Mission/Campaign Creators - Please respond to this poll about using 3rd party mods in your content

[TEMPEST.114]

I've spent the last 18 months learning lua and the scripting engine/dcs to build a superscript, designed for mission creators and campaign creators.

I think we can all agree that DCS is SEVERELY lacking in Civilian Aircraft/Animated civilian humans/Ships and other assets, but civilian aircraft primarily.

There are some truly amazing modders out there making amazing work for free that really enhance the kind of missions DCS can run.

Here are my favourites in no order:

Military Aircraft Mod                          
Civilian Aircraft Mod                          
CJS SuperBug AI Tanker                         
Civilian Objects, Ships, Vehicles and Farms Mod
Infantry Unit - Animated Pilot Mod             

 

My question is how many of you use these mods, or others to enhance your missions?

[TEMPEST.114]

If anyone picks 'do not use any mods' would you mind leaving a comment as to why? Is it the size of the files that you'd need to share to players? Is it that you don't know who your players are so you can't get them to ensure they have the mods before joining your public server? Is it that you don't see any value in the content of the mods or something else? 

Thanks!

[Rudel_chw]

On 4/1/2024 at 10:20 AM, Elphaba said:

Here are my favourites in no order:

Military Aircraft Mod                          
Civilian Aircraft Mod                          
CJS SuperBug AI Tanker                         
Civilian Objects, Ships, Vehicles and Farms Mod
Infantry Unit - Animated Pilot Mod             

 

I employ user Mods mostly on missions that I edit for my own use, on missions I plan to share I strive to not employ any Mods, tough it sometimes can't be helped.

 

My favourites, for Modern era, are:

 

a) For scenery:

Massun's 92 asset pack (but not the last version 3, I use v2.1)

VPC Airfield objects Mod

Civil Aircraft Mod & Jet Twins by Western_JPN

476th Weapons Range Mod

 

b) For AI Units

Frenchpack

Military Assets Packs, by Current Hill

Military Aircraft Mod

Several soviet AI, like Tu-4, Su-15, Tu-214

F-80C

F-84G

 

c) Flyable aircrafts

Saab Sk60

OV-10

UH-60L

A-4E

 

[TEMPEST.114]

24 minutes ago, Rudel_chw said:

Military Assets Packs, by Current Hill

I haven't heard of that one - it's amazing. Thanks for the tip!

[cfrag]

A Mod requires that the receiving audience also have that mod installed. I write missions for everyone, and thus avoid mods.

[HungryCoyote]

FYI, you can edit the mission in text editor and remove Required mods. Then people can join server even if they don't have the mods installed. This is for aircraft, not tried with other mods. I do this on my servers that have the Hercules, Blackhawk and Bronco mods.  

[Exorcet]

I never use mods as I aim to make vanilla DCS missions for maximum compatibility and ease of use. I also like to have as much control over the content that I create as possible, so even when it comes to stuff like Lua scripts I'll prefer to write my own rather than use someone else's, just so I understand as much as possible what is going on under the hood.

  

On 4/5/2024 at 4:48 PM, cfrag said:

A Mod requires that the receiving audience also have that mod installed. I write missions for everyone, and thus avoid mods.

This basically.

Edited April 12, 2024 by Exorcet

[TEMPEST.114]

On 4/5/2024 at 9:48 PM, cfrag said:

A Mod requires that the receiving audience also have that mod installed. I write missions for everyone, and thus avoid mods.

But if you provide a download link with the mod ready for OvGME to install, doesn't that negate this problem? 

[Exorcet]

39 minutes ago, Elphaba said:

But if you provide a download link with the mod ready for OvGME to install, doesn't that negate this problem? 

Just from my own experience on the other end, meaning as an end user, I tend to avoid modifying my games unless I feel a real need to. I appreciate when things are kept simple and I may avoid content that require mods even if the extra steps are simple.

I'll also add that I intend for some missions to be modified by the end user if desired, which is probably simplified by leaving mods off the table.

[TEMPEST.114]

I find it sad that so many mission types just can't be made without 3rd party mods and yet so few mission creators seem to make use of them. Certainly far less that the users heaping praise and gratitude in the mod channels and threads. 

I can think of a few missions I made that were so fun, challenging and realistic, that are just impossible with vanilla DCS and it's lack of civilian aircraft, ships, vehicles and non-military animated humans. 

