Beardtrick

The new berry system is frustrating and crunchy. By that i mean; The texturing of the bushes make seeing ripeness almost impossible at a distance. It discourages idle foraging due to promoting checking the tooltip for "traits" and the above issue. Cuttings don't stack unless they match in traits, which means more inventory management woes. Having another state "dormant" and "ripening" reduces the total number of "ripe" bushes on world gen. Having to wait 20 years to no longer use fertilizer seems arbirary, as do the traits themselves. I'm not saying that the changes are entirely bad, i do perfer the idea of taking cuttings and not being able to transport an entire bush. And with more consideration the texturing of the bushes could bring gameplay out of non-diagetic tooltips that feel immersion breaking into diagetic worldspace. Please, don't use "it'll make the game too easy" to explain away poor design for the sake of balance, especially since the community is so practiced at the game that almost anything you throw at them will never be a "challenge".

Okay a few things to unpack: Adding code direct vs informing design. Consent to have code released from mod authors and into the hands of the developers. Focusing on the second point; I agree with Kulze, that an opt-in option would rule out issues of consent: An Upstreaming Repository Anego could maintain a public repo where mod authors submit features they think belong in core. Only mods intended for upstreaming would go there. Contributors would agree to hand over code and waive their existing rights in favour of eventual integration. Anego would decide what fits the game’s future vision, so even popular mods could be rejected if they don’t align with the team’s plans. It's important to note that a seperate repository is required, and not just a badge in vsmoddb, since we'd want automated testing that would be hard to ahieve from within a php website. A brilliant point to make, I think that in this case Anego would set the terms in the licencing agreement for contributing to the upstreaming repository, it's really upto the mod author to agree/disagree. It would be unfair to force a mod developer to contribute, and I couldn't agree more that some would expect compensation and that Anego wouldn't be prepared to pay. I just hope people here are modding for the love of the game, and not personal gain. I would expect Anego to not compensate monitarily at all, instead they might offer some devs a job. I don't personally like the idea of monetised mods, but feel free to disagree. On the first point; Adding code direct vs informing design. As to whether the mod is deployed "as-is" or "informs design" should be left to the desision of the development team. It's their game, and unless they design the CI tests and a method to acually fold-in code, then it's unlikely they'd ever use code "as-is". On making the trasisition from Mod Author led to Game developer lead: Proving out Mods as Modules with CI Tests Instead of merging upstream mods immediately, selected community mods could ship bundled with official releases using the existing mod API. This keeps features isolated, easy to remove, and low risk. Lightweight CI could automatically build mods and run basic load tests to ensure they start and register systems correctly. Hosting these tests on GitHub would prevent mods that fail on updates from reaching release. Only a small number of mods should be included this way, since CI tests would need to check compatibility between them. If a bundled mod works well for a release or two and is popular with players, it could be gradually folded into core systems. If it doesn’t, it can be removed without extra maintenance. Upstreamed mods would retain visible credit in the game’s internal credits, with ownership transfer agreements already in place via the upstream repository consent form.

Community Driven Development Folding Hi all, this is my first post here. TL;DR "I’m interested in whether Vintage Story could ever fold community mod ideas back into the core game, similar to how other studios have learned from or adopted mod-driven development. I’m also curious how both Anego Studios and existing modders would feel about that kind of collaboration." I’m a game developer myself, though not a particularly successful one. While studying Computer Game Development at university between 2014 and 2017, I wrote a whitepaper looking at community-driven development and how studios might legitimately incorporate ("fold") community-created work back into a game’s core design. That included things like mod‑to‑core DevOps and QA pipelines, social or monetary reward systems, and EULA changes that allow a parent studio to safely and fairly adopt community ideas or code. I’d need to rewrite it if there was any interest, but the core ideas are still relevant! Some well-known examples of games influenced by community mods or where modded content became part of an official design: Integrating mods into the core game can help reduce development time and allow new features to be added more quickly, because active modding communities can extend a game’s functionality and address community needs that developers might otherwise have to build from scratch themselves. Research on modding communities shows that supporting modders can help meet the rapidly growing and changing needs of players, potentially saving developers time and money and improving the overall game experience. (Daniel Lee et al., Building the Perfect Game – An Empirical Study of Game Modifications; https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.07528) A monetarily driven reward system (like the one present in Roblox) doesn’t really feel appropriate or realistic for Vintage Story in my opinion , But I was wondering whether Anego Studios has ever considered working more directly with the community to bring mod-originated features into the core game? or, has anyone in the studio already pitched the idea of a reward system and ethical changes to the terms of service that improves the game's future development cycles? I’d also be interested to hear how existing modders feel about this idea. In particular, how comfortable would people be with their code or concepts being used to help shape the future development of Vintage Story? Would you expect to be compensated, and how would you feel with a change to the terms of service? Thank you for listening to my TED talk.