To EGOSOFT: Don't stomp the sparks, inflame the fans

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h2odragon3
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To EGOSOFT: Don't stomp the sparks, inflame the fans

Post by h2odragon3 » Fri, 2. Aug 19, 19:54

I like X4 Foundations. My steam client says 1,100 hours played in 5
months, that testifies that I'm a satisfied customer. So much so that I have
taken advantage of the open architecture of the game to make a [half
dozen
mods](https://github.com/h2odragon/x4f-notes/ ... er/NEWS.md)
which have enhanced my enjoyment of the game and hopefully made it
more fun for others.

That kind of original, volunteer content was what made X3 and its
sequels so great, and by all appearances the design of X4 is as apt to
that purpose as the name. Truly this is an excellent foundation for an
ecosystem of wonderful wild, often wacky mods that no one but their
authors could ever imagine. I look forward to another decade or more
of enjoyment flying spaceships and coding up new things to do in this
game.

I am concerned however that EGOSOFT's actions and apathy may
extinguish the sparks of creativity and stifle the efforts of a
growing modding community. DocAce and Lino (who bravely spend time on
the Discord and whose efforts are appreciated) have been kind enough
to utter what are the only two official communications from EGOSOFT to
mod makers' questions we've been able to find, which while not
unreasonable are not encouraging.

The [first](https://imgur.com/tTmFK98) about porting XR ships, has not
prevented 3 or more independent and successful effort to do just
that. The people who made those efforts have received enthusiastic
thanks, then been advised to keep their work quiet. This doesn't help
build a healthy community. [Most recent ported ships thread](viewtopic.php?f=181&t=418034)


The
[second](viewtopic.php?f=181&t=418038&sid=a6d9e4 ... d#p4878144),
about UI modding and the 8 month old bug which complicates same
enormously, is the most encouraging thing yet: "It's not important."
OK, then, at least it's not lost. Good to know.

That thread prompted the creation of a slightly better workaround for
the Gnull issue, which means there are now two *unofficial* workaround
standards for potential mod makers to trip over and get correct. At
least the new one will have better documentation. Any UI or lua usage
in a mod apparently requires one to embraces the inevitable breakage
of ones work future changes.


I have suggestions as to how the current issues might be better dealt
with. There are certain to be complications I don't see, and I hope
there's better ideas out there too: I hope to gather all the ideas we
can for a happier player community and find the best ones to use.



For ports of XR ships; perhaps EGOSOFT could release a DLC ports
package, free to XR owners and some reasonable price to x4
owners. Everybody's happy and the IP holders might get further use of
their properties. Using as much of the community efforts as possible
with loud public thanks would send a nice signal to prospective
content generating volunteers that they would indeed be welcomed and
their work appreciated.

More generally, to nurture a broader mod making community, (and
thereby happier player community), EGOSOFT might create an official,
paid, Community Advocate position, who has some contact channels to
EGOSOFT representatives and can be the communication interface between
the growing modding community and the working employees, who have
things to do besides tolerate fan attitudes.

This might include responsibilities such as keeping a list of known
documentation, with pointers where people can find them: forum,
reddit, wiki, manual, steam forums, etc.

Volunteer efforts to do these things exist (and thanks to the people
who do them!). There's no way for them to publicize or co-ordinate
beyond a forum post that may not be visible long and may not be seen
by many. It's in EGOSOFT's interest to pay a curator to spread news of
these volunteer efforts and see they get the recognition they deserve.

UniTrader is incredibly helpful, a living reference and so often
willing to give his time to explain modding details and help people
implement their ideas. His contributions already merit recognition and
reward, and I hope he would accept some additional responsibilities as a
Community Advocate and receive some direct monetary compensation for
doing so.

teleportationwars
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Re: To EGOSOFT: Don't stomp the sparks, inflame the fans

Post by teleportationwars » Fri, 2. Aug 19, 22:05

I agree with this.
If we held bets (we dont), Unitrader would be the guy to hold the money. We all trust him.

The lack of a community manager has left us feeling like egosoft is a little cold.

Sometimes we are treated dismissively:
viewtopic.php?f=146&t=417815
viewtopic.php?f=180&t=417690&p=4874697#p4874697 <- I think ego even fixed this issue.
viewtopic.php?f=146&t=417673

Sometimes we are treated well:
viewtopic.php?f=146&t=417849
viewtopic.php?f=146&t=417701&start=15
viewtopic.php?f=146&t=417726&start=15

Someone should speak for or to egosoft on behalf of the community.
Every other game company I care about participates in regular communication about their goals.

