Making your game moddable.

[looter_udn]

@Gwenn

Well, I’ve spent a week investigating modding support, and as far as I’m concerned, there currently isn’t any.

4.19 has an obvious breaking bug - it can’t build DLC. So modding is entirely impossible on that version, unless you fix a regression in the engine code yourself.

4.20 doesn’t have that bug, but despite dozens of hours of work, I’ve never been able to detect mod content from a mod pak, despite trying many different methods.

• The asset registry works perfectly fine for the base pak, but won’t detect content loaded using OnMountPak().
• The same issue happens if you let the engine load a mod pak from next to the default pak (which is not a practical method with Steamworks, anyway).
• Loading assets manually with LoadSynchronous() won’t find mod assets.

I’ve confirmed that the basics of reading a pak file still work - I can dump the contents of my mod file and check that the assets are there. It all appears good and consistent. Actually making use of these, as of 4.20, appears impossible.

I’d love to be proven wrong, but I’d advise going with a different engine if modding is required.

I believe you must still manually merge the asset registries of each pak file when loaded, similar to how it is described here. It was stated to be added to a future release over a year ago but doesn’t look like it ever made it in. It seems after investigating modding support again before we move into 4.22, it’s still barely supported natively and requires lots of custom code to get functioning, on top of the legal barriers mentioned in this thread related to distribution.