Let's talk about modding in this game

[[SGT] Boris]

Got into modding the game recently. At first I thought "Oh the devs created a wiki for modders that's cool".

The wiki could practically hold on a napkin. But fortunately I had enough information to get what I needed to begin changing textures in the game, which was what I needed in a first time to begin simple.

Then today I thought that thermal cameras could be cool in the game. It certainly is not an easy thing to implement, don't get me wrong, but all the complications I'm going through are not normal for a game that has a steam workshop and supposedly has mod support.

First: No documentation on any of what the variables do in the game scripts provided in the game kit which means I loose most of my time trying to figure out what a simple function does, and where's the thing I need.

Any mod friendly game has a wiki or documentation about it's modding tools: take for exemple gmod with their documentation on glua.

But if it was the only issue I wouldn't be writing this and I would've been just midly annoyed.

Now I'm trying to do the simplest thing: Add a key input into the game.

Nothing I do, and I mean nothing works to add a key that I can bind into the menu, and I've tried everything. Found the files where key inputs are defined, where they are called, etc...
Nothing works, because I'd guess either they updated the game and not the dev kit and that means that I'm basically coding for nothing at this point or the inputs are hardcoded into the game but then what's the value of giving us the files for it ?

Then I say "Okay, then let's go even simpler and just modify the locale to change the name of already existing text in the game to see if that works"

And even that doesn't work with anything I do. I even compared with existing mods that modify locales, I do basically exactly the same thing.

My guess would be that they don't work anymore because they updated something in the game files, and modifying locales are now impossible.

Doing anything else than modifying textures, vehicle and projectile speeds in the game in a nightmare and I find that very disappointing...

Game is great, modding is not.

If the devs read this: Please do something about it, I truly believe the game would gain in popularity and would bring people in if you'd let the modding community create new content for your game.

[TheFrommie86]

With the last Update the Devs gave us access to the Developer Tools which should make modding more easy and give players more options.

Sure it's not perfect but it's what we got, it at least opened up a few more things that were previously impossible.

Originally posted by Boris:

Then I say "Okay, then let's go even simpler and just modify the locale to change the name of already existing text in the game to see if that works"

And even that doesn't work with anything I do. I even compared with existing mods that modify locales, I do basically exactly the same thing.

My guess would be that they don't work anymore because they updated something in the game files, and modifying locales are now impossible

As for this bit right here.
Only the english part of the localization is impossible to change, the other languages are. A user made a Mod replacing every language with egnlish and apart from the original, they can be changed.