#I think a bunch of these kinds of mods exist on Nexus now but I did this before they existed and I had to figure it out with half a prayer | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kala-hira · 5 years

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That Anon certainly has no business calling them selfish, but I’ve never understood pulling all your content as a reaction to these kinds of things. Future work, sure, I’m not going to miss anything I’ve never used. But with existing stuff that was previously publicly available, you feel rather helpless. A majority of users respect TOUs and appreciate the modders work, there is a positive relationship there and you’d hope that still counts. But all it takes is 1 asshole to ruin it. It’s a shame.

First off thanks for being civil and polite with your anon message it is much appreciated :) All the below is stuff I have come across and in no way do I speak for all modders. I can barely speak for myself somedays lol. I am going to assume you are not a modder just from your post if this isn’t true then I apologize.

I will agree for the most part there is a positive relationship between modders and users but you would be amazed by the amount of people I see using my mods who have never taken the time to comment or endorse my mods. I spent hours making that mod that they will enjoy for hours and they didn’t even take a few seconds to say thanks and endorse it. I try to respond to every comment I get on the Nexus (sometimes notifications do not always work) as it is one of the few times we get to interact with the users. It can feel like a very one sided relationship and how are we to know that they appreciate it when they don’t take the time to say it? (for an example one of my older mods has 11,920 downloads, but only 24 comments from users and 396 endorsements) Even a simple thanks for sharing! Awesome work :) Love it! can go a long way in making a modder know you appreciate their work I am not asking you to kiss my butt to the sun and back.

Until you put yourself into that modder’s shoes I do not think you can understand what this really feels like. In the past I have hidden mods as it is a knee jerk reaction to everything that is going on. It is the quickest and easiest way for a modder to control their mods. Which is completely fair as a creator it is our right to control our creations.

You have to remember that modders are real people with real feelings. They put their time, heart and soul into these mods and when someone disrespects their decision or their mods it is like a knife to the heart. I know that seems dramatic but we spend hours working on and tweaking these mods they become important to us especially if we make them with a specific character in mind that is special to us.

You have no idea what that modder is dealing with in their real life, life has a tendency of kicking you down and then continuing to kick you when you are still down. If hiding their mods allows them a bit of respite from all the crap and stress in their life then it is a smart decision otherwise you get burnt out really quick. I have been there and it isn’t pretty. A person’s mental health is much more important then any mod every made. This is supposed to be a fun hobby not a crappy part time job but with time it starts to feel like work and instead of being a stress relief it becomes a source of stress.

You are just seeing this one instance but it isn’t just 1 asshole a modder is dealing with. You haven’t had to deal with getting rude, disrespectful comments from users. You haven’t had to deal with people being nice/friendly to you just to get them to make you a specific mod, then ditch you or say rude shit about you in the future. You haven’t had your work stolen or reused in other mods without permission. You haven’t had anon hate sent to you just because they don’t agree with a mod you made or have people talk behind your back about a mod you made. You haven’t had to deal with people comparing your work to others and telling you that the other modder’s work is far superior to yours. You haven’t spent hours troubleshooting something that has nothing to do with your mod but you are getting blamed for it. You haven’t had to deal with people harassing you over if you are going to share a mod and if you are when is it going to be released. You haven’t had to deal with people requesting changes to make it fit their character. You haven’t had people complain that your images are not good enough to show off your mod and that they won’t try it until you post more images. You haven’t had youtubers steal your images and use them as click bait for their videos. You haven’t had your free work stolen then “edited” a bit then put behind a paywall by another modder. All these things add up and you become tired, jaded and hesitant to release anything. We are just human we can only take so much. So to you it looks like 1 asshole but it’s much more then that, it is a bunch of little things add up until we get to a tipping point and we can’t take anymore. Everyone always says you need to grow a thicker skin on the internet but sometimes it feels like you have to become bulletproof in order to come out unscathed.

If you love a mod that much and feel helpless when it is removed then treat it like a limited collector’s edition when you download it and keep a backup or multiple backups. I myself tend to hoard mods, I buy external HDD’s and store tons of mods on them. I have them on multiple drives now as I had a shelf incident (my cat broke the shelf and all my hdd’s fall off and died, RIP). Some of my all time fav’s I have even saved digital copies of just to be safe. Or you can try your hand at modding I can point you to some free programs and some great tutorials to get you started. Many modders myself included are willing to help and share their knowledge.

I agree it is a shame when a modder feels like their only choice is to hide a mod. It is not an easy decision to make as you can see you face backlash and hate for doing it. This is a huge reason why modders just disappear and I don’t blame them. I feel like doing it all the time, the older I get the less time & patience I have to put up with it all.

Hope this helps explain a bit more from a modder’s perspective. I do get your point of views and before I started modding myself I felt the same but now that I am on the other side of the fence I understand.