It's just a real shame I seem to be alone in this.

Edited April 12, 2024 by Elphaba

[PawlaczGMD]

I don't think you realize the mess that this would create. Firstly, people do not expect and are not willing to install a mod manager and multiple mods to play a mission. But even if they did, imagine maintaining it. Your campaign is then dependent on 3rd party amateur mods. What if they stop working? You have no control over this. Mods also cause weird bugs and crashes all over the place. Campaigns don't. And if you're talking about a paid campaign, will you be refunding or otherwise taking actual responsibility if any of these issues occur?

My experience with free campaigns that require mods is that none of them worked for me, as the mod was defunct or caused some issue or crash. I am personally willing to try installing mods for a good campaign, but it spells trouble for me - something will not work, so is it even worth it?

[TEMPEST.114]

4 hours ago, PawlaczGMD said:

I don't think you realize the mess that this would create. Firstly, people do not expect and are not willing to install a mod manager and multiple mods to play a mission. But even if they did, imagine maintaining it. Your campaign is then dependent on 3rd party amateur mods. What if they stop working? You have no control over this. Mods also cause weird bugs and crashes all over the place. Campaigns don't. And if you're talking about a paid campaign, will you be refunding or otherwise taking actual responsibility if any of these issues occur?

My experience with free campaigns that require mods is that none of them worked for me, as the mod was defunct or caused some issue or crash. I am personally willing to try installing mods for a good campaign, but it spells trouble for me - something will not work, so is it even worth it?

I’ve curated a mod pack that has NEVER caused a single issue for anyone from my squadron; never has updates unless I add something. I’ve never known a gaming community so mod resistant, especially when the base game is critically lacking entire categories of assets. The missions I’ve built have been so unique and interesting because of these talented mod makers.

In the sub sim community, mods are used by almost every player; here, people complain about fictional problems and imaginary issues. 
 

[Exorcet]

5 hours ago, Elphaba said:

I find it sad that so many mission types just can't be made without 3rd party mods and yet so few mission creators seem to make use of them. Certainly far less that the users heaping praise and gratitude in the mod channels and threads. 

I can think of a few missions I made that were so fun, challenging and realistic, that are just impossible with vanilla DCS and it's lack of civilian aircraft, ships, vehicles and non-military animated humans. 

It's just a real shame I seem to be alone in this.

 

I've seen some of the mods mentioned and I think they're great, but people will fill different niches. I'm in the vanilla mission niche by choice. I'd expect most new players won't be looking for mods anyway even if the base game has limitations since they may not immediately run into them.

If you've chosen to work with mods you've gone down a different path them me and you can produce content for people that don't like what I offer. In the end, we have a greater variety of content that covers more end users. At least that's how I see it.

[Minsky]

2 hours ago, Elphaba said:

I’ve never known a gaming community so mod resistant, especially when the base game is critically lacking entire categories of assets.

DCS is bugged as it is. Even if a mod works now, doesn't mean it will be working in a month. Or that its next version will be compatible with your older missions.

Mods just add more variables and maintenance headache. So I'm trying to avoid them unless they're absolutely crucial for the gameplay.

And even then, I tend to only use mods that have been "stable" for quite a long time: e.g. CAM and 2SAM are okay, but VPC, which has been abandoned and requires non-trivial installation, is not.

That's my personal informed choice. Yours is different, and that's fine. Just don't go overboard with statements like these:

2 hours ago, Elphaba said:

here, people complain about fictional problems and imaginary issues. 

 

[PawlaczGMD]

5 hours ago, Elphaba said:

I’ve curated a mod pack that has NEVER caused a single issue for anyone from my squadron; never has updates unless I add something. I’ve never known a gaming community so mod resistant, especially when the base game is critically lacking entire categories of assets. The missions I’ve built have been so unique and interesting because of these talented mod makers.

In the sub sim community, mods are used by almost every player; here, people complain about fictional problems and imaginary issues. 
 

I feel you. I use mods in other games, but in DCS I mostly gave up on them. I will have a random game crash, and the first thing they tell me- uninstall all mods. I think it is because DCS is both buggy, and in constant development. So mods will sometimes cause crazy bugs that you would think are completely unrelated to their function, or they might at any point in the future, and most mod makers understandably will not provide support forever.

Making a curated modpack specific to the campaign seems like the best way to do it. Do you have any public missions/campaigns out there to try?

