Looking for a few technical answers

[Nolenthar]

But please, let your colleagues know that often community simply can't find any way to contact developers and questions remain unanswered for months and years. And forum is really the best medium for it, since it allows participation of community as a whole. So if some developers (especially engine developers) could find at least some time periodically - it would be really great.

Having been around gaming for a while, I have never seen a developer go in the forum and reply to the community unless this is part of his job. In other terms, if the community manager (which is, I think, a role that might not even exist given the relative low amount of answers with a RED tag) specifically asks one developer to reply.

The reason for this is really simple : communication and backlash. Studying The Witcher 3 is a good example of what gaming communities have become. Aligned with the time of social media and sensational article, anything that would be written by a dev or an official would be used/reused and reused against them eventually. That is the cost we have inflicted on ourselves by being bully customers and self-entitled individuals.

This kind of relationship, where developers happily follow the forum, answer the would be modders can only exist nowadays in small gaming community, generally coming from Indie games, with basically very low resources and very little amount of customers.

Fortunately for us, this is no longer what CDPR is (maybe never was, but surely was more this type when TW1 was released).

As much as we'd like things to be like this, any person working in a developing company knows developers seldom talks directly to customers. Expecting a developer to roam the forum on his free time, and answer a demanding, unhappy and disappointed community is a bit naive.

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

This kind of relationship, where developers happily follow the forum, answer the would be modders can only exist nowadays in small gaming community,

I saw that happening with big enough studios like inXile and Larian. Participation of developers in the community there is driven by their availability, not by PR bans and such. And from what @Vinthir said, it sounds like it's more of a time lack issue here as well, than actual ban on participation.

Fortunately for us, this is no longer what CDPR is (maybe never was, but surely was more this type when TW1 was released).

I wouldn't call developments that cause reduction in communication to be fortunate. But again, it's not a function of size really. It's up to the studio's approach in general.

 

[PrincessMassacre]

@Vinthir

couldn't you just pay a developer to engage with the community? or should we start a community fund?

btw, will modkit be fixed for next dlc, or do we still have to rely on 3rd party tools?

as per marcin momot: there will be no additional mod support... just wondering if what is already available will be fixed.

or was he referring to the fact that it will be left in a broken state, such that it is?

 

[Gilrond-i-Virdan]

couldn't you just pay a developer to engage with the community? or should we start a community fund?

Usually, that's what community managers are for. They track such kind of subjects and direct developers to them. Or at least they are supposed to. Normally they are being paid to do it.

 

[Garrison72]

couldn't you just pay a developer to engage with the community? or should we start a community fund?

That's Marcin and Burza's job, of course not on a technical level.

I think Vinthr's made it clear though- untill studio managers hire staff to create a toolkit, the rest are busy making new content and all interaction is therefore voluntary and on their own time. Not exactly a promising future for modding, but it's where we stand.

 

[PrincessMassacre]

@Garrison72
@Vinthir

well, they did promise to deliver some mod tools. unfortunately, they are all broken.

- wcc_lite doesn't export .redswf, must use sarcen's w3edit.
- wcc_lite doesn't extract/compress .w3strings, must use remr's w3strings encoder.
- wcc_lite crashes with Voice Starvation, and produces other errors.
- wcc_lite complains about collision cache, and appears to idle.
- wcc_lite may generate 'ghost' files/folders when it crashes.
- wcc_lite produces excess disk activity for minutes after it crashes.
- wcc_lite does not export scripts, simply crashes. although they are provided.
- wcc_lite refers to itself as 'wcc', and the commandline help is outdated.
- scriptstudio stack trace and break points do not function, and crashes.
- scriptstudio mod creation often crashes, creates ghost files, etc...
- scriptstudio copies mods to the wrong folder called 'local' in game files, crashing.
- scriptstudio crashes unless redscm.dll file is renamed/removed.
- both wcc_lite/scriptstudio documentation is incomplete and outdated.

 

[ReptilePZ]

Ah, I see the questions have been answered and instructions on how to contact CDPR have been provided. Time to close this one