I appreciate you taking the time to send this message and then talking the time to read my novel of answer.

Happy Modding!

Kala

#modding #Anonymous

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omegasisgamedesign-blog · 6 years

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A new year, new content.

If you are reading this, welcome to a new blog I’m trying to start to sort of keep everyone updated on my progress on some of the work I do, most notably game design and mod development with maybe a sprinkling of some streaming thrown in. I’m going to try not to get ahead of myself just yet though.

First let me begin a incredibly short explanation for my absence in mod development for 2017. It was a hard year. Lots of personal events between moving twice, two very hard school terms, a passing of my grandmother, and trying to take care of myself since I believe self care to be important.

On the flip note though 2017 had plenty of opportunities. I made friends, traveled to Spain, and learned more about myself as a person. All of this in combined with spending adequate time with friends and family really got me remotivated to get back into what I love to do, game design and modding.

While I started this endeavor almost two years ago Most of my work was done in the first year and not much progress has been made on the neverending list of ideas I wish to develop/am developing/have developed but not released.

I suppose I’ll talk about a bit of my work since that’s what is going to be the main focus going forward

Stardew Valley Mods:

This is the bread and butter for this blog for the time being, the main thing I’ve done and what I plan to mainly work on for some time. I’ve already released a slew of mods on nexus under the name of Omegasis with the help of Pathoschild in teaching me new things and maintaining my mods in the large year of absence. I’ve done great things like Happy Birthday, Stardew Symphony, and Auto Speed just to name a few. However this could be greatly improved upon. Here’s some of the upcoming ideas that I probably want to work on in this order.

Note* Some of these names are subject to change.

0. Stardust Core: Status: WIP

This is the main core mod I’ve been working on for about the last year now. It’s gone through many different iterations, but the main focus is to provide a modding core for a bunch of shared functions and things I want all of my future dependent mods to work off of. This includes a generic template object that all my modded objects will inherit from, a serialization system for saving a loading all of these custom objects, and the Illumination Framework, which I’ve decided to integrate as opposed to having it be its own stand alone mod since I can use a lot of the code in the core. Also one notable feature is an animation manager where users can add in animations to their custom objects and have them run at specific triggers when combined with a code based mod. This could allow for things like fountains, spinning tops, and more!

0.1 Illuminate/Chromatica Framework: Status: WIP Planned: Summer 2018

This is already a really basic implementation of lots of colors that I’ve added into code to basically just make things look well...colorful! It’s in a very basic alpha stage and doesn’t do too much since it really only includes the Chromatica side of things, but in the future I hope to be able to add a lot more customizable light sources with different light shapes, interpolation, and configurations to be able to have lots of controls to add multiple light sources to an object. An example would be having multiple light sources on something like a christmas tree or a lamp that gives off multiple colors!

This crystal for example would be colored differently and give off a colored light. Stuff like that mostly.

1. Additional Crops Framework: Status: WIP Planned Winter/Spring 2018

This is one that I’m currently developing right now. I recently learned that a similar mod called JsonAssets exists that covers some of the same features but what this one does differently is

1.Allows the user to purchase planter boxes that can be placed down. More of these can be added in by modders for different aesthetic designs. These planter boxes will be used to plant crops anywhere in the world and allow for more features such as greenhouse effects where crops don’t die and self-watering planter boxes. No more having to have crops planted just on your farm!

2. More kinds of fertilizer that can speed up crop growth and increase quality. This will basically expand upon the fertilizer that is already included in the vanilla base game.

Also shoutout to Spacechase0 for JsonAssets. Definitely a big fan of the work and very impressive.

1.1. Rune Factory Crops Mod: Status: WIP : Planned Winter/Spring 2018

This mod is being co-developed alongside Additional Crops Framework as a way to make sure it has a good set of features so that mod authors can make their own mods based off of the Additional Crops Framework. All it would take is a super simple 5 lines of code or so in a code based mod to simply tell the framework where to find the new assets. Of course I would include a tutorial of how to do so full of documentation, but the point is to make a crops mod with lots of new features and customization without having users struggle with the code side of it.

Here is some examples for my art so far, I’m a programmer so programmer art is more of my style but some of this doesn’t look to bad.

Sorry about the size. I’ll have to find a better way to include images without destroying the quality. Also yes, the turnip crop is just a recolored parsnip right now. I’ve made custom art for the object, but there is still quite a bit more work to be done on this one in terms of art.

2.Stardew Symphony Reboot/Stardew Music Displayer: Planned for Winter/Spring 2018

One of my personal favorites that I wrote a long time ago with not much programming experience behind me. While the mod works, it’s not terribly user friendly and the tutorials that I made for it well.... frankly put need lots of work. I wasn’t very confident streaming back then and my old house echoed terribly so my voice just doesn’t sound very great on these videos. Also what does one typically say during these things anyways? Well the point is that this mod is going to get a user-friendly upgrade. While a sister mod for it exists which is the simple sound manager and allows for simple mod sound effects for modders to use, Stardew Symphony is aimed at the general populace with no coding experience.