[TEMPEST.114]

4 hours ago, PawlaczGMD said:

Do you have any public missions/campaigns out there to try?

Hi. Thanks for your response. 

Not at the moment; they all use my Superscript that isn't quite ready for public release - and I'm still... concerned over that, but I do have a dedicated server box, so when the scripts are ready for primetime, I can publish my mod pack and then let people loose on my server. 

 

[cfrag]

15 hours ago, Minsky said:

DCS is bugged as it is.

IMHO I think that is - especially for DCS neophytes - the main stumbling block. Out of the box, DCS's user experience simply can't be called "good" nor "modern". For a new user, nearly everything in DCS becomes a fight. Imagine that you download DCS, install it, and start it for the first time. 

... and then? Nothing tells you what to do, no guide, nothing. "Fresh" DCS comes with the T-Frogfoot and T-51. Neither of which you can fly out of the box - unless someone tells you how. Well, maybe you can get into an Instant Mission, and then you run into the wall of setting up your gear. Fine, that's expected. There's no flight sim worth its salt where you don't have to set up your gear. DCS's way, however, is, uh, an acquired taste, I guess. It definitely can be improved. 

No matter. We are in-game, and our gear is set up. Now what? Hey, that plane's avionics talk Russian to me.

So there are a billion ways that DCS can be improved, and missions (e.g. tutorial missions) are one way that mission creators can help. And that's where we hit the next wall: no integrated way to discover missions, even though we upload them to ED's servers. Another billion great opportunities sadly wasted.

So if new DCS users are brave enough to download some files from a Russian-registered server to their PC, and find the correct way to install them so that DCS can find them, these users should be encouraged. If my mission doesn't run because it requires a mod, that would only frustrate them, and they would not play the mission I wrote. That's why I try to keep it simple: no mod, no more problems (and not to disparage the incredible work other contributors have made) some mods are difficult to install. That's mainly ED's fault, and the early 1990 architecture of how DCS organizes its assets. But for a new user it's another frustrating minefield to cross. And incredibly helpful utilities like OVGME? Lets me quote the Readme: "Sadly the original developer Sedenion is no longer developing this extremely useful tool". This is not stuff first-time players want to read, it all makes a really, really bad first impression.

Now, some of my missions are geared towards servers/multiplayers. With those missions I will occasionally include a mod, but only very sparingly, and usually only those that I know very well and trust that they will be maintained - that point of introducing dependencies is very well made.

So, no mods in my missions for normal players, minimal mod support for server missions. Server admins usually have the knowledge (or access to people who have it) so that they can add support for their favorite mods.

Now, if DCS came with built-in mod support, mod discovery and integrated mission loading from their servers, I'd reverse that in a heartbeat (and maybe even try some of these mods myself  ).

Edited April 13, 2024 by cfrag

[Rudel_chw]

43 minutes ago, cfrag said:

IMHO I think that is - especially for DCS neophytes - the main stumbling block. Out of the box, DCS's user experience simply can't be called "good" nor "modern". For a new user, nearly everything in DCS becomes a fight. Imagine that you download DCS, install it, and start it for the first time. 

... and then? Nothing tells you what to do, no guide, nothing.

 

Wow .. it makes me wonder how most of us ever learned DCS when we were neophytes ... honestly, I don't remember it being a fight.

I first knew about DCS when YT suggested a DCS video to me. At that point I had some prior knowledge, after having played Flanker 2.5 and Lo-Mac, so I wasn't put off by its 1990 architecture ... I remember having started by reading the Sim's manual first and then looked for DCS tutorials on YT, best ones at that time were those by Bunyap and Robert Sogomonian ... it was not having a bad first impression at all, on the contrary, the learning process was very enjoyable to me.

[cfrag]

14 hours ago, Rudel_chw said:

makes me wonder how most of us ever learned DCS when we were neophytes

At first I didn’t. Got it when it came to steam, didn’t like it. It simply didn’t click with me, and many things I couldn't get to work for me (I felt that ME in particular, was actively resisting my efforts to get anything done). Then I got my first module. Yeah, the Hawk. That didn’t help either.

i tried again a year later or so with FC3. That made me delete and ignore DCS for another year or more.

i only got into DCS again because of its superior VR support. Then it grew on me. 

Edited April 14, 2024 by cfrag

[Tippis]

20 hours ago, cfrag said:

Lots of words.