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NodusCursorius
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Re: To EGOSOFT: Don't stomp the sparks, inflame the fans

Post by NodusCursorius » Sat, 3. Aug 19, 16:32

I disagree.

Disclaimer: I could spend multiple hours typing this up and exceed the word count allowance, because of how strongly I disagree, but it would invite people to burn bridges or shift things heavily into a more philosophical debate that would result in nothing being achieved. So I'll give a polite summary. I'm also not targeting anyone in specific, only addressing concepts and ideas in a general sense.

In general, gamers are bad developers and community managers are bad gamers.

Just because players want something doesn't mean that:
  • they should get it
  • it's actually what they want but are unable to describe
  • it should be higher priority than all the other issues the players are unaware of but would complain about if they personally experienced it.

Just because a community manager can act as a communication bridge between players and developers doesn't mean that:
  • there will be a response (for the above reasons)
  • the response won't be manufactured (they are hired, after all) because wording something to please a few thousand people's understanding is a nightmare
  • the community will share the same opinion over what they think should be communicated.


Not every game needs community interaction with developers. Not every developer needs open documentation for players, nor may even want it. It may not even fit with their artistic or mechanical vision of the game. These reasons could also be applied to concepts such as "games should have difficulty sliders".

But this isn't just about preference for keeping a great distance away from the community so that the developers can do the job they enjoy or implement the artistic and mechanical vision they have for the game, using everything they've learned in school and in the field - it's also about player arrogance combined with shortsightedness (or lack of empathy, pick your poison). Documentation is incredibly time consuming to punch into a more consumable format for modders that don't have the same development toolset or internal notes/stickies; ask any modder why the World of Warcraft API is still mostly volunteer work with over a decade of progress and occasional developer assistance.

Ask yourselves why the X3 and X Rebirth wikis are still largely undocumented by the playerbase's own findings.
Note: I didn't say "no documentation".

Ask yourselves why most of your own mods or home programs are lightly documented, if at all.

In an era of "petitions" from playerbases where there's severe lack of social awareness regarding how others may feel about different opinions and features, I disagree that open communication method discussed here is the solution, and find it shockingly selfish in a non-malicious way.
Note: I didn't say that communication, of any sort, is useless.
This isn't about death. This is about what you learn from death. Never hollow.

Aranov
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Re: To EGOSOFT: Don't stomp the sparks, inflame the fans

Post by Aranov » Sat, 3. Aug 19, 19:48

I agree wholeheartedly with h20dragon3.
I really feel like Ego have themselves in an ivory tower, forgetting how they got there.
I can't speak for the older games, discovering the series with X3:AP 's release, but hasn't every game since X3, maybe even X2, taken from the community?
Not that's inherently a bad thing but then to turn around and shut us out? When the fans ask for nothing but a good game and support for the community?

Egosoft (an apt name for this company now) needs to take a hard look at the successes of X3, and the failure of X:R (still negative on steam) when deciding where to take X4.
After all, a name does not make a successor. Actions do. And Ego's action have made mods and modding an afterthought. A side effect of their own laziness in programing, that the game is modifiable at all.
That if they had time and money to do so, they'd lock us out.
Then there's the return of the Modified tag, which only seems to have random people complaining about the incorrectly system flagging their saves as modified. Didn't need that for Rebirth, why do we need it here?

And NodusCursorius, that is the dumbest, and most self loathing thing I may have read on a gaming forum.
"Gamers are bad developers" !?
Then what the hell is Egosoft supposed to be? X:R was a disaster, and the entire time leading up to it Ego told us to sit tight, and politely stfu. No "Gamer" input on that.
Then they did it again for X4. And look how the ratings on Steam are dropping over time. Meanwhile, almost radio silence. We, the players, got one road map at the start of the year, 3 months after release, and nothing else.
X4's reddits been abandoned by the devs. Steam forums seems to be just a bunch of lost souls screaming in to the void. Not that we're better of here, place is DEAD. Both in dev and player comments.

And "Not every game needs community interaction with developers" !?
Watch and read some interviews with EGO devs leading up to XR. Cause that is what no community interaction leads to. Blatant lies, misconceptions, and to quote Mr.Bernd, "Grand Theft Auto in Space".

