For some bizarre reason, one that makes Bethesda look like a benevolent and intelligently run company, Funcom have made it impossible to modify the DLC items. There’s no meritable reason for it; if it’s an issue of people getting access to the DLC without paying, merely make a serverside check that handles that. If it’s an issue of essentially making a crack, that’s readily doable anyway for every Steam game. So why are we not allowed to modify the content we paid for?
According to users on the Discord, Scooper will be releasing a row editor that will facilitate that. But I can’t find any details on it, the status of it’s implementation, nor it’s limitations.
My reason for inquiring, is that I was developing an overhaul that completely removed the leveling mechanics, and removed any semblance of tiered equipment by making it all into three classes; light, medium, and heavy, with the stats entirely dependent on their class rather than tier.
Of course, that requires me to edit every item, recipe, and a moderate number of feats. But without the ability to modify DLC data, I cannot continue working on the overhaul. It’s literally impossible, due to the arbitrary and meaningless restrictions by the developers, to mod the DLC.
When Funcom stops having psychopaths as shareholders and running it’s marketing department.
I’ve stopped trying to tell them to make a flawless Atlantean Sword and to make it available to all, but it seems it’s not up to the people who care. It’s all up to psychopaths who pay these folks to “deal with it”.
A fair question that may have been answered before.
All the DLCs are paid for and therefore ‘locked down’, never to be opened to modders.
Modders are also not able to include any of the DLC items in their personal mods and therefore also cannot edit the DLCs themselves.
If DLCs were not locked down then I imagine there would be a flood of ‘same-as but called something different’ build pieces that would remove any need for paid content.
But the base game itself is paid for as well, yet we can mod that. If it’s an issue of DLC items being freely available, that’s already doable; all there needs to be is an admin with the DLC, and they can just spawn whole stacks of the items in a few seconds. Put them in a freely available vault, and now everyone has access to the DLC without owning it.
That would actually be the smart approach; if the server admin has the DLC, then mods containing DLC data (textures, meshes, even just paths) cannot be loaded on the server. if the admin does have the DLC, they can.
So the answer is just pure farcical ineptitude and stupidity.
It’s just bizarre. Their reasoning doesn’t even hold up to their own design decisions. It’s like the project lead is emperor Claudius but the bumbling half-witted act isn’t an act.
That attitude is not going to win you much sympathy, let alone a snowball’s chance in hell of changing it.
You are right about one thing, which is that Funcom is already very generous with what they allow people to do with the DLC (including sharing it with people who haven’t bought it), but to build on that and somehow turn it into an entitled ragepost about how you want more is just a bad look.
Feel free to now label me a fanboy or white knight (I know your type) if that makes you feel better.
What’s generous about that? It’s pretty much a standard practice. Most games I have played with a similar system in place do it. They let you give away or trade the weapons, and only the missions themselves require you to own the DLC (crafting your own would be the equivalent of the missions in this example).
The really generous companies even let your friends play the missions for free as long as you are playing with them at the time. (If they want to go back and play or farm it by themselves they have to buy their own copy.)
And I am not trying to bash them. I am just pointing out that following a standard practice is not the same thing as being generous. Being generous means you are going above and beyong the norm in what you are giving.
If they don’t want their utter idiocy to be pointed out, and their ineptitude for sticking to it when there’s no justification for it, they have had ample time to backtrack and do something in a competent or not-stupid way. They haven’t, so I’ve no sympathy for them.
Hell, I paid for the game, and they advertise extensive modding support. But not for DLC which I paid for, you can’t mod that in any shape or form.
If pointing out the problem makes me the problem, that’s just pathetic.
I’m more than willing to be corrected. If there is actual justification for the inept and stupid DRM that goes against the whole point of having mod support, I’ll take my words back and apologize.
Exactly @Mikey - and to be fair, I imagine a lot of people that paid for DLC would get very salty, and perhaps litigious, should FunCom do some weird turnabout. It’s kind of like appearing at the doors of Microsoft and Apple stating that, because they have been successful, that they want all the other paid-software free. La-La–Land
(not as if the DLC’s are priced too highly - though I shouldn’t say that in case someone at FunCom gets any bright ideas to increase fees…) lol
Oh I don’t think the core argument - that DLC should be moddable - is entirely without merit. It’s the way it’s presented with such entitlement and anger that makes this thread annoying.
You make it sound like we don’t pay for the DLC. I paid for the product, and the developers have made it so that I can’t use the product as advertised.
If this was a free game with free DLC made by interns on their free time, you might have a point to argue entitlement and anger. But this is a paid product, that we have paid for, that we can’t work with.
@Reprehensible
The main reason is: The ability to mod the DLC content is disabled, otherwise this DLC content could be made available to players who have not purchased this content by modders. This is related to the mod possibilities of the Unreal engine. Funcom wants to avoid this, which is understandable, since the revenue from the DLCs should serve the further development of the game.
Maybe someday the DLCs will be integrated into the maingame for free. At the latest then they will be available for modding.
But following that logic, is that we can mod the base game resources just fine. We can even take the models, animations, blueprints, data tables, textures, and shaders, and use them in other games. So that justification doesn’t hold water; if it’s an issue of protecting resources, the base game resources aren’t protected at all.
The proper way to do it is to have a server side check that compares the DLC’s resources to that in mods. Check the SHA2 hashes and paths, if they’re the same and the DLC is not present on the server owner’s account, close down the server.
Lets make a mod:
I - the modder - take the BP of the sandstone foundation. I make a copy and then I give this new BP the mesh and material of the Turan Foundation. Now I can cook the mod and publish it in the workshop with the name, lets say : Arabian style CE Mod - Now everbody on PC can use the Turan Style without purchasing it.
This is the case Funcom wants to avoid - on private servers, in SP and MP. You can see: the server side check wont prevent this.
Yes it can, all they have to do is check all the mod’s resources when the server is loaded, and check the SHA2 hash of all the resources in the mod, as well as the file paths. If any of them are the same as what’s in the DLC, and the feat & item table entries that use the DLC resources don’t have the proper DLC package value in their data table entry, stop the server from running.
They have the source code, this isn’t some impossible task. Couple of for loops, a couple of string arrays that have 1:1 indexes of hashes and row names, and they could readily solve that issue.
If they genuinely cared about non-DLC owners getting the DLC, they won’t let other players give non-DLC owners DLC items. As it currently is, an admin can just make a blueprint that spawns the items, and hands them out to all players regardless of whether or not they own the DLC.
But I am a very clever Modder, so I am aware that Funcom might check the file paths. I will copy all the needed materials and meshes to a new path and rename them as I rename the new BPs which will not be related to the BPs of the DLC Stuff. Funcom will not be able to control this.
