Are we going to get an SDK anytime soon?

Night Nord · Post by **Night Nord** » Sun, 2. Feb 14, 20:12

Let's face it - unless we have an SDK the engine is nowhere near to moddability level of the previous engine. And EgoSoft has such an SDK - symbol table for XRebirth.exe contains functions for enumerating "Plugins" (for Lua UI) very similar to what there are already for "Extensions".

With Bernd promising us the new engine being even more moddable than ever before it's quite logical to have such a system for deep modifications.

But a question is - how long we should wait? Why EgoSoft is holding back such a thing?

YorrickVander · Post by **YorrickVander** » Sun, 2. Feb 14, 23:27

Maybe holding back till it works properly

Even at 1.24 I've been hard pushed to get the plot station made without resorting to save hacking.

Maclarium · Post by **Maclarium** » Mon, 3. Feb 14, 07:20

Will we ever get a tool like this ?
Did they say it somewhere ?

Observe · Post by **Observe** » Mon, 3. Feb 14, 09:08

Maclarium wrote:Will we ever get a tool like this ?
Did they say it somewhere ?

No, it has never been explicitly stated that there would be an SDK per se. It has been said that we may get some modding tools and support at some point "soon after" release, but not the exact nature of what those may be. Several modders have made requests to Egosoft, but to my knowledge there hasn't been any definitive replies thus far.

At this point, the modding community is on its own to come up with tools based on what we can infer from looking at the various files and file types. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because it provides opportunities to those who thrive/enjoy the challenges involved in sorting these things out.

In my opinion, one of the main things holding back the modding community, is the fact that this game isn't very popular among modders and non-modders alike. After all, even modders prefer modding games they actually enjoy playing. In addition, some modders may not be interested spending the time to create mods for a dwindling audience. That too is reasonable - depending on what drives the individual modder.

I suspect there are more than a few in the modding community that are sort of sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how this game evolves, and whether it evolves in a direction that captures their interest. It is apparent that quite a few modders have already decided to turn away from this game and many of them may already be involved in other games and projects. Some of those who have left may never return. It depends on where this game goes, and what other games may be on the horizon.

The bottom-line is we weren't promised an actual SDK and we don't know if/when we'll receive additional tools beyond those we already have.

Maclarium · Post by **Maclarium** » Mon, 3. Feb 14, 09:50

Observe wrote:
Maclarium wrote: Will we ever get a tool like this ?
Did they say it somewhere ?
No, it has never been explicitly stated that there would be an SDK per se. It has been said that we may get some modding tools and support at some point "soon after" release, but not the exact nature of what those may be. Several modders have made requests to Egosoft, but to my knowledge there hasn't been any definitive replies thus far.

Then a definitive and official answer would be great (I'd even say required).

Right now i'm just building some tools around the game waiting for bug fixes, required features and most of all an SDK allowing modders to revamp the entire user interface.

This UI is a definitive game breaker for me. Every time i want to relaunch the game I remember I'll have to deal with this horrible radial menus which are so TINY, slow and with a hundred sub levels

But there will be a time I will be tired of waiting.

Observe · Post by **Observe** » Mon, 3. Feb 14, 18:21

Keep in mind that previous X games didn't have SDK's either. Egosoft did provide an extraction tool and a couple of basic modding guides, but most of the tools and utilities that modders have used were created by fellow modders.

We are seeing a similar situation with Rebirth. Egosoft has provided a manual for Mission Director, and we have ability to extract the files. We are already seeing modders sorting out how to import/export 3D meshes and there is progress on working with the UI - again primarily being accomplished by the modding community without much/any input from Egosoft.

It's possible Egosoft is holding off on further modding information because they themselves are still struggling with getting fundamental aspects of the game to work (pathing for example). There wouldn't be much point for them to tell us how to do something that isn't working and likely to change.

Night Nord · Post by **Night Nord** » Mon, 3. Feb 14, 21:57

Well, TBH, there is a definitive and official statement about any kind of SDK: http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php? ... 27#4106827 (note the uncertainty about export tools).

Yet still I do believe that some kind of SDK exists internally at EgoSoft - it's quite logical to develop separate logic parts using a plugins system, so they may experiment with things without touching anything else. Without such a system I hardly understand how they managed to remove all the stuff that was in the game, but was disabled at release - the game is mostly barren clean. Just a few things, mostly a localization strings, contain hints at what was removed.

While yes - there was no SDK in prior, but it there was no hardcoded logic too. X:R MD and AI scripts are significantly less complete than X3's MD/AI. And all this X-C stuff?

I fear that such a change is deliberate - EgoSoft don't want mods becoming rivals to any future EgoSoft game, so mods are heavily restricted to mainly relocating things rather than creating anything new, especially a new logic.

But we haven't seen all the promised modding "tools" yet - Bernd+CBJ were quite clear about UI being much more moddable than in X3. Even with my decompiler being able to decompile all the xpl files into a fully recompilable and working without errors sources we can't do much - resize stuff, move stuff, change font and color, etc. With some magic we can even mess with presentations (we can't add new slides, but we may change existing slides contents, thanks to all slides being a simple model). But we can't add anything really new - no button to rename ships. No tactical interface for a fleet control. No cockpit-less HUD flight interface.

Without being able to modify and (mostly) extend a basic logic we are almost out of guns already. Without the SDK there will be no great mods, such as a boarding mod for X3:R. Without the SDK we can't fix usability bugs while EgoSoft is focused on a general stability and performance.

With the SDK, on other hand, we may fix the most frustrating usability issues like right now and Ego clearly doesn't have time to work on anything with priority less than "super-ultra-urgent-blocker".