Dear Devs,
Conan Exiles is a great Game und especially the PC Community helped a lot to get this game from Early Access to final release.
One of the most important reasons for me and many others to support this game is the possibility to play with mods. Right now there is a great Modding community which is getting bigger and bigger. These Mods are enriching this game and help to increase longtime motivation for all the people playing this game. The success of these mods (Pippi, Emberlight, Savage Steel Mod, Jungle Building Set and many many more and probably many more to come in future ) make Conan Exiles even more successful.
Actually there is one thing which threatens this really positive upgrowth - it’s the 4,5 GB limit for the mod database. People with a mod db near to 4,5 GB or beyond that are reporting lags and serverkicks. Right now the Modders are doing everything to reduce their modsizes but therefore they accept to be limited in creativeness and possibilities, possibilties the game itself could use for further success.
But 4,5 GB is a very low limit, by so many high quality mods the people are reaching this limit very quickly.
I know you are supporting the Modding community and you are helping a lot that the Modders can be creative and successful.
So I bet you, in the name of the pc and Modding community, please do anything to increase this limit up much further.
Thanx BiJay
Simply take a look around, look at all those great stunning creation in the workshop and else. There simply so many great mods, awesome skills, and passion for this game, that you devs, can not ignore !
I know many devs tried and loved many of this and other mods, and have seen the great potential and love shared in the community.
So please, yes, this is realy an important thing for the CE modding community, and will make this game still greater, this over many years.
I disagree. The bigger doesn’t mean the better. The mod needs to break down to small parts. Nowadays, the mod developer tries to put everything in one mod. Let’s see the Pippi mod. The Pippi mod is famous for User and Server management purpose. If you check the features, you will be surprised. It has a Chat system, Kit system, Command system, Announcement system, Warp system, MOTD system, Rule System, Player System, Dynamic Rank System, and Pippi Toolsets. The Pippi Toolsets has NPC Spawners, Globs (for customized lighting), Loot Spawners (creating customized loot chest), Building dye system, Portals (for teleport), Wallpapers (you can load images from the web into your game.), Music box (Steam audio from internet). I want to remind you that this mod is for server and user MANAGEMENT mod. Music box feature can be a separated mod. Wallpapers feature can be a separate mod. Portals can be a separated mod. You might think what is wrong with putting everything in a mod. It can potentially cause mod conflict. more memory & CPU consumtion for nothing, forcing a player to have unwanted features so limiting player’s choice. If one feature generates the error, the entire mod becomes down too. Similarly, you buy an all-in-one computer, and if one part of the computer doesn’t work, you have to send an entire computer to the A/S center. It is a bad idea. For right now, I don’t see any point to increase mod limit.
You took the wrong example. Pippi has only 41,3 MB. But I know what you want to say. As I said: Right now the Modders are doing everything to reduce their modsizes. Nevertheless also you will reach this limit in future.
The larger the mod, the more issues it causes. One major issue is in MP servers. If a mod starts exceeding 500MB (0.5GB) you run into an issue when a player logs in. What happens is all active NPC behaviors glitch. Sometimes they even despawn.
The biggest problem is when dragging a thrall back to a wheel. When such a player logs in, the dragged thrall disappears. You see this happen with mods like Immerse and Thrall Wars and other large mods.
The best bet for mod authors is to keep their mods under 400MB until the new modloading system.
Doesn’t really matter if they split the mods up if it’s a graphical mod. Like a building set, since it will need the texture assets either way. Since that’s the whole point of the mod…
Your example as mentioned before has very little assets, it’s mainly just text/code.
Anyhooo, the mod system needs improvements either way. And hopefully something that will be worked on soonish.
Ill try to explain some of the dependencies between big mods size and Server lags and the always shown mod size cap.
First: There is no mod size that is causing any issues like server lags or something similar and there is no reason why there should be any cap.
You need to differ between dedicated server and listening server (coop mode). A dedicated server cant run any visual or audio code even if he wanted, because the unreal engine modules to handle them are not loaded. Listening servers need to take over the task from client and server, so they are different.