The community knows what it wants. The community Egosoft spent almost 30 years building. And then the community was flushed away for GTA in space, to appeal to the uncaring masses.
X4 is that attempt to rebuild and salvage, or at least it should be, if Ego intends to stay in this business.
But hey, can't be all bad, right? We got Ventures? Oh wait, this is the modding forum, no Ventures for us. They're actively denying paying customers features and content if they so much as fix one bug.
But Multiplayer looks to be in the pipeline. Assuming you chant "In Egosoft We trust" three times before each meal.

I do love the X series (Even Rebirth turned out merely lackluster, in the end), I really do, but sometimes Ego makes it hard to be a supporter with their apathy.
So much so I'm actually planning a tabletop role-playing campaign in with "Stars without Number" system in the setting. And honestly, rather be doing that or just playing X4 (With my XR ships, My custom sectors and a ton of other mods.)
Nodu's reply just utterly shocked me with its dismissal of complaints.
With that, I'll leave you all with one word: EgoCredits.

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X2-Illuminatus
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Re: To EGOSOFT: Don't stomp the sparks, inflame the fans

Post by X2-Illuminatus » Sat, 3. Aug 19, 21:40

Can we tone it down and focus on the topic at hand rather than going into full rampage mode, please? This would greatly benefit the discussion.

NodusCursorius is completely right with their assessment of what a community manager can do and what they cannot. The examples giving in this thread are great examples of what a Community Manager has almost no control over. The porting ship statement has always been the same for all X Games to date: You were never allowed to port all ships from a previous game to one of the following, unless you received an explicit permission from egosoft to do so. For half a year the note about the instable interface modding capabilities has been listed at the top of the Breaking changes wiki page, which is again linked in the Notice to modders announcement thread at the top of this very forum. While it's indeed a shame that this does not work, there's no chance that this topic is lost at egosoft. Developers working on different aspects of the game not knowing about a specific bug is hardly evidence of the opposite. Lino's comment in the other thread wasn't about declaring that bug as not important either, but rather telling you that there are more important ones at hand. (I tried to explain what criteria can be relevant to the decision what to spend development ressources on in that very same thread. A community manager wouldn't be able to change these.) Organising things is always a great idea, but only works as long as there are things to organise. We also already have a sticky thread, where we do list available resources and tutorials and everyone is welcome to make submissions there. And we have a wiki where people can document their findings, if they feel that the forum does not offer the means to do so.

Having said all that, a community manager may still be able to "inflame" things. Just consider that not everything you wish for will automatically come true just because there is one. Also while appreciation of one's work is always welcome, you may want to ask that someone whether they have the time and would be willing to do what you ask for, before throwing their hat in the ring. I feel doing so shows common courtesy.
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Re: To EGOSOFT: Don't stomp the sparks, inflame the fans

Post by Cg089 » Sat, 3. Aug 19, 21:45

Just to throw my two cents in here - thought I think X2-Illuminatus and NodusCursorius covered most of it. I understand why people feel like the devs could communicate better, and I don't disagree. However, the devs are also pro-modding, in my experience. For instance, I've been working on ship modding tools, and I got a massive boost from really helpful information that the devs compiled for me. And that wasn't just Lino or DocAce - I got a lot of that information from CBJ. And that documentation they sent me will be out shortly - it's taken me a while to get what I want to done on the tools (and on polishing up the documentation) because I've been busy with my day job, but that's on me, not them.

I think if they had more time, they'd love to have full documentation for modders, etc - but doing those things take time, and Egosoft is pretty small, and thus they only have so many hours to do these things.

So don't forget to give the devs some credit. Yes, they're human, and humans are fallible, but if you reach out to them with questions and are polite and respectful and patient, I think you'd find that you get a response - maybe not the answer you wanted, or as soon as you wanted, but a fair and reasonable response. Be thankful for what they have given us - a hugely complex space sim with support for multiple languages, modding, and more - in an era where many studios are preferring to focus on microtransactions and other exploitative practices rather than content.

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Killjaeden
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Re: To EGOSOFT: Don't stomp the sparks, inflame the fans