I'm in a similar position. I did the annoying thing of answering the poll in two opposite directions: I use a very select number of military aircraft mods and also I don't use mods.

The problem is, anything that puts even more of a barrier between the player and the (multiplayer, which is what I build for) game is a no-go.
I will happily try to add in the most out-of-place aircraft for some very tortured-logic reason just to enable a player's ability to join — if that's that's the only plane they have, that's the one they get to fly.
At the opposite end, I will refuse to add even the most sensible addition if it disables players' ability to join — if they have to install a lot of extras on top of the hassle DCS is by default, then I've already lost them before we even get into the process of finding a fork of a tool based on a previous tool so you can (hopefully) find a version of a mod that is suitably compatible with the tool and/or the game.

The reason military aircraft mods work in all this is that they are usually not just self-contained, but more importantly provide a fallback: anyone who doesn't have the mod install sees an oddly-behaving Flanker. It's ugly, but still: they do see an airplane, and they can shoot it or avoid it or do whatever they want with it. It just looks wrong. Other mods rarely have the same kind of fall-back, even if you manually bypass the “required” field. Other players may then be able to join, but best-case scenario is that they see nothing and nothing happens, so the creator's time is wasted; worst-case is they see nothing and then explode, so their time is ruined. The inconvenience on both player, creator, and server end just isn't worth it unless there is a graceful fallback built into DCS itself. In most cases, there isn't, and this is an ED-level issue rather than something the mod can really resolve. On top of that, there's the IC to contend with. Admittedly, this is less of an issue nowadays, but all the other mods — the ones that could offer gameplay improvements and convenience as opposed to just being decorative — tend to fall straight into this category and as a rule have to go as well.

SP could be a different matter. There, I just build for myself so any mods I have I… well… obviously have and wouldn't be restricted by, but due to the above, I don't have many to begin with. It's such a small niche for my own creation that there's no reason for me to install anything that doesn't work in MP without the mod installed.

[TEMPEST.114]

13 minutes ago, Tippis said:

At the opposite end, I will refuse to add even the most sensible addition if it disables players' ability to join — if they have to install a lot of extras on top of the hassle DCS is by default, then I've already lost them before we even get into the process of finding a fork of a tool based on a previous tool so you can (hopefully) find a version of a mod that is suitably compatible with the tool and/or the game.

No offence but that seems like a cognitive bias rather than evidence. It sounds like you're imagining issues without them actually ever having been raised by others. 

There seems to be a huge amount of that problem in this community. 

[Tippis]

8 minutes ago, Elphaba said:

No offence but that seems like a cognitive bias rather than evidence. It sounds like you're imagining issues without them actually ever having been raised by others.

It really isn't. The evidence is in the interactions with the players in question; with the amount of “don't worry — you can join with whatever you have and nothing more” we have to go through; with the very clear drop in numbers we see any time anything extra is required, no matter how available it is.

Don't ascribe other people's experiences to your biases.

Edited April 14, 2024 by Tippis

[TEMPEST.114]

2 minutes ago, Tippis said:

It really isn't. The evidence is in the interactions with the players in question; with the amount of “don't worry — you can join with whatever you have and nothing more” we have to go through; with the very clear drop in numbers we see any time anything extra is required, no matter how available it is.

Okay, if that's true, and I have no reason to disbelieve you, then it reinforces my opinion that players of DCS and people in this community are massive outliers when it comes to mods - even perfectly seasoned and benign mods like CAW/CVM/MAM... this 'resistance' is unreasonable and on top of that just reinforces that ED need to bring those mods into the game themselves. 

In two years of using these mods they've NEVER caused a single issue, and the benefits of them far, far outweighs the download and installation of the trivially easy OvGME.

But, it sounds like you're running a large, open MP server (something I've considered but not done yet) and you have more real-world experience of getting people to be open to this issue.

In that case, do you have any positive suggestions on how to 'win them over'?!

[Tippis]

40 minutes ago, Elphaba said:

Okay, if that's true, and I have no reason to disbelieve you, then it reinforces my opinion that players of DCS and people in this community are massive outliers when it comes to mods - even perfectly seasoned and benign mods like CAW/CVM/MAM... this 'resistance' is unreasonable and on top of that just reinforces that ED need to bring those mods into the game themselves.

