Ventures and a modded game

[Spiralrazor]

For me, right now the mods are the only saving grace that keeps me playing at all.

I'm just going to completely ignore ventures and use mods, of course then I won't earn cool EgoCredits and will miss out on that highly anticipated and much requested feature of the game.

Same,, i could give a crap less for the entire venture thing. Id only have an interest if i can host games for limited multiplayer.

[maniac_uk69]

I'm playing a vanilla game, but cannot place the venture mods????

lol I think you got a little confused. You an place the Venture parts no issues

I can place the base as a new structure... it wont connect with any existing buildings. The s/m dock is grayed out with a message about no more copies available even though I never built one?

[lordmuck]

I'm playing a vanilla game, but cannot place the venture mods????

lol I think you got a little confused. You an place the Venture parts no issues

I can place the base as a new structure... it wont connect with any existing buildings. The s/m dock is grayed out with a message about no more copies available even though I never built one?

Use the argon cross to attach it to existing structures

[radcapricorn]

Mods to ships/weapons/new ships made by modders. Then I totally agree these should not be sent to a venture. If however the Venture platform was to check the stats of the ships, turret amounts rotations speed each variable before sending it off, therefore ensuring that the ship is vanilla and standard, the platform accepts it and recognises it to be sent off. Thus allowing players to mod the snot out of their game as long as the mods do not effect the base ships.. So yeah you would have to choose between modded standard ships or venture, but at least you can benefit from mods that fix the game.

That part can't work. A mod can easily allow you to install best ship upgrades without scrounging for components, spending money, etc. So, with such a cheat mod you could create 100% vanilla buffed ships en masse. By your logic, they will look "legit" to the venture system, while in fact they're not. It would be a loophole to transfer maxed out ships into a non-**modified** game (since the other party can capture them), especially if/when Ego implements friends system.

[lordmuck]

Mods to ships/weapons/new ships made by modders. Then I totally agree these should not be sent to a venture. If however the Venture platform was to check the stats of the ships, turret amounts rotations speed each variable before sending it off, therefore ensuring that the ship is vanilla and standard, the platform accepts it and recognises it to be sent off. Thus allowing players to mod the snot out of their game as long as the mods do not effect the base ships.. So yeah you would have to choose between modded standard ships or venture, but at least you can benefit from mods that fix the game.

That part can't work. A mod can easily allow you to install best ship upgrades without scrounging for components, spending money, etc. So, with such a cheat mod you could create 100% vanilla buffed ships en masse. By your logic, they will look "legit" to the venture system, while in fact they're not. It would be a loophole to transfer maxed out ships into a non-**modified** game (since the other party can capture them), especially if/when Ego implements friends system.

oh yes I totally forgot about our mods that we can make in game. Tho why send a modded ship like that to a venture, it wont effect the outcome I believe. Still the venture platform could insist on 0 in game player made mods at the workshop table.

[radcapricorn]

oh yes I totally forgot about our mods that we can make in game. Tho why send a modded ship like that to a venture, it wont effect the outcome I believe. Still the venture platform could insist on 0 in game player made mods at the workshop table.

The venturing player might not get any extra benefits, but the receiving one can: by capturing that ship. At the moment it doesn't really matter, but if they are to implement "friends" or whatever means of choosing the venture target, it will. Cheat in a bunch of maxed out ships, fill them to the brim with most profitable wares to sell, give them all 0-skill captains, and send away: the other player (not **modified**) just captures them, profit. And then we get "black marketeers", selling uber ships for egocredits, or hell, actual currency

[Galinet]

I'm playing a vanilla game, but cannot place the venture mods????

Code: Select all

Go to online features and register the game with an Egosoft account. You already logged in?
Log out and restart the game. There is some voodoo involved with this step.

After this, you need a Venture cross to attach to your station and then you can place the venture dock 
(unless the game bugs out and does not save your changes and you only realize this after player 5 hours).

I can see the difficulty of flagging mods as safe; this list would be valid until the next time the mod is updated to do something else, which can then give players an unfair advantage. For example, I write a mod that displays captain's names in upper case because I find that cool. Egosoft puts my mod on a safe list. I then modify my mod such that it also gives me 1 million per letter in their name. I now have a quick way to earn a lot of money, which I can then use to buy better stuff to send on ventures, which allows me to earn Egocredits more easily than players without any mod.

That scenario seems like the ultimate reason to prevent mods, to ensure players are on an equal footing. Also, I do not want Egosoft to spend their time approving mods; I want them to improve the game.

The flip side of this is that the vanilla game was not ready for release (was there a beta?) and many mods alleviate problems. I would like another thread so players could nominate mods to be included with v2.0; the code for those mods is already working, the features are what players want and bring some fun to the game and all Egosoft has to do is to review those mods once and incorporate them into vanilla game.

Here's my short list:

• BetterScanColors
• CrystalFinder
• mej_improved_explore_behaviour
• Signal_Leak_Hunter
• trade_buy_notification

Signal leak hunter is the only one that I consider "dangerous", since it makes finding those signal leaks trivial, greatly diminishing the time needed to get all the blueprints. However scanning stations to find those signal leaks/blueprints is such an awful game design that I find it extremely tedious/frustrating to play vanilla and having to spend hours scouring stations in the hope of a signal leak being present on them. I cannot see myself starting many new games if I have to do this again and again.

