AMS 2 Mod Support?

We know. That was worked out weeks ago. I even posted a guide. But as I said above, skins are among the few things that aren't locked behind the CRC check. Plus Reiza have said there will be a skin editor in the game, so modding these is also somewhat pointless at this stage.

 

Are you really expecting a skin editor any time soon?

 

No I'm not. But personally, I'm not wasting hours of my time making skins without proper templates and in the limited fashion currently possible, if a proper in-game skin editor is going to be added in the future.

 

It would be cool to see an in-game skin editor but I wonder how it would give more creative freedom than a PSD template and a 3d model provided by the team.
Actually, the templates and viewers in AMS2 are the same of AMS1 already provided in this forum.
I wonder if they will provide templates and viewers for the new cars.
I was really expecting at least an official support for customized liveries.

 

I was under the impression that while Reiza wouldn't "support" modding, they were not against it if somebody found a way. I think thats what developers said in an interview. Seems like they changed their view quite a bit by going into these drastic measures.

 

It's not good at all...

 

Mods are far from being consistent and many times, completely over-rated. I'd rather pay the devs and the artists to create the high quality professional content we expect. Not worth the huge amount of development time it takes to properly support mods, documentation, QA, etc...

 

I agree. If you wanted to do that, you'd need to go the route Kunos have taken with AC or ISI with rF & rF2 and build a game engine from ground up with built-in modding support by design. Putting it in after that fact or going to presumably great lengths to open up an already existing game engine that was built without modding in mind usually isn't viable for relatively niche projects.

That's not to say I would mind having the odd mod from VRC or RSS in AMS2 if the opportunity arose

 

I wonder how much of a good (or bad) idea it would be if Reiza allowed 3rd party developers to release official mods as DLC on Steam. Say they paid some money to Reiza for SDK access and official support as a DLC. That way we could have high-quality stuff from the 3rd party pay-mod developers such as VRC and RSS, among others.

 

Modding is always a contentious subject (much like FFB!) in that for some people it makes or breaks a game, some can't live without Mods whilst others are perfectly happy with just the Dev content.

The way I see it these days is a trend of Devs not bothering with actual proper Mod Support because of the hassle it brings (having to take time to create tools, support modders, bug test every update so as not to break mods, legal issues as seen with AMS etc), so in the not too distant future I can see no Sims actively supporting Modding at all and lets face it, we're pretty much there already with only RF2 being a current developed Sim that does so.

That's not to say there won't be mods of course, people find a way and those desperate enough will get them to work knowing there will be people who'll download them. But if Game Updates persist to "break" Mods I don't personally see the point in modding for that particular game, seems like a waste of time for me (game modding in general). Until a time comes when the game is no longer actively supported and thus Updates/Checks no longer hinder a modder, then Mods may Rise somewhat. AC being the exception as they supported mods from the get go with various tools, it now lives on much stronger than ever before which is nice to see.

Personally I prefer just the Devs work, I have more faith in them getting the required Data than a Modder (unless from a Modder/Team with known contacts and proof of this). Besides with AMS2 there is already a huge army of Cars to race with and loads of tracks, it's not always "more is better" and it bewilders me why people have 100+ Car Mods for AC with 100+ Tracks - where do they get the time to Race them all and learn to Master them? Answer is they don't!
Again that's why I prefer Dev only content, more time to properly engage with the 1 Car & 1 Track over a longer period, the art of Mastery is a long lost Art in Sim Racing it seems.

 

Most of the games and sims which have large modding communities do not actively support modding of any kind. The community has worked it all out themselves, shared that information, and received no official help whatsoever. So it's not really about development time. I don't think anybody expected or even wanted Reiza to deliberately make their game moddable. I know I didn't.

But there's a big difference between not officially supporting modding, and actively preventing it which is the case here. I think that's the main complaint.

Me too, regardless of the sim. My main sim right now is R3E which doesn't have any mods whatsoever. However, having the option of mods is always nice. Some teams have produced truly amazing work that is beyond the scope of a developer due to licensing or other issues.

It's a shame that is unlikely to ever be the case for AMS 2, but while disappointing it's certainly not the end of the world. It already has a load of content not seen anywhere else, and I'm certainly not interested in seeing all the "usual suspects" badly imported from old sims into this one.