What happened to Vanilla Expanded Team ?

[Ribera]

Is something wrong with them? I know they release new mods, but I've noticed that some of their old projects either aren't updated for Biotech mechanics or some reported bugs in their many modifications have been hanging around for ages without being fixed.

I absolutely don't want to attack them, but I have a feeling that something isn't working right

[KharnTheKhan]

Originally posted by Ribera:

Is something wrong with them? I know they release new mods, but I've noticed that some of their old projects either aren't updated for Biotech mechanics or some reported bugs in their many modifications have been hanging around for ages without being fixed.

I absolutely don't want to attack them, but I have a feeling that something isn't working right

Which ones? theres only like 3 of them that arent updated to 1.4, One of them being a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ waves storyteller and then one is a base generation but biotech sortve already does that so theyd have to rework some of it

[Aranador]

The VE Team have their own plans, a roadmap that they update every month. They decide where to put the enormous effort they contilnually put into the game based on where they want to, plus their pareon feedback. If you are concerned that a mod that they have decided to set aside, is one that you feel needs attention, then sign up on their patreon at a high level, and vote on their direction.

They are very much active, but they can't do everything, and how much they can do depends on your support.

[The Blind One]

Over the years their projects have piled up on each other and with even greater future projects ahead, they have over a hundred quite large mods at this point, they can't be expected to keep updating everything with 'new' stuff every time. They definitely try and do the best they can with the limited resources they have. I think it's amazing how they've managed to keep everything working and (mostly) functional so far.

[Astasia]

Do you have examples? The only mod I can think of that hasn't been updated to 1.4 is Vanilla UI expanded, and there's a big blurb at the top of the workshop page explaining why it hasn't been updated and how it's being remade from scratch with better coding and more modular options. I also can't think of any mechanics that don't work with Biotech, since there's not a lot Biotech did that broke anything modwise or needs any compatibility. Vanilla Skills Expanded needed a bit of an overhaul to work with children, which happened, that's all I can think of.

A lot of the smaller animal mods were dropped because they were almost all merged into one larger mod. I suspect that is the main one you are seeing. They didn't want to maintain a dozen extra mods, so with 1.4 they made Vanilla Animals Expanded Core which merges most of them into a single mod.

People above mentioned Vanilla Base Generation Expanded, and Winston Waves, these are both updated to 1.4. Both of those are managed by Kikohi and it looks like they simply forgot to update the mod icons to change the 1.3 to a 1.4.

Edit: The RimEffect alien stuff might be wonky, because it relies on the Humanoid Alien Races mod, which Biotech did turn upside down. I don't think anything that uses HAR is ever going to be fully smooth going forward, and I personally have just stopped using anything that depends on it.

[Ribera]

First examples from my head:
- Pirates, mercenaries first option do not work, red errors,
- Medieval, mechanoids are affected by anesthetics from healroot tree
- Memes, are not updated for biotech content.

I can agree that not a major bugs, but just seems like bugs fixing are not priority for older projects

[Astasia]

Well ya, Pirates has always been fairly glitchy, it's largely compatibility issues I think, but the comments for that mod have always been full of error reports and things not working, much of it can't be replicated outside the specific environment the user is playing in, some stuff might be confirmed by whoever is maintaining it but perhaps they are doing other things. I would just say not all VE mods are under the "care" of the same people or have the same priorities in terms of bug fixing (maybe they are busy with other projects or whatever), but ya Pirates has had issues for a long time. I haven't used it lately myself.

I would imagine the healroot tree thing is not any easy fix. The Medieval mod has been updated multiple times since Biotech came out including adding xenotype support to the factions and whatnot. So it's not like this is abandoned or they aren't fixing issues or adding relevant features, it's just that issue is still outstanding for some reason. VFE Medieval is also by XeoNovaDan who I don't think is active anymore (I think he stopped modded around 1.1), so other people would have to come in and dig through his code or whatever to fix any issues which may be another contributing factor.

I use Vanilla Expanded Memes and Structures in every playthrough and I don't think it has any real issues with Biotech. I looked in the comments and saw your mention of some new junk not working with the Scrapper meme, I'm assuming that's just not a concern and might never be changed. Sarg handles that mod it looks like and he is very on top of thing and replies to most issue reports.

