Could there ever be mods in Elite?

[Malvinas]

I have seen in the past few days (since Odyssey-console dev' got dropped), questions bubbling up within the community, in several places, about what's coming up for this game.
Will there be new content?
What kind of new content could there be?
New ships? New "places"? New missions or mission types?
and then an idea dawns in my head.
Games that last long, and those that last the longest, I'd rather think, it's in part due to the fact that they support mods.
I haven't played any other game developed by FDev, so I wouldn't know if it is in their 'policy' or 'dev model' to support mods in their games. Some other game companies do support mods on all the games they do, some others include mod support on some of their titles only...
Could this be a good time for E to open up to mod support?
I imagine, after the long-run exprience of mod supporting games like DooM or Skyrim, that E could greatly benefit from this, and modders could add just so much to the game, as much as what FDev wouldn't and more.
Graphical and performance improvement, new ships, new bases and general geometry, new missions and mission types, new graphics and sounds, new gameplay elements, anything is possible if 'mods capability' allows it.
The 'new missions' bit particularly keeps pinching my head from the inside, because I keep reading of ppl somewhat bored of the same o' missions, and sometimes suggest possible 'new missions' that are just so cool... it could add gameplay engagement, exand on the BGS story, develop or 'branch out' what's going on with the game, where players populate the game's space... it could be easily achieved (or so it seems) with mods only for the mission config part.
I understand there could be a huge impact in multiplayer gameplay performance because of the mods implementation. I've seen SCS company heavily compromised with a lot of work to get their MP-enabling update for their trucking games with mods, so I presume maybe mods could be only intended for graphical and cosmetics, or dwell further into the game mechanics and allow for heavier stuff.
What are your thoughts on this? Could this be the right time for mods on Elite?
Was it ever an issue with this old game?
Were there ever mods made for this game, in earlier versions? Perhaps, come to think of it now, there already are mods but are not so well known...
Anyways, I just wanted to talk about this, so... I'll read your replies, thank you.
Fly dangerous, o7

 

[Northpin]

Nope, FDev does not support mods in their games

 

[varonica]

Be hard in a multiplayer game also, I remember the invisible skin cheats in some early shooters.

 

[Demonlord79]

Nope, FDev does not support mods in their games

And let's pray they never do. Mods just ruin a game, IMO of course.

 

[Misty_Dark]

it is quite more difficult to deal with modding support in an online game with a shared world.

if there would be a possible to have our own servers then most of the issues with a shared world is gone, as now players can choose which servers they want to play on and thus accept the mods needed to play in that server.



But mentioning games like Skyrim for why modding is great, is very deceiving, as Skyrim is a pure solo game. And if we go from Skyrim to Elder Scrolls Online, ESO, an online game with a shared game world, modding is restricted to be around UI. so you cannot add new structures, no new weapons/spells/etc but you can change how information is displayed, so makes mods client side only. ESO also have to deal with things like cheating, so if we start to mess around with stuff to improve performance, then any such effort would open up for the possibility for players to create mods that not only improves the performance, but also to add unfair advantages, like seeing other players behind walls. And in games where PvP is an option, cheating is a thing you need to take into consideration, as we know that some players will and do cheat in online games, and that will for the most part, ruin the experience for the rest of the players. And cheating is a thing in Elite too, but not as widespread, but for those who encounters it, it is rarely a fun experience, it mostly ruins the encounter with the cheating player...



So how would a free for all modding solution like the one Skyrim offers work in an online game like Elite? simply, it would not. First players would cheat. players would create over powered ships. this would make basically any PvP game play worse. And if we add new stuff to the game, like locations, etc, then the game need to push those mods to the players visiting that area, so this creates a huge liability for FDev, as they now mush vouch for all the content delivered to your PC. So any player created content would have to be checked. and double checked. that requires staff and time. and mistakes would happen, especially in the mod is big. So who would be responsible if they missed hateful speech in a mod? or a mod breaks the law, in one country? would that now make players from that country unable to go to this location? this is just the top of the iceberg on the problems with mods that adds new content...

So why not allow us to craft our own missions then... same issue here, cheating, you need specific material for engineering, so you craft a mission that is super easy, and fast todo, and gives you 100 of the require material. So not so good, so there will obviously be some limits on the reward. so you cannot give out more than 3... but you can still make the mission super easy, and fast to complete, and make it so that it stacks with other similar missions, so you just need to repeat it more times, but the end result would still be the same... and in adding more and more rules to block these kind of missions, you will ruin more and more of the other potential great missions players could do. What about translations? how will you manage that? Who will create the translations of missions details for player created mission?
As you can choose to play the with these languages English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese.
And this is before we even get to the validation of the mission texts, so that age appropiate and all that stuff. And this costs money....




So in short, we will most likely never see mod support in Elite Dangerous from FDev. and if we would get mod support, it would be for client side stuff like how the UI looks and operates. But we would not be able to do add new ships, no new locations, no new missions, etc. etc. Add to this, that due to the existing cash shop for paint jobs etc. we would never get a mod that allowed us to do our own stuff that rival what is already in the cash shop...


Just look at any of the big online games that have shared game world between all the players, how many of these do offers mod support and what are they allowing you todo...because that should have given enough answers doing that little bit of research on how feasible and likely mod support would be. Do not confuse this with games where players run their "own" servers, as these games do run their own copies of the game world.

 

[Old Duck]

Were there ever mods made for this game, in earlier versions?

Not "this" game, but debatably a "earlier version" is OOLite, which provides many of the features you request for a fan-made version of the original Elite.

Personally it's too "old school" for me, but IIRC it still has a loyal following of players and modders.

 

[Morbad]

It's a persistent world multiplayer title. There isn't much modding that could be done that we cannot already do that wouldn't have serious potential balance repercussions.

Maybe when the game becomes unsupported and someone leaks the server software, dev tools, and maybe even source code, then there will be significant modding...but there also won't be much of a playerbase.

 

[Gibbon]

And let's pray they never do. Mods just ruin a game, IMO of course.

HAHAHAHAHA. They are in fact that which keep older games thriving. The difference here, is that we have servers to deal with which don't belong to us, therefore can't add anything. I can name at least a dozen games which survive purely based on modded content. They enhance a game in most respects. Yes, some mods are rubbish, can't deny that, but in general they keep a game alive. Using Mass effect series as an example

 

[Kissamies]

Elite's equivalent of mods are all the 3rd party tools and websites.

 

[Old Duck]

Shameless plug:

Amazingly Realistic Immersion Mod

UPDATE - The latest version of this mod is available in this post from this very long thread. This is the last update I'll be making before Odyssey releases. For those who want more customizations and fine-tuning of their HUD, I recommend checking out EDHM, which is more user friendly than mine...

forums.frontier.co.uk

 

[Malvinas]

So why not allow us to craft our own missions then... same issue here, cheating, you need specific material for engineering, so you craft a mission that is super easy, and fast todo, and gives you 100 of the require material. So not so good, so there will obviously be some limits on the reward. so you cannot give out more than 3... but you can still make the mission super easy, and fast to complete, and make it so that it stacks with other similar missions, so you just need to repeat it more times, but the end result would still be the same... and in adding more and more rules to block these kind of missions, you will ruin more and more of the other potential great missions players could do. What about translations? how will you manage that? Who will create the translations of missions details for player created mission?
As you can choose to play the with these languages English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese.
And this is before we even get to the validation of the mission texts, so that age appropiate and all that stuff. And this costs money....

I understand that multiplayer game pretty much rules out mods, because of "the posibility of cheating"... Then, what if mods only worked on "Solo play"?
"Solo play", in a way, is like "running your own game world version"... If you want to play with mods, you can, but when you're only on your own. I understand that leveling up while in-solo and then going back to "Open" is considered by some as flat-out cheating, with or without mods...
And about your quote: What if we could craft missions, but not their rewards? The mission's rewards would still be generated by the in-house algorithm, but everything else and be manipulated. If you don't know how to fly, 20Ls can take forever. Even cooking up delivery missions that are very short could take really long... and rule out the rewards, let the game keep adding those to "mod" missions. I envision something like this: string up a handful of missions to "create" the illusion of a short story, told through the mission string. For example, Go to X and find a Black Box, with that Black Box you get a weird transmission telling you to go to Y and find someone, you get there and you drop from SC to a Pirate Rendevouz... they invite you to go to somewhere else and attack a Megaship, you then have the choice to join them and attack the Megaship, or kill them and collect your reward..." <- is something like this too crazy to make it work?
Besides all this "mod jive", I also got to think that FD need to "man up" and manage their own product and not be so lazy as to handling potential threats and cheaters... You can't make an MP game and constrain it so much as to leave out any posibility of you having to work on it and be responsible for what happens with it. It's not like you flip a switch on the server and just wait for the money to fall from the sky and forget about maintaining and working on the platform.
I don't know, I've heard that E: D , in its current condition, is giving signs of reaching the end of its "lifespan"... and I find just so many things that are still "unexplored" (no pun intended), and "un-tryied"...