I have just today found a pirate base that allowed me to purchase EMP bombs. Been using those to obtain some of the tougher blueprints.

[Dread Quixadhal]

I can see the difficulty of flagging mods as safe; this list would be valid until the next time the mod is updated to do something else, which can then give players an unfair advantage.

It's not that it's difficult, it's that somebody has to be paid to do this. Egosoft has enough on their plate right now without also having to hire or re-assign a dev to audit every single mod on not just the steam workshop, but nexus, and any other sites people use to distribute them.

Once somebody takes the time to audit a handful of mods and approves them, they then would ALSO need to implement a non-trivial checksum system (a simple checksum can be faked easily enough) to ensure someone doesn't just name their "i win button" mod the same as an approved one.

Remember, this is not an online game where you play it entirely on Egosoft's servers. Anyone can write or install a mod from any source... and that's fine, until it impacts other players.

[lordmuck]

I'm playing a vanilla game, but cannot place the venture mods????

Code: Select all

Go to online features and register the game with an Egosoft account. You already logged in?
Log out and restart the game. There is some voodoo involved with this step.

After this, you need a Venture cross to attach to your station and then you can place the venture dock 
(unless the game bugs out and does not save your changes and you only realize this after player 5 hours).

I can see the difficulty of flagging mods as safe; this list would be valid until the next time the mod is updated to do something else, which can then give players an unfair advantage. For example, I write a mod that displays captain's names in upper case because I find that cool. Egosoft puts my mod on a safe list. I then modify my mod such that it also gives me 1 million per letter in their name. I now have a quick way to earn a lot of money, which I can then use to buy better stuff to send on ventures, which allows me to earn Egocredits more easily than players without any mod.

That scenario seems like the ultimate reason to prevent mods, to ensure players are on an equal footing. Also, I do not want Egosoft to spend their time approving mods; I want them to improve the game.

The flip side of this is that the vanilla game was not ready for release (was there a beta?) and many mods alleviate problems. I would like another thread so players could nominate mods to be included with v2.0; the code for those mods is already working, the features are what players want and bring some fun to the game and all Egosoft has to do is to review those mods once and incorporate them into vanilla game.

Here's my short list:

• BetterScanColors
• CrystalFinder
• mej_improved_explore_behaviour
• Signal_Leak_Hunter
• trade_buy_notification

Signal leak hunter is the only one that I consider "dangerous", since it makes finding those signal leaks trivial, greatly diminishing the time needed to get all the blueprints. However scanning stations to find those signal leaks/blueprints is such an awful game design that I find it extremely tedious/frustrating to play vanilla and having to spend hours scouring stations in the hope of a signal leak being present on them. I cannot see myself starting many new games if I have to do this again and again.

I have just today found a pirate base that allowed me to purchase EMP bombs. Been using those to obtain some of the tougher blueprints.

And this is why I am saying I pray they listen to our suggestions, for the "cannot live without mod"

I can see the difficulty of flagging mods as safe; this list would be valid until the next time the mod is updated to do something else, which can then give players an unfair advantage.

It's not that it's difficult, it's that somebody has to be paid to do this. Egosoft has enough on their plate right now without also having to hire or re-assign a dev to audit every single mod on not just the steam workshop, but nexus, and any other sites people use to distribute them.

Once somebody takes the time to audit a handful of mods and approves them, they then would ALSO need to implement a non-trivial checksum system (a simple checksum can be faked easily enough) to ensure someone doesn't just name their "i win button" mod the same as an approved one.

Remember, this is not an online game where you play it entirely on Egosoft's servers. Anyone can write or install a mod from any source... and that's fine, until it impacts other players.

Devs / CS or who ever cannot keep up with the forums bug reports let alone also approving mods as clean or what not. So again I am saying this is why they really need to check each suggestion out and see how "hard" it would be to implement. Yet they never ever tell us if something has made it to a list or not.

oh yes I totally forgot about our mods that we can make in game. Tho why send a modded ship like that to a venture, it wont effect the outcome I believe. Still the venture platform could insist on 0 in game player made mods at the workshop table.

The venturing player might not get any extra benefits, but the receiving one can: by capturing that ship. At the moment it doesn't really matter, but if they are to implement "friends" or whatever means of choosing the venture target, it will. Cheat in a bunch of maxed out ships, fill them to the brim with most profitable wares to sell, give them all 0-skill captains, and send away: the other player (not **modified**) just captures them, profit. And then we get "black marketeers", selling uber ships for egocredits, or hell, actual currency

I keep forgetting how the mods work in game, I didnt think of that. This is why I would have thought that we can only send unmodified ships w/o our own vanilla mods.