It's not that the mods need to be made part of the game — it's that the game only half-way supports mods to begin with so we have to have all these work-arounds and extra tools to make it behave even slightly nicely with them. You almost see this with the official modules and how they work: every time a new official module is made, all client installs have to have additions to their CoreMods and Bazaar collections of assets: you still get large portions of the module, just not the bits that let you fly it.

A good case study is the Supercarrier vs WWII asset pack, where the former can be deployed and accessed (but not used) anywhere because so much of it is just the assets and those are all part of the CoreModes. The latter is strictly limited and will even break in various fun ways if you try to bypass the requirement, because of how little is in the CoreMods and how much is in the full module. And it's an asset pack — it's pretty much all… well… assets.

Again, the problem is one of fallbacks: the official modules work because the client has a bunch of stuff in their CoreMods that it uses to represent the module content. If you were to remove any of that, things start going haywire. Many airplane mods survive on the fact that they also have a fallback in form of The One True Air Unit — the Su-27 (for historical Flanker reasons). At least as far as assets go. Nothing like that really exists for any of the other things you'd like to add, at least not in a way that doesn't look very very silly. Eg. if all your bespoke fortification-mod sand bag statics defaulted back to wind socks for anyone who didn't have the mod installed.

 

So that's one thing that needs to be resolved: how should the game handle fallbacks? If it encounters something that it has no record of, what does it do? What assets does it use? If it's a live unit, what driving/flying/fighting logic is employed?

Another issue is with the core install vs. user profile separation. They've actually done a lot of work here and made it more and more possible to alter the game via your user profile rather than mucking around with the core install files. The more that can be done there, possibly even to the point of overwriting more central files in the game and its various modules, the better — this would remove the need for a mod manager, especially if this could be made subject to the “clean clients” server flag in a more dynamic and interactive way. I.e. letting you put in replacement files for pretty much everything in the DCS install file structure and have those user-specific file take precedence over the base files unless the “clean client” flag was set, in which case the game strictly reads from the base install directory, and those files can be protected by IC checks to hell and back. A lot of the annoyance we have with IC right now is that the only way to alter some files is to directly replace them in the core install; there is no user-profile override for them.

The third problem is, as was mentioned earlier, mod discovery, installation and updating. There are a few ways to go about that. The most convenient for the user would obviously be if everything existed in the same repository — most immediately the DCS User Files — rather than there, on github, on personal cloud storages, on various self-hosted websites etc etc etc. So if you come across a mod that is blocking you, you can immediately find it. The evolution of this solution is to expand the notion of the “required” field in the mission file, where mods not only mark themselves as required, but also provide the client with its source location. This would then enable auto-downloading of modules from any source if the user accepts it. This would still require quite a bit of structure and organisation on the mod creators' end — always strictly following an archive structure that exactly replicates how it should go into the user's mod directory; always maintaining a “latest” archive to be fetched (including some kind of hashing to tell the client whether they need to auto-update or not); and of course, being subject to moderation and outright blacklisting because their mods are just too horrid for whatever technical reason.

One might think that having that in place would solve the issue of fallbacks, but at the end of the day, the player needs to be able to choose, and what happens if they say “no”? Does the mission still load, but rely on fallbacks, or is access denied?

 

Basically, winning them over is all about one by one removing the obstacles that sit in the way of the player wanting to run a mission or joining a server, and only ever clicking “load” or “connect” to do just that. The rest is handled automagically. The issue is that a lot of that magic falls on ED to conjure up, and that this deeper support will inevitably end up (rightly or wrongly) being interpreted as their support for xXx420WeedLord69Hitler1488xXx's genocide mod, with all the legal funtime this will entail. Oh, and security issues… we haven't even touched those.

…on reflection, all of this sounded a lot more negative than I actually feel about it.
I'm not saying it's all dead in the water and we have to live an ascetic and mod-free DCS life. Only that we're not sitting on the most solid foundation for building out good and hassle-free mod support. The game has a ton of very good mods — it was just never really built with them in mind so it's even more of a miracle that they can exist to begin with. The more that can be done with that ecosystem, the better everything will be, but it's a long climb.

Edited April 14, 2024 by Tippis

[TEMPEST.114]

7 minutes ago, Tippis said:

Another issue is with the core install vs. user profile separation.

This isn't a factor.

OvGME lets you define whatever you want, so I have a DCS CORE (main DCS install folder) and DCS SAVED GAMES (users's saved games/dcs folder)

And named the mods so you always know where to put them...