Some of my plans for it include:

1.Making an interface to listen to music included in music packs. That way users can determine what music they do and don’t like. This will probably take form of a music box that you can purchase from Robin to keep keyboard keys clean from a million menus. This menu would also be able to customize what music would play when in terms of location and season instead of having to fudge around with text files.

2.The Music Displayer portion is a part I already integrated that automatically parses the names of songs from the music files included in a music file. Using some nice hex parsing techniques this allows exposing all the sound files associated with any one given music pack without mod authors having to include a file saying which songs are included.

3. Finally some better tutorials on the process from how to install the mod, to making music packs, to working the interface. This one is huge since it’s almost stupid that the ability to add custom music to Stardew has existed for so long and I just haven’t made some good tutorials for this yet. So this time it’s happening.

3.Additional Fruit Trees Framework: Status: Planned for Spring 2018

This is the same as Modular Crops Framework and very well might be integrated into Additional Crops Framework at a later date. This essentially does what you think it does. Adds in different types of trees that will be able to produce different things for the farmer such as more fruit or different kinds of trees that maybe produce modded items. That would be fun!

4. Unnamed Cooking Mod Framework/Overhaul: Status:Planned

Because what’s the point of having more crops if you can’t cook with them? This essentially will make cooked dishes have different/better effects or at least have a more reasonable logic when it comes to healing stamina and health.This mod would also add in the ability for new cooking recipes that can be learned in different ways. How this would all work is still undetermined. Maybe the same or maybe you research them? Also maybe include a cooking skill??? Who knows.

5. Unnamed Alchemy/Magic mod/Framework: Status Planned for Summer 2018

This is a big one. It’s to hopefully expand on the fact that there is magic in the world of stardew but finally add on things like spell books, potion brewing, and other small magical machines and artifacts that would be able to add a bit of variety to Stardew. I’ve already prototyped a bag of holding which can be expanded with upgrades, some crystals that do different things like healing or cause it to rain, etc. Like I said, there is a lot that will be done with this one, and is going to be the big content adder.

6. Additional Animals Framework: Status: Planned for later 2018.

This mod essentially will expand on the potential to have different types of animals that can live on your farm. Of course content mods will be made off of this and I already have an idea of one. It’ll sadly be awhile before I get to this one since I know the other mods will take me a ton of time to get around to completing, but I’m determined to add this one in too.

7.Modular Furniture Framework: Status: Planned: ????

This is a HUGE mod that I’ve been trying to properly tackle since my early days of Stardew modding and I think I finally found a working solution to how to go about this one, but understand the amount of time it will take is going to be a task within itself. This will finally allow modders to add in custom furniture and place it anywhere. This will also allow ways to include more interactable types of furniture as well that could allow for some fun potential.

8.Unnamed paint mod:Status: Hiatused

This is a mod I made back in the spring and it technically works but needs some more tweaking. It essentially allows you to paint on a canvas object with different colors and place that painted tile anywhere in the world. This is pretty much the same way Animal Crossing does it with their designs from the Able Sisters. While I could probably get this mod up and running pretty quick it’s a bit lower on the priority list right now.

9. Additional Buildings Framework: Status Hiatised/Planned to resume LATE 2018

This is a mod that I’ve already made a variant through XNB content modding, but I need to update it to be more compatible to SMAPI since this mod was made on a patched version of Stardew Valley I made as an experiment in the early days of modding. This would allow for different buildings to be placed on the farm such as a bathhouse, warp hubs like subways to go to new custom maps, different aesthetic barns/coops etc. I want to get back to this one but it’ll take a ton of time before I can get here.

Anyways that’s what I have PLANNED for 2018 but the scope of some of these might even flow over into 2019 depending on a ton of factors such as multiplayer, code complexity, and the amount of art I would need to do. Not to mention I have a life where I go to school, am social with friends and family, and like to do other hobbies to. If I can complete even half this list though that would be amazing!

Unnamed Story that actually has a name:

Now this is a story I’ve worked on a long time ago for a game I was making in good ol’ RPG maker VX Ace and while I might not get around to making the game anytime soon, I really want to get back around to writing this story.

Game/Code Streaming:

Since I already play games in my free time and I spend so much time coding figured I might as well try my hand at streaming again. It could be a fun way to pass time and maybe bounce around ideas from streamers about things I could do with my mods. We shall see where this all goes.

And that’s the very first and VERY long update.

I’ll try to see if I can stick to a bi-monthly update schedule where I’ll update every two weeks or so with my progress that I’ve been making and hopefully next time I’ll have more graphics to show on the specific mod I’m working on.

Util next time.

#stardew mods #blog update #game development #Omegasis

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