I think what it comes down to is, this is not a uniform "team" that does everything together. Most of the VE mods are handled by one or two people in terms of coding, with Oskar and some others doing the art, and then they have some shared QA options they use. Different VE members have different priorities, some would rather push more content than fix minor bugs, some aren't very active anymore and their mods get minimal support, some are still very active but might just not consider some things to be an issue, etc.

[SkunkPlaysGames]

Modding is a thankless job and real life takes precedence. Organizing a team makes it even harder. Plus people tend to bite off significantly more than they can chew.

[Minty Fresh]

Originally posted by SkunkPlaysGames:

Modding is a thankless job

Thank you modders!

There, that jobs done...

[SkunkPlaysGames]

Originally posted by Minty Fresh:

Originally posted by SkunkPlaysGames:

Modding is a thankless job

Thank you modders!

There, that jobs done...

What, no cake?

I'll take it anyway I guess. Download my mods!

[-HoK- Cian]

I don't know man. I love most of the mods put out by the Vanilla expanded team. They do an amazing job of creating content that stays fairly balanced and most of the mods I've used are pretty stable with 1.4. I am even running the Pirates faction mod and I don't have any errors.

My son's computer sometimes throws errors up with RimHud having a conflict with the Vehicles mod. Mine doesn't. Modding is kind of weird in Rimworld sometimes.

I honestly think if Tynan hasn't considered hiring on the Vanilla Expanded crew to work on additional content for the game, he's missing out. My only regret is having to wait for them to update everything whenever Tynan does a version update.

[MerlinCross]

I still get a few hiccups from Medieval; most notable one is that after choosing a site it seems to stay on that world map only swapping UIs. I have to swap away from world map AFTER I've landed. And this has been something that's effected me for awhile now.

HOWEVER; at the same time it's a mod. They don't need to update it if they don't want to and the fact they've actually kept it in a workable state, even with the hicups, is impressive. Other mods have either died off, or been pulled. I went looking for, I can't remember the name perfectly, "Nutrijelly Meals" mod and that seems removed.

The fact Vanilla expanded is still around and keeping their mods in a working state is more than I can say about other mods, and they keep wanting to test out ideas or push new content so I can't blame them if some of their older stuff is a little.... aged I suppose.

[Ribera]

I am pretty aware, that unofficial free content can't be blamed, and i don't blame them, i just have hope that won't turn into quantity over quality.

[Vagineer1]

Originally posted by MerlinCross:

I still get a few hiccups from Medieval; most notable one is that after choosing a site it seems to stay on that world map only swapping UIs. I have to swap away from world map AFTER I've landed. And this has been something that's effected me for awhile now.

HOWEVER; at the same time it's a mod. They don't need to update it if they don't want to and the fact they've actually kept it in a workable state, even with the hicups, is impressive. Other mods have either died off, or been pulled. I went looking for, I can't remember the name perfectly, "Nutrijelly Meals" mod and that seems removed.

The fact Vanilla expanded is still around and keeping their mods in a working state is more than I can say about other mods, and they keep wanting to test out ideas or push new content so I can't blame them if some of their older stuff is a little.... aged I suppose.

Been having that issue with VFE Medieval for ages as well now. Figured it was my mod list but maybe it's an issue with that specific mod.

[_♣Caligula♣_]

Like written here lots of projects, a diverse team(if that is the word for it) in terms of working times/priorities etc.
Also not all mods started by same persons, so if original modder left/takes a break(which happens quite often) others have to fix/dig trough code written etc.
But yeah, with some vanilla expanded mods I tend to have more problems compared with the rest of ve mods.
Pirates out of my head amongst it.
I am interested at which point in time every reasonable and interesting modding idea has been done and if rimworld 2/follow up project exists at that point.
Since for me, multicore usage and lacking z levels are really the stopping point in the end to what is possible to achieve.
If you are interested in the work of the vanilla expanded team you might like to subscribe via patreon and see what their plans/progress are and donate a bit to them on the monetary side of things.