Post by Killjaeden » Fri, 27. Sep 19, 01:49

h2odragon3 wrote:
Fri, 2. Aug 19, 19:54
volunteer content was what made X3 and its sequels so great
there was a lot of volunteer content, because there where volunteers. How do you get volunteers? Step1. Make a great game. Step2. Have a large audience. Step3. Make it easy for volunteers to do work.
X3 was "easier" to mod because of several guides and tools made for it by the community. X3 was "easier" to get into because not much changed from X2. Still wasnt easy, and several people bounced of of it, because it's annoying if you want to do something, but have to dig for a pile of half-truths, "maybe's", and guides written by people who have never written a guide before (didactical catastrophe) - looking at my own guides for X3, they are simply put - baad.
TLDR - if things go the same way - It may not be until X5 or X6 that you will finally see a lot of good content - if Egosoft doesn't finally step in proper. If XR hadn't cleansed the community of many volunteers it might have looked different.
NodusCursorius wrote:
Sat, 3. Aug 19, 16:32
In general, gamers are bad developers and community managers are bad gamers.
Just because players want something doesn't mean that [...]
In general, players dont mod. In general, and collectively, people are stupid. That doesn't mean anything however and certainly doesn't justify disregarding opinions and suggestions just because they are "no developer". Saying modders are bad game developers is a dangerous statement. Many a game developer you find in game studios these days where (or still are) game developers ... If someone thinks he/ someone else is smarter or better than everyone else, he is the one who's stupid ... and that goes for all sides.
You don't need to be a mechanical engineer to make good suggestions for improving the ergonomics and handling of a machine - things the mechanical engineer wish he'd thought of. There are enough stories how engineers and designers fell flat on their noses, thinking they where smarter than "the simple people". Its the exact same for game development.
NodusCursorius wrote:
Sat, 3. Aug 19, 16:32
Ask yourselves why the X3 and X Rebirth wikis are still largely undocumented by the playerbase's own findings.
As far as i'm aware the "official" wiki was created after the fact, that is after X3's prime. Pretty sure it was after X3AP, though i'm not 100% certain, but certainly not much before that. All relevant info about X3 you find on other websites before that wiki was a thing. Argonopedia, x-lexicon, etc. Not quite a fair comparison then.
NodusCursorius wrote:
Sat, 3. Aug 19, 16:32
Ask yourselves why most of your own mods or home programs are lightly documented, if at all.
Bad comparison. Because mods are in the very most cases not continued by anyone other than the author himself. Therefore in most cases it is a waste of time. Mods dont do anything new. So there is nothing new to learn that wasnt already in vanilla. And if it is, the original author is 90% of the time on the hotwire to help. Documentation is necessary to learn how it works. I've barely seen any modder who didnt post his new findings for other modders to see and kept the knowledge for themself.
Furthermore mods dont make profit from their documentation. Egosoft does however - mods increase a game's value and longevity.

___________________________

Egosoft got lucky with modding community for X2 and X3. Particularly X3.
Did Egosoft release any modding tools, apart from the x3-universe ingame editor and ingame script editor? IIrc all the other modding tools for X2 and 3 came from the community. Including most of the documentation of basically almost everything that is/was available (before links dying of old age). Egosoft barely raised a finger for most of this and benefitted directly from it (X3TC and AP+ community update).
So yes, Egosoft got lucky there - will they get lucky again? Who knows. I wouldnt bet on it.

Would a community manager increase changes of getting lucky again? Nah. Talk is cheap. If nobody can walk the walk, it's worthless. He's not going to talk "the community" into making modding tools.
Because this is a thing of chance and luck to inspire someone who knows how to program these tools, into working on a pretty unexciting and dry piece of software, in order to enable others to MAYBE work on cool new things, that may see light of day when the one who programmed the tools already lost interest in the game itself. And again for people to work on cool new things. The community manager isnt going to talk the modding tools into existance on egosofts side either. We were asking for the proper X3 model converter from Egosoft, we got the "something something license something something" excuse. Asking for XR model converter from egosoft got the same "something something license something something" excuse once more... i didnt follow X4 modding closely but i doubt its any different now. Licenses can in many cases be in many cases re-negotiated (with concessions on both sides, naturally). Forgive my ignorance but after 10 years and 2 game engines of the same "nah, license" it feels more like "nah, not worth the hazzle". Feel free to guide my feelings.

You want to see more, better and nicer mods/modding? Hire a tool programer to write modding tools. Maybe on a contract basis. With a license fit for distributing. From blender to X4 engine. Or from general 3d format to X4 engine. 1-2 weeks work, maybe. Its not bloody rocket science. People are writing blender plugins for everything nowadays. Even Arma 3 got one that can port directly into the engine (despite the existance of a rudimentary 3D editor for that game). From a volunteer.

People crave new ships, new toys. And since there is barely anything whatsoever (... modding tools...), they turn to XR (and i guess X3) ships... When it gets denied by egosoft, because, ??? reasons - is it really surprising people are miffed? X2 ships where allowed to be in X3TC, just saying...
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