Modular Modding

This is more a meta-post rather then any concrete ideas for any of the mods you guys are developing. I’ve expressed these views before, a long time ago in a forum far, far away (atari forums 🙂 ), but I thought I might hit my target market better by posting them here again.

You guys have done some superlative stuff, especially with regard the Middlestates cluster and the (seemingly) large chunks of code that accompanies it. I tip my hat to you good sirs.

Yet there is not alot to show to non-modders for your efforts, which is a shame because I do believe that you have code/ideas that could be packaged as a mod right now and distributed. Frankly, I think this is a paradigm more modders should adopt – release smaller, self contained mods that can be enabled/disabled at the discretion of the end user, rather then forcing them to “buy” into a gigantic mod that adds/modifies stuff that the user liked as is. Take, for example, Freelancer and its modding community. Some mods are pretty good in what they have achieved, but are ruined (IMO) by forcing users to take the good with the bad – some mods have battleship encounters but also give you star wars fighters or flying saucer models on top of that. Ideally, they should be packaged separately – this is the concept of the modular mod. A positive example of this paradigm would be Flamineo’s Damage Mod (there are many others), which worked well within the confines of the game without adding lots of craziness, like the freighter-carrier in the unleashed mod.

What I’m trying to get at here is that maybe you should step back and see what ideas/code you have now could float on its own with some work and perhaps go about releasing it piecemeal, rather then working towards a hugh uber-release that might suffer from infinite deadlines (thusly denying the public the fruits of your labour). I am a programmer myself – I can appreciate that some concepts cannot be extracted from the superstructure of supporting code, I’m sure alot of your ideas could be modified to fit into vanilla EoC.

[+1 to me for using the word paradigm]