And texture files are not part of the streamed data, so they dont care in general and thats why the filesize did not mather.
What mather is the idea of these mods. The idea is to give the players the opportunity to build more beatifull places. But this will cause more objects in the renderdistance of the clients.
The render distance is a volume arround the ingame Player where objects are loaded (streamed) from server to the client. The more objects in render distance the more bandwidth is used. If clients load more data as they are allowed to do (because of bandwidth restrictions) they will start lagging and they may have moreimportant variables which are running out of time. If clients are running out of time, the server will close the connection and start a reconnection process wich is causing the micro disconnects.
This reconnection process is part of the cheat prevention so there is no way to turn this system of or allow a longer timespan to run into the out of time state.
The major reason for any connection issues is the used bandwidth and the main goal of the modders is to optimize the bandwidth usage. But this is not an easy task and its not funcoms bad, too.
Most modders aren´t professional programmers and most professional programmers modding aren´t really familliar with unreal engines blueprint Scripting language (which is great, but you had to learn how to…) So optimizing anything is a learning process which sometimes goes wrong.
And the documentation of the unreal engine is not optimized for blueprinting. In the opposite, at many times the solutions for problems are described in c++ because you are more flexible compared to blueprints. That means for modders, they need to find their own solution to handle their stuff.
Its really important for modders to get feedback if something seems to be wrong with their mod. There are some reasons for errors in the development and build process of mods and most modders are running into them sometime. So it will help everybody if you report issues.
But in most cases, server issues are caused by not enough server power and it just seems that the biggest mod is causing the issues. (I repeat myself: “the server did not run visuals and there is no texture Streaming”)
UE is using only 1 CPU Core if its running on Windows server. <- UE. Funcom has to deal with it.
HDD instead of SDD (at the server) may cause issues if there are to many database requests.
Bandwidth,… Bandwidth,… Bandwidth…
As a summary:
If you want a smooth Gameplay on your server,… you need a server with reasonable Hardware. If you rent a cheap dedicated CE server it might be possible that this server is optimized to Play the vanilla game.
“New modloading system?” Please tell me more about this!
I do feel it’s important for modders to strive to make their mods as “lightweight” as possible regardless of whether or not Funcom ever expands that 4.5 limit.
However, there really are some problems with the game that, while modders must grapple with them, are on FC’s end. Like the fact the game itself is really only optomized for a max of 40 players, making dreams of 100 player servers just that, only a dream. 70 player servers are prone to truly terrible lag and even with 40 players all online many people report lag issues. I really do think rendering is a large part of the problem so the more players and the more building there is… the worse the lag and other issues. Until FC figures that out we’re all pretty much at their mercy and it’s a brave modder who forges ahead under these conditions.
That said, the quality of mods overall is very uneven. Standouts like Pippi and Emberlight let us know that really great things CAN be achieved though and that, under current circumstances, making a mod as lightweight as possible is Job #1.
I’m of two minds about “breaking up” mods. On the one hand, a mod that includes a lot of things, it’s probably easier for the modders themselves to make sure everything works together by streamlining it all into one mod. OTOH, as a player, I really do like having gameplay mods, placeables mods, and character alteration and emote mods as separate things. There are a LOT of mods I’d love to have a tiny portion of but am no way interested in all the things that come along with them, especially in the gameplay department.
Thank you very much @ShadowCMD for your comments here. I understood your intention: “Modsize doesnt really matters - its a matter of bandwidth, amount of placeables rendering in the scenario and hardware. The 4,5 GB mark doesnt exist, its fairy tale.”
I dont know from where I got this rumor about this mark. It was on several discords. The existence of such a possible mark was really annoying to me. Therefore I made this thread - to discuss it with the community. But as you see this rumor seems to be very obstinately.
On their roadmap they indicated they want to add a new modloading system that will automatically launch the mods when you load into a server. So a new player to a server won’t have to adjust their modlist order anymore.
I assume this will change how mods are loaded into the game. The size limit may go away. Large mods may stop causing issues.
…or we may see some new issues pop up and new restrictions. No idea though. I’m hoping for the best.
