MOD Request

[Robo25]

If anyone has the ability to Mod this game would be great in terms of adding in finding food to eat to survive, and able to craft healing plants from falls and monster attacks, with detailed meters of tiredness, health, thirst and hunger would be great. More Notes left lying around also showing where such plants can be found and even a stamina bar would be much better as unknown how much it is currently.

With all this the game would be so much better and fun to play.

Definately fix the silly delayed running controls also - or add the ability to both walk as normal and run separately but much better than what is now...sick of running off ledges all the time...
The music should play more often also - not just near bases.

Thanks to anyone who will try and improve this game for the better.

[DarkStarSword]

The modding options in the engine are pretty limited - we have some flexibility, but not as much as you might find in other engines such as Unity or Unreal. As a general observation though, if you want any of this stuff you are probably better off learning how to mod the game yourself. I released miasmod (see the sticky), which allows the game's environment database to be tweaked to change some things within the limitations of the engine and we do have ways to edit/add/remove textures and the like, but we don't currently have more advanced tools such as a map editor (and I don't have time to write one).

adding in finding food to eat to survive

There is no hunger mechanic for this and we can't add a new one, but you could maybe fudge it by trying to repurpose either the thirst or tiredness mechanics to use food instead of water/beds. Not sure if that would work and it would look a bit funny, but that's where I'd start looking.

able to craft healing plants from falls and monster attacks

I don't think there is a way to distinguish between the two types of damage, though if memory serves you can adjust how much damage they do (someone made a mod a while back to make the creature more friendly like a pet, and as part of that they set the damage it does to 0). There's also not a whole lot you can do to change what each medicine does, e.g. both mild and extra strength medicine affect "sickness" equally, the only difference between them is "duration", but that doesn't have any noticeable effect in game that I can see. Other medicines affect "strength", "endurance" and "perception", but I don't think there are other options. These are under player/condition/drugs in miasmod.

with detailed meters of tiredness, health, thirst and hunger would be great.

I don't think there's enough flexibility in the engine's HUD to allow this, though you could potentially write/adapt an external tool that searches memory for these values (something like cheat engine) and draws an overlay to show them.

More Notes left lying around also showing where such plants can be found

This would definitely be possible, but to do this easily would require a map editor, which we currently lack. Without that it would still technically be possible - we can add new textures for notes and edit the map nodes by hand to add them, but it would be difficult to get them positioned sensibly.

and even a stamina bar would be much better as unknown how much it is currently.

That falls under the HUD above.

Definately fix the silly delayed running controls also - or add the ability to both walk as normal and run separately but much better than what is now...sick of running off ledges all the time...

I think this should be possible to do today with miasmod, but I haven't tweaked things enough to try it (I did have some fun making my character be able to jump rediculously high - I wanted to see if I could mod the creature to have super speed to chase you endlessly for an awesome super-hero standoff). I'd start by playing with the values under player/physics and world_items/ground_resistance to see what you can do.

The music should play more often also - not just near bases.

That should be possible, but again would need new tools to do easily (probably not a full on map editor, but something along those lines) - we should be able to set up additional regions that trigger music. What is not possible (without a modder experienced in reverse engineering and audio formats) is adding new music, because I have not been able to determine what audio container + codec this game uses (it does use something with compression ratios comparable to mp3 or ogg, but it is neither of those and I can't work out what it is. One clue is that Obulis used the same format, and that was for Windows Mobile back in the day, so it could be something suited to that platform).

[Robo25]

Thanks for your detailed comments - I will have a look into it some more even though I have never made any mods before nor reverse engineered any software - though anything is possible I guess. Maybe the best bet is for the developers to give out the original engine so it can be modded and increase new buys for the game...? or get them to add these things as a DLC for small fee...that could work ?

[pawzisme]

DSS you are a star. :)

[BenM64]

Originally posted by DarkStarSword:

One clue is that Obulis used the same format, and that was for Windows Mobile back in the day, so it could be something suited to that platform.

Are you referring to the original Obulis, or the PC remake? Just checking.
Either way, I'm not sure why, but something about that sentence suggests to me that IonFx might've reused more of their old Windows Mobile code than we might've realised… Just a wild guess.

GeoRally EX shares the same title screen music as Obulis… Perhaps it shares the same audio format too, much like Into Outland?
(Come to think of it, GeoRally 2005 seems like their only game that doesn't.)

Originally posted by Professor:

Maybe the best bet is for the developers to give out the original engine so it can be modded and increase new buys for the game...?

Funnily enough, I was wondering the same thing. Joe Johnson wrote some spectacular game engines for Windows Mobile. ImmersionX2 in particular looked the most promising, IMO.
Restricting such highly-optimised technology to a handful of games (which can no longer be bought, let alone played unless you have a working Pocket PC)…is a bit of a pity, really.
If I were them, I would've at least put up some free modding tools on the website for fans (a few Obulis players on their old forums wanted a level editor of some sort…which instead became a full sequel, Obulis: The Second Epoch).
Since IonFx didn't, and currently still don't, I'm not surprised that they also kept Miasmata's Milo engine in-house.
At least DarkStarSword was kind enough to reverse-engineer some of it, eh?

or get them to add these things as a DLC for small fee...that could work ?

Somehow, I don't think that kind of DLC would work for Miasmata… But regardless of my opinion, it doesn't look like IonFx will be returning to Miasmata any time soon, having suffered burn-out from working on it for almost five years straight (funny, seeing how they released four Windows Mobile games in less than a year (judging by the dates on the .exe files), yet showed no sign of burn-out back then… Then again, none of them are anywhere near Miasmata's scale).
If their email to DarkStarSword is any indication, Bob and Joe have been discussing the possibility of an update, possibly to fix a few more of Miasmata's bugs like the unfixed Achievements, and "maybe add a feature or two". But that was back in 2014, and I haven't heard of any official bug fixes since then. They must be focussing more on their next game instead.
(The one thing that personally worries me, is that this spiritual successor seems to be taking longer to develop than Miasmata did.)

One thing is for sure; Bob wants the aforementioned successor to have better modding support from the start. At least there's that, right?

Whatever the case, you can always play around with Miasmod and Miaschiev in the meantime.

[Robo25]

Thanks for your comments - appreciated.

[BenM64]

Of course, the only mod that's arguably essential, as far as most of the Community is concerned, is DarkStarSword's Community Patch. It fixes most of the bugs in the game, and fixes the broken Achievements. From my experience, it also helps prevent the pause screen from crashing the game.
I recommend giving it a try, if you haven't already.

(Apologies for getting carried away in my previous comment.)