[viperfan7]

So, I saw somewhere the reasoning for not allowing you to send out ventures when modded is that you guyys don't know what ship mods someone might have. I have a solution for that

1st. Create a checksum of the stats and loadout of the ventuire ship
2nd. send that checksum to the selected client, along with the loadout and ship
3rd. if the ship loadout is possible on the receivers game, compare checksums of ships, if the ships match, the players both have compatible mods and should be able to allow ventures between those players

This avoids needing to have the same mod list as each other, as you're not comparing mods, you're comparing the individual ships, this will also allow for players to have mods that do not affect ship stats to still perform ventures, as it only checks if the ships are compatible, nothing more

[TDQuasar]

I think there are more issues with modded games than only that. Simplest one for example, if you have a modded game you can just replace the lost ship with a magic button, so you can just start ventures without any risk. In an unmodded game you need to reach a certain level when such a loss won't really matter anymore. But it will be still a loss.

Furthermore, we all know that there will be people who will want to circumvent the checks you described and try to send modified ships anyway. So ES will always have to keep an eye on that and waste resources. Not sure how hard it is to break the game's checks for unmodified saves, I think it could be done with X3 saves, but not sure.

The most fair and simple way is just to allow ventures with unmodded games.

[mistervec]

I don't really think the 'no mods' thing is about game balance.

It seems more likely to me that mods could add entries to the ship data that the Venture system's server cannot interpret or cannot strip out. Also, while I'm not an expert in such things, it does seem possible that one might be able to mod a ship in such a way that loading it on a vanilla client would cause the game to crash or screw with save-games those modded ships appear in so badly the save won't load. Either would leave Egosoft in the unenviable position of having to be responsible for whatever maliciousness folks might perpetuate by exploiting the venture system's code.

[TDQuasar]

Check out this post:

viewtopic.php?f=180&t=412111

[magictrip]

I do believe that is more like a Business decision than a technical one.

Want to use mods? Cool, but you deal with everything and you will be locked out of some things we do (like achievements, online features, etc).

As they don't introduce new games every year they will need to add new revenues (DLCs and microtransactions) and modded games bypass that all as you can just enable them with scripts. So, a little discouragement in using mods will probably be in place.

[abisha1980]

Most mods on the nexus are more cheats then real game enhancments

[Pichu0102]

The idea is that Mercenaries would be an additional option in addition to sending your own ships in vanilla, while mercenaries would be the only option in modded games. Essentially, you'd hire mercenaries from a hiring board and they'd show up on the venture board as eligible ships to send out, for a fee and cut of the credit-type profits (but would not appear on the map or as owned ships, only existing related to ventures). You'd be able to customize the paint job and name, and the mercenary would have a simple 0-5 star level that increases as they keep doing missions.

Under the hood what would happen is that the game would send the mercenary ship type, name, paint job, and star rating, then a ship semi-randomly generated with those parameters (with star rating affecting their loadout in the target universe) will be sent to another game, provided the ship type and paint job are vanilla friendly, name has been sanitized to prevent little bobby tables, and star rating is 0-5. Under the hood, it's more or less a normal ship generated in the target game rather than a copy of a ship that a player sent out of their own fleet, but shh, don't break the illusion. In all, this would feel like a lore-friendly, modder and vanilla friendly thing to add, especially in this series where the modding scene is great.

(I may have considered leaving the typo "mercanaries" as is, but when dangerous missions show up, I figured it would be a little too on the nose.)

[grapedog]

If you're using mods, you can mod further and get everything you want that ventures could provide to someone who isn't modding. why do you want to have mods AND venture? why should Egosoft go out of their way to put in further controls for handled modded content?

I personally am not against the idea, as long as only vanilla content is roaming around in my vanilla game. I think for modded content, it can only be modded base game ships, and the game can nueter it down to it's normal type/model with middle of the road gear.

[Drake]

Is this ever going to be allowed? I love this game but I also love the mods some people in the community have come up with. Beyond a pilots skill I see no reason why a modded game should not be able to be part of the Venture system. It really sucks to be cut out of an interesting part of the game because I want to enrich and custom tailor my single player experience to what I want and again, it is not affecting other people as we can not send modded ships through and there is a time limit on excursions right so we can not exactly spam them either.

[adeine]

I don't really think the 'no mods' thing is about game balance.

It seems more likely to me that mods could add entries to the ship data that the Venture system's server cannot interpret or cannot strip out. Also, while I'm not an expert in such things, it does seem possible that one might be able to mod a ship in such a way that loading it on a vanilla client would cause the game to crash or screw with save-games those modded ships appear in so badly the save won't load. Either would leave Egosoft in the unenviable position of having to be responsible for whatever maliciousness folks might perpetuate by exploiting the venture system's code.

Very simple solution:

Allow people who are **modified** to do ventures, but don't actually send their ships to other players' games. Instead simulate that aspect (right now: success/failure), and reward them just the same.

I believe this the best way Egosoft can do this where everyone wins without disproportionate effort.

[iforgotmysocks]

Very simple solution:

Allow people who are **modified** to do ventures, but don't actually send their ships to other players' games. Instead simulate that aspect (right now: success/failure), and reward them just the same.

I believe this the best way Egosoft can do this where everyone wins without disproportionate effort.

That would be the best approach, i agree. Kinda the thought that got me going to just make better Ventures. :p