I am not a modder. But I have always wanted to be. So my question to the modding community is how far can a mod change this game? Can you add dynamic events based off of the day number (time), the location of players and their bases?
With work, yes.
-WM
Lets be a lot more truthful and serious as the question is an honest one.
Not far.
Your limitations are going to come quickly as the engine itself is far dated. 4.5.1 with some 4.7 features. To top that off, it is a highly edited version of it all for Wildcard. It is what it is …
You guys are seriously lacking in performance and a ton of other areas/features. Your very limited by what they allow in the design of the core. The engine was edited by WCS for what they needed. You need to remember, the version being used (ADK) is not optimized at all. It is not compatable with any optimizations further then whats already been done. We can argue back and forth for the sake of argument, but, lets be clear on this … WCS has not optimized this thing in the 2-ish years its been out. Empty maps run fine, but, build something big and you can see how broken it all is. Like i said, it is what it is, but, this is something yall are having to deal with.
This is why you see minor changes, and, not “game changers”. Its just not possible. Unless, of course, you want to recode the system is cpp and roll out from there, but, just dont see it happening. I have seen a lot of “im going to make classes” and “im going to change end-game!” and “im going to add this and that” but in the end, it never happens. Why? Because its just not possible. You can pull assets from ADK and add them unofficially before they get added officially, but, your not making mods, your simply adding content thats just locked for now.
Can you do a lot? Yes, you can. ADK is more of a “WYSIWYG”. You wont see much more then what you already have avail. Just a bunch of recycled mods. Is anyone really putting in “with work, yes” effort? Nah, not really. Tho, Mr Kangaroo and his gang did do a TON for the mapping community to show how far you can go with it. Line in the sand was drawn there tho.
You can change almost every aspect of the game if you put in the work and time to learn how it works with a total conversion. The things mentioned in the question are very doable and absolutely not outside of the devkit limits. Someone experienced with the kit would be able to do that in a few hours.
As for the current mods available: My feeling is the exact opposite from what AP_Studios said. The mods out there barely scratch the surface of what’s doable. We are getting new functionality with every update lately.
i have to agree with mezzo there is alot that has not been touched because of the lack of experience ppl have with the devkit the community is basically split u have a huge group of basic modder change item adding content adding dino modifying dinos and such and then u have the mod adv modders the bring game changing items to ARK things the PC ARK player can’t play the game without since it was released. There a lot of things that can be done and myself have touch upon but just haven’t release due to the limit of time just i have just look at some of the old TC mods that were release those provide that u can rewrite the game to make a whole new game. Even Ext maps u can create whole new weather systems and add ons the amount of things u can do is limitless its just having the experience and knowledge and time to do it.
I had an entire thing typed up … but -
Yeah you can achieve the “theory” of what your asking. Depends specificly what you are wanting to do.
Mezzo and spezz, i have nothing but respect for yall … so i will keep it professional lol …
There’s limitations in ADK, but you can do a lot with it if you’re creative at doing work-arounds. The biggest problems are the lack of documentation (you literally just have to play with things and figure out what those things are doing), and also 95%+ of modders lack any experience (most people just copy existing assets and edit default values to create something slightly different). Very few people create their own custom meshes, very few people code anything past a few blueprint nodes, and I’m assuming less than 1% code anything complex (most, if not all of these people are now being paid by WC to continue working on their mods).