assets of the game and add new ones, that would be cool. I think we at least need an XML editor specially designed for ES though, I don't know what other guys do but for me, using notepad++ for more than 15 files at once becomes confusing sometimes. It's no problem if you're making a small mod, but for major mods it's really time consuming.

Okay maybe I m mistaken and its not hard but as you say the limitations are severe enough to put off bigger projects.



I am not modding myself, gave it a try in the past and failed hard. I think I enjoy playing mods more then creating them.



That being said I d like Amplitude to think about their approach to modding in ES2. Steam workshop would be an excellent tool to spread mods further. Sure you can run the risk to allow "too much" modding so I understand many companies hesitation to open up their code to the community but some games *cough* Torchlight2 *cough* made it a point to allow modding to insane cheat levels and it didnt hurt the game IMO but rather made it more playable.



ES2 is not a leaderboard game like others. Also its mainly not an online game where you compete against others (it does have MP, thats not what I mean).



As far as I see there are enough safeguards to protect the community versus cheat mods that might ruin the gaming experience. Be it achievements disabled while playing with mods to unable to play MP with any mods enabled (or only if everybody participating has it running).

The Really big problem for modding with Endless Space was definitely changing assets. It was quite easy to add factions, etc. and even pictures of them. But when it comes to changing models or sounds.. we were very limited.



We need more options !! Importing models and change the hardpoints for weapons. In endless Space, it was very weird how models were imported, and the result was that weaponfire would still fire from the old hardpoint the ship had on its old model.



Small Mods like Balancing mods were never the big issue, but total conversions were basicly impossible.

Would love to see amazing mod support

Gotta say, I'm with those asking for a dedicated mod-kit or at the bare minimum, a bespoke XML editor. Endless Space was easy to adjust stats for things, or change a couple things here and there. But once you really starting playing around with it, and changing multiple systems, it began to fight back hard. On top of that, being reliant on XMLs meant every time the game updated, you either had to force a revision to an older version, or restart much of your work. It was a nuissance.



I know there's nothing to be gained financially from a SDK (Unless you're a company who's built on that reputation, then you don't need to advertise - Bethesda), but from a fan appreciation standpoint, it would add MASSIVELY to the game. The community wants to help add, but it's pointlessly difficult at the moment.

I 100% agree with those saying we need better support for modding and I believe it is to Amplitudes benefit to do this. Modding adds value and longevity to the product which allows it to sell more units over a longer period of time for more money.



For Endless Space we had modding tools like KnightHawks ESMapEditor and your preference of any text editor. I came pretty close myself to creating a full blown content editor called ESDK but I ultimately lost motivation do to the size of the project and my skill level. The lack of tools made for an extremely frustrating modding experience. With Endless Space 2, Amplitude has the chance really support user created content. If you care about this do your part to let Amplitude know user created content is a selling point for you.





PS Can we at least get a syntax highlighter for the xml this time? (Sublime/VSCode)