Here is my main concern with the mod support. I went to the discord and looked at all the news and the dev gallery. You will see things like special brick grids, water graphics, overlapping bricks, player emotes, the in's and out's of the options menus. These are all very cool and impressive. But it seems your biggest source of criticism is skepticism surrounding modding, so shouldn't we be seeing something related to that? The closest thing I saw was a re-imagined state system, something that obviously came about to support the weapons update. If the developers have been working on it since the beginning, shouldn't there be something to show, even if it is a little too technical for the average user? Have I missed something?
I'm not on the Brickadia dev team, nor am I on their test team. So I can't speak in absolutes about their code, for or against. Speaking candidly, it's actually pretty frustrating how little you get from the horses mouth. I've heard a
lot of talk regarding their plans for modding. It's not very reassuring to hear "We are gonna do modding, shut up about it" over and over again. Would like to see something. If that's not appropriate or possible, fine, but until then I'm reserving my skepticism that mod support is even a priority.
And if it isn't a priority, it's understandable. I don't think anyone has any disillusions about Brickadia being a highly professional product being worked on by people with tons of experience, it's not always logistically reasonable to start developing at such a complicated level. I'm not going to lambaste the developers or their supporters if mod support is taking a back-seat to some other things. I'm not trying to get everyone to go throw their Brickadia keys in dumpster fire. But most of us understand that the longer it takes a back-seat, the more tedious and complicated it's going to become. Mutability is very different from things like guns and option menus and graphics and other things that have comparatively high cohesion. It's something that branches out and touches every part of your system, meaning it has to be accounted for every time the system is changed, so it should stand to reason we'd have something to look at by now. If that's not the case, we'd like to know why.
you guys basically just want the developers to turn Unreal Engine into Torque.
Not really. I think a lot of people just wanted you to admit that Unreal Engine is polymorphically inferior to Torque. Which I think you did, so thanks. And I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Like you said, I think Unreal brings a lot of other benefits to the table, but it's modding ability is not really one of them. That's a big enough problem to warrant discussion when talking about Blockland's spiritual successor.
Edit
I'd like to clarify my statement that you responded to: I'm personally excited to leave the idiosyncrasies of Torque behind to develop on a, albeit less convenient, more modernized platform. But I'd like it if the community were directly involved in this process and were able to influence it to better suit everyone. When Brickadia comes out, Blocklanders are going to flock to Brickadia, leaving everything we made for Blockland behind. If modding for Brickadia is not intuitive or requires a level of skill most Blockland developers don't possess, the greater community is not going to understand that.
...incredibly nuanced discussion ... mindlessly tell people to use X design pattern all the time because it's the ONLY way to do anything.
Game development is nuanced, definitely. It's actually not nuance I possess. But game development is just a level of abstraction of software engineering. The great thing about UE4 and Unity is that you don't
have to be a software engineer to make games with them, but any game developer worth their salt has done their research in the area. I do actually have faith the Brickadia dev team is going to come out with acceptable modding ability come hell or high water. Because it's absolutely necessary. Everybody is saying that the Brickadia dev team has been developing mod support and keeping it in mind from the beginning, that's a great thing! Can't wait to see some of the fruits of that labor.