Modding in the era of freedom

General Feedback & Requests
1

I’m really excited at the news that Unreal 4 is now free to download. Not just because I don’t have to pay for it, but it means there’s a much better chance for allowing users to mod things made in Unreal.

Several of my projects have been put on the shelf* lately because modding is incredibly important to their success. (and to me in general) I spent a lot of time looking for alternative solutions in Lua, V8, SkookumScript, etc… And I still had no idea what I would do for a reasonable art pipeline.

So now that the editor is free and intended for use in modding Unreal Tournament, let’s talk about what us independent developers should do to allow modding of our own games.

The way I see it we have a few distinct types of modding: (And of course no mod is limited to only one of these.)

  1. Music, texture, model, animation, and even language replacements. The kind of thing you see browsing the Left 4 Dead 2 workshop, or Minecraft texture resource packs. Any type of mod should be easy for the user to install, but especially these.
  2. Editing existing maps by moving props. (Including creating new tile-based maps)
  3. Adding new behaviors to existing actors.
  4. New maps with custom behavior and art assets.
  5. New actors with custom behavior and art assets.
  6. New game system behaviors. Anything from rewriting AI to act differently, to editing game mode and playerstate, to adding Oculus support.

Some of these were easy. Some were hard but viable. Others seemed impossible, at least for me. I’ve never written a (decent) art pipeline before and had no idea where to start. V8/SkookumScript allowed custom behavior at runtime but giving the user freedom was difficult.

So, I’d like to hear from Epic (and community members) ideas on how to allow for some or all of these in the new era.

  • This is the ONLY reason I’m upset that the news was so sudden. I totally get why it was quiet, but a large portion of what I do is intended to be modable, and so it’s been on hold until I could get something for modding in place. If I had known the editor would be available for public use in the future I’d have kept working on those projects instead of switching to some of my more “boring” (but still bill-paying) projects. No hard feelings, but a little bit of frustration.
2

I think the best part about free UE4 is that we don’t HAVE to do anything to empower modders. We just link them directly to the account/download page for UE4. Being able to give so much power so easily is the best thing ever. If I had played a game anytime in the last 30 years that linked me to UE4 for it’s modding, then I probably would have become a game developer ages ago. Think of all the foot traffic Epic is going to get just from developers pushing players their way.

I think there are 2 main challenges, one of which you have hit upon.

  1. Engine Side: Making the actual modding process as accessible as possible from a user interface point of view. I think you are going to see a whole new crop of engine plugins pop up whose sole purpose is to make the editor more friendly to the average Joe who just wants to do something simple like make a model pack, or tinker around a bit.

  2. Game Side: Making a mod system that is interchangeable and seamless, allowing users to easily share and install creations in modular form, from within the game/launcher environment. Modder creates a mod, user grabs it, clicks a button, and is ready to rock.

3

as one that fought for moddability for UE4 games and the new UT, I’m also interested in this

in fact I asked this question in the free announced thread but it got overrun but the thankyous :smiley: