How come there is still not a single mod?

[Ramm]

April is coming close and I would like to talk again about the subject of modding. Something that kinda scares me is that Planet Coaster doesn't have a single modification so far. Not a simple menu change or addition like a different material. Now I am scared it is gonna stay like this and it feels like Custom Content/UGC is kinda a subject that doesn't get enough attention in my honest opinion.

Planet Coaster is such an amazing game I always compare it to Cities Skylines alot. Why? Well.. we all knew that the city building genre was dead in 2013 with the new Simcity (more like simtown), and then we suddenly got Cities Skylines in 2015 which totally revived the city building genre and gave alot of fans exactly what they have been craving for all this time.

The same happened with Roller Coaster Tycoon World. People were craving a new theme park sim for so long and I remember getting so excited when hearing about the new RCT only to find it out wasn't as much fun as expected and I kinda gave up hope for the genre. And then Planet Coaster came in 2016 and totally brought new life in the theme park genre so we could finally keep enjoying our favorite genres.

Now compare the two games, I think they are both great modern games and they both are amazing building games that saved our beloved genres but one thing that kept the old games alive for so long was the custom content. People were, in masses, creating content for it and there is literally more content you can install. Now cities skylines has more mods than you can count while Planet Coaster doesn't appear to have any while both Planet Coaster and Cities Skylines use the Steam Workshop were they can upload everything.

So how come we got 0 mods so far? Please don't get me wrong here, I absolutely love Planet Coaster and with current in-game content you can do alot, but alot of times there are some limitations in how good you can make everything with their default building pieces. For these instances Steam Workshop would come in handy.

For example: I love the fence tool in Cities Skylines because you could easily shape out everything so more realistic. I'm sure i'm not the only one who would love to see a fence tool in Planet Coaster too or even a simple extra path texture but for some reason we don't have a single mod.

What is holding this back and will we ever get mods? Thanks all for reading and thinking with us [heart]

 

[LN]

Because mods are not (yet) supported.

 

[Ramm]

Because mods are not (yet) supported.

Which raises the questions why and will this change if so when? What makes Planet Coaster different in this?

 

[LN]

Don't know, its just a decision the developers make. I guess you can only mod the game if you have some build of the engine?

So Unity is such an engine which makes it possible because it is an open engine and very easy to modify.

The engine from Frontier is an in-house development and I can surely understand why they won't give away anything about their (imo) best engine for these kind of games.

 

[gregorburns]

What makes Planet Coaster different is that mods are not officially supported, as no toolkit has been provided by the developers for this (which would take a lot of work to implement btw, many games that support mods will use engines such as Unity or UE4 which is substantially easier for developers, since mods work out of the box). It doesn't mean it is impossible though.

You could always try making some yourself maybe?

Just as an FYI, it's entirely possible. I've had a play around with swapping textures myself, and swapping animations on characters, with hilarious results. It just requires a bit of digging around in binary files and some technical know-how.

 

[PlanetChris]

I think Luuknoord and gregorburns wrote some good points, but there is a pretty easier point in my opinion:
There is no need for mods atm and other things are more important...

I personally don't think that we need mods for such a game and I wouldn't provide this great engine to everyone if I would be a dev of PC.

If you want anything like your fence-tool: Why don't you start a thread for it in the Suggestions area?[weird]

 

[DreamMaster]

I think Luuknoord and gregorburns wrote some good points, but there is a pretty easier point in my opinion:
There is no need for mods atm and other things are more important...

I personally don't think that we need mods for such a game and I wouldn't provide this great engine to everyone if I would be a dev of PC.

If you want anything like your fence-tool: Why don't you start a thread for it in the Suggestions area?[weird]

Fence tool have been sugested since alpha 2. Frontier can't do everything hence the mods. Also there's isn't a need to provide the engine fir mods to be possible.

 

[PlanetChris]

Fence tool have been sugested since alpha 2. Frontier can't do everything hence the mods. Also there's isn't a need to provide the engine fir mods to be possible.

I'm sure there is a reason why they didn't add it to the game so far.

You're right, my sentence seems to be too general: They don't need to provide their entire engine, but as far as I know, they will need to provide parts of it to add the mod support. (Like an API)
And if you want to add mods, you will need to know, how the engine works or am I wrong?

 

[Vampiro]

What makes Planet Coaster different is that mods are not officially supported, as no toolkit has been provided by the developers for this (which would take a lot of work to implement btw, many games that support mods will use engines such as Unity or UE4 which is substantially easier for developers, since mods work out of the box). It doesn't mean it is impossible though.

You could always try making some yourself maybe?

Just as an FYI, it's entirely possible. I've had a play around with swapping textures myself, and swapping animations on characters, with hilarious results. It just requires a bit of digging around in binary files and some technical know-how.

Agree 100%

I think it was AndyC who said that basically adding stuff is already possible if you know how the filesystem works.

Edit :

So, RCT3 mods worked by modifying assets using 3rd party (and unsupported at that) importers. Planet Coaster modding could work exactly the same way - it just relies on someone reverse engineering our resource format in the same way they did for RCT3. If anyone has any questions about the resource format they can post here and we'll do our best to answer the questions.

Of course, this isn't very helpful. As we've said before, we'll have more to say about modding "soon". Adding mod support to a game is very, very complicated. Especially so given how Planet Coaster has to be written in order to remain performant. It's also worth pointing out how much more complicated the authoring process is in Planet Coaster compared to RCT3. So, we're working on it - give us some time and we'll be able to tell you more.

Cheers

Andy

(Thanks Gregorburns for poiting out this link)

 

[gregorburns]

Also there's isn't a need to provide the engine fir mods to be possible.

Correct, as I stated above, mods are currently possible.

What people are asking for here is official tools that provide the means to do so. Frontier have certainly shown interest in this in the past, but it certainly would not be a simple thing to do, hence why they have not done it yet. It would take a lot of development time, and would be a pretty costly thing just to create intuitive modding tools.

Have a look through this thread where AndyC gives explanations of these things, and also why games running in engines like Unity don't require very much work from the developers (if any at all) to open up the game to modding. https://forums.planetcoaster.com/showthread.php/11671-How-far-can-mods-go?p=145368#post145368

Again though, my point still stands, mods can be made, as they were for RCT3. Personally though I have no need for mods at the current time, hence why I haven't taken things any further than a bit of digging out of my own curiosity.

 

[Bullethead]

From a game dev's POV, mods are a 2-edged sword.

OT1H, they're good for the community and increase the customer base. Plus, the community often comes up with good ideas that can be incorporated into the stock game.

OTOH, they make customer support a nightmare because mods usually cause bugs, either alone or when mixed together in the same game. Thus, the official bug report forum gets flooded with problems many of which are caused by mods, not the game itself, and it's often quite difficult to sort them out.

For this 2nd reason, many dev's don't like to allow modding until they're sure the underlying game engine is not only very stable but also thoroughly known in how it works in all its nooks and crannies. If a game uses an off-the-shelf engine, it's already in that state so release and modding often happen simultaneously. When it's a custom engine still undergoing active development by a small crew, modding (if it happens at all) comes fairly far after release. PC seems to be in this latter category, so I wouldn't expect any official modding support any time soon.

 

[BigDragon]

I think the reason there's no mods yet is because of the time investment aspect. For me, it's the chicken and egg problem. Mods would make me play Planet Coaster again, but spending time reverse engineering a game I'm already not spending time with so that I can spend more time with it in the future does not make sense.

If Frontier wanted to speed things along then all they'd have to do is release some source content that we could import into our editor of choice. Release a ride, its animations, and the scripts that makes the engine aware of it. Release a scenery object and its associated scripts. That would accelerate the creation of custom content. It wouldn't have much impact on gameplay-altering mods though. Having access to Frontier's tools is not exactly necessary.

I normally consider mods to be a barometer of how strong a game's community is and how invested the players are. Steam Charts is backing me up here.

 

[Ramm]

From a game dev's POV, mods are a 2-edged sword.

OT1H, they're good for the community and increase the customer base. Plus, the community often comes up with good ideas that can be incorporated into the stock game.

OTOH, they make customer support a nightmare because mods usually cause bugs, either alone or when mixed together in the same game. Thus, the official bug report forum gets flooded with problems many of which are caused by mods, not the game itself, and it's often quite difficult to sort them out.