 

[gorankar]

You could tinker with paint colors and other graphics enhancers that only you could see, some UI changes and the like, but that is really as far as you could go without rightfully deserving a ban. It's an mmo, and while PvP is mostly dead in this game, anything that gave you a true gameplay advantage would be problematic to say the least.

 

[Misty_Dark]

I understand that multiplayer game pretty much rules out mods, because of "the posibility of cheating"... Then, what if mods only worked on "Solo play"?
"Solo play", in a way, is like "running your own game world version"... If you want to play with mods, you can, but when you're only on your own. I understand that leveling up while in-solo and then going back to "Open" is considered by some as flat-out cheating, with or without mods...
And about your quote: What if we could craft missions, but not their rewards? The mission's rewards would still be generated by the in-house algorithm, but everything else and be manipulated. If you don't know how to fly, 20Ls can take forever. Even cooking up delivery missions that are very short could take really long... and rule out the rewards, let the game keep adding those to "mod" missions. I envision something like this: string up a handful of missions to "create" the illusion of a short story, told through the mission string. For example, Go to X and find a Black Box, with that Black Box you get a weird transmission telling you to go to Y and find someone, you get there and you drop from SC to a Pirate Rendevouz... they invite you to go to somewhere else and attack a Megaship, you then have the choice to join them and attack the Megaship, or kill them and collect your reward..." <- is something like this too crazy to make it work?
Besides all this "mod jive", I also got to think that FD need to "man up" and manage their own product and not be so lazy as to handling potential threats and cheaters... You can't make an MP game and constrain it so much as to leave out any posibility of you having to work on it and be responsible for what happens with it. It's not like you flip a switch on the server and just wait for the money to fall from the sky and forget about maintaining and working on the platform.
I don't know, I've heard that E: D , in its current condition, is giving signs of reaching the end of its "lifespan"... and I find just so many things that are still "unexplored" (no pun intended), and "un-tryied"...

But this is not a solo player game. even if you choose solo mode you play in the same game world as the rest of us, the only difference is that you do not see the rest of the players, and they do not see you.
And if we would have a proper solo game mode, then that would essentially be a totally different game save to begin with. So now the question is, can we scale down the existing game to run on your computer, and yes it can be done, but would require ALOT of effort and redesigning of the game, more or less creating a new game. So this option is very unlikely.

Crafting missions, still the issue with checking the missions texts, and the translations. So making the game add the reward, does only solve part of the problem, there are so many ways to abuse any system where you are allowed to write text freely, all from inappropriate sexual content, to political statements to propaganda statements. all of these have nothing to do in this game. So Frontier would still have to screen any player contribution here. so the obvious solution to this, is to restrict player freedom even more, so you can basically only add missions that are copies of the existing ones, using the existing generic missions texts. and when we have reached this point, then what would the purpose of the mission the be? what extra flavour would these missions bring? So it is more likely that we see a revamp, again, on the mission system, than adding player generated missions.

Multiplayer are always getting constrained due to cheaters. many games releases in a terrible state, where cheating is "easy" todo, and as the developer fixes the underlying code that allows the cheats, it also restricts the game. So thre are numerous ways anti cheat code is bad, not only are they cause to performance issues, micro stutters, lag etc, they are also riddled with false positives for cheating, meanign that many thousand of player are banned due to very bad detection methods. And anti cheat code is often connected with DRM code, which also very often is written very poorly, given rise to very much the same performance issues as the anti cheat code does, so guess how bad this can be when we combine these two... hint, it rarely gets any better.

So cheating is not trivial to deal with, there are so many ways, that game developers can mess up, or simply make really bad code to make cheating easy in the first place. and this is before we even get into all the possible way we can cheat. And it all comes down to we cannot trust the player computer, or players home network, some cheats affects the packets between the game client and the server... and game streaming services can solves many of these issues, but they have their set of issues instead...





Sadly, I have seen the same signs that Elite Dangerous does not appear to be prioritized by FDev, but modding support will not save the game. And as I have said before, modding a single player game or a player hosted co-op game, is vastly different from modding an online multiplayer game, which Elite Dangerous is.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

As long as it's MP - no. How would that work?

 

[Greasetrap42]

I think ability to mod the ship HUD would be really nice.

It doesn't change any ship performance. It just makes it better. I find the HUD not very good. Overall lacking in some areas.

Kinda like how WoW allows modification of their UI.