For this 2nd reason, many dev's don't like to allow modding until they're sure the underlying game engine is not only very stable but also thoroughly known in how it works in all its nooks and crannies. If a game uses an off-the-shelf engine, it's already in that state so release and modding often happen simultaneously. When it's a custom engine still undergoing active development by a small crew, modding (if it happens at all) comes fairly far after release. PC seems to be in this latter category, so I wouldn't expect any official modding support any time soon.

I dont really see the customer support as an issue to be honest.

1. Do you have a mod?
2. Reinstall planet coaster and we'll help you from there

it's as easy as that

I think the reason there's no mods yet is because of the time investment aspect. For me, it's the chicken and egg problem. Mods would make me play Planet Coaster again, but spending time reverse engineering a game I'm already not spending time with so that I can spend more time with it in the future does not make sense.

If Frontier wanted to speed things along then all they'd have to do is release some source content that we could import into our editor of choice. Release a ride, its animations, and the scripts that makes the engine aware of it. Release a scenery object and its associated scripts. That would accelerate the creation of custom content. It wouldn't have much impact on gameplay-altering mods though. Having access to Frontier's tools is not exactly necessary.

I normally consider mods to be a barometer of how strong a game's community is and how invested the players are. Steam Charts is backing me up here.

Mods easily multiply the ammount of time you can play with a game by 10 or so. Steam workshop is already there, but instead of just blueprints of stuff people made we could add our own stuff and even change gameplay things when people add scripts and all. It would be so amazing. I love it with Cities Skylines and I hope I can have the same blast with Planet Coaster at some point in the near future

 

[breezerHOG1]

I dont really see the customer support as an issue to be honest.

1. Do you have a mod?
2. Reinstall planet coaster and we'll help you from there

it's as easy as that

If mods are not supported, then they can say "reinstall"... but if mods ARE supported, then they cant say that

the devs have already stated it is possible to mod PC, its just nobody has dove into it too deeply yet because A) it takes time and B) any updates frontier releases can prevent mods from working and cause more problems. Best to just wait for the game to be a bit more complete and to see how frontier will handle UGC

 

[NainConPetant]

to add my 2 cents. I was a big modder in the past with the gta games.

Now I think that this game is taking enought of our pc capacities. Adding mods would simply make mid/low end pc's not beeing able to run the game.

Op stated about city skyline, you kinda anwsered yourself saying that city skylines was release in 2015 and now have plenty of mods.

PC was released 5 months ago, offer lots of differents options if you think out the box (like icing to make fences)

They are still working on it, new stuff is coming up. what you request as "mod" would maybe be add to the game at one point. We just need to be patient

 

[Robert K]

Other games like RCT2, RCT3, RCTW, and Parkitect have the ability to add user made stuff to the game. PC does not. But, Frontier is working on new rides for us, which will be released in April. And probably even more down the road. We do need more wall and roof types like 1/2 tile walls, diagonal roofs, and roofs to make an octagon roof easier. In RCT3 everything snapped to the same grid, but in PC we have to work with different grids for paths and buildings, and outside the grid, so it is harder to line things up correctly.

 

[Ramm]

to add my 2 cents. I was a big modder in the past with the gta games.

Now I think that this game is taking enought of our pc capacities. Adding mods would simply make mid/low end pc's not beeing able to run the game.

Op stated about city skyline, you kinda anwsered yourself saying that city skylines was release in 2015 and now have plenty of mods.

PC was released 5 months ago, offer lots of differents options if you think out the box (like icing to make fences)

They are still working on it, new stuff is coming up. what you request as "mod" would maybe be add to the game at one point. We just need to be patient

it has been almost a year since the first alpha by now

 

[breezerHOG1]

it has been almost a year since the first alpha by now

as i said before, nobodys going to dive into modding a game thats still getting frequent major updates

 

[Ramm]

as i said before, nobodys going to dive into modding a game thats still getting frequent major updates

I dont seem to understand why this is, as this wasn't for other games like the example I used in the OP

 

[breezerHOG1]

I dont seem to understand why this is, as this wasn't for other games like the example I used in the OP

rct2 and rct3 recieved mods some years after release... rctw doesnt have mods it has built in ugc support, i thinkt he same is true for Parkitect. if you play city skylines u would know any time an update is released a lot of the mods stop working

the alpha for PC is actually a different game than the full release so modding the alpha would have been a big waste of time