Officializing addons\mods

[Smurf]

Hello,

I would like to know whats BIS point of view and politcs regarding the possibility to make an addon something official. Any chance?

I´m talking about custom anims (eg: Smokie's,I44 and others like AT from prone....), AI related modifications, some gameplay change and even somekind of launcher (to help managing mods\Steam-CO "problems", and something that could have somekind of MoTD by Devs giving a heads up on Official and Beta Patches and stuff (eg: World in Conflict and Medieval 2: TW have it)) or somekind of integrated Yoma\SU.

And maps? Other games (like WiC, RO, TF2) have contests to elect some custom maps to be "officialized" and released for the public via patches to avoid problems with no or wrong version of the map.

Just asking....

[NeMeSiS]

Well, in the past couple of years they just recruited some community members, which more or less has the same effect.

But i cant think of any addon that would really need to become default and/or could be added without giving problems.

[coopr]

I won't see that happen and in my eyes unnecessary. If they would just give servers the possibility to send clients a decent error report when they miss a mod. Small simple text would be fine."you can not join this sever because you miss the following mod: (cvar mod) (cvar mod website)

[Atkins]

I think it would be enough if BI implemented a system where you click a server to join it and if you don't have the mods needed to play in it, you will automagically download them from some fastdownload server and if you have the mods the game will enable them on the run, and if you have some mods running that are not allowed in the server, well they will be disabled on the fly.

And don't tell me to use AddonSync, cos I already do and it is just a half-way solution, which doesnt work that well.

[Smurf]

I think it would be enough if BI implemented a system where you click a server to join it and if you don't have the mods needed to play in it, you will automagically download them from some fastdownload server and if you have the mods the game will enable them on the run, and if you have some mods running that are not allowed in the server, well they will be disabled on the fly.

And don't tell me to use AddonSync, cos I already do and it is just a half-way solution, which doesnt work that well.

...or that..

IIRC Dwarden or Suma was talking about such system some month ago (before the whole UI redesign). Something happened?

[MadDogX]

I don't feel like rummaging through old forum threads, but from what I remember, Suma/Dwarden/Maruk said the following:

- They're looking at integrating an addon sync tool into the game. Loading addons from a server would most likely require a restart of the game afterward.
- Dynamic loading of addon content at runtime could be done (in fact, a command to load configs at runtime was tested in a few betas. Don't know if that feature is still in, but it did work.)
- Dynamic unloading of addon content would be much more complicated, so much so that it is unlikely to be implemented in Arma2 (little to no ROI).

[coopr]

I don't feel like rummaging through old forum threads, but from what I remember, Suma/Dwarden/Maruk said the following:

- They're looking at integrating an addon sync tool into the game. Loading addons from a server would most likely require a restart of the game afterward.
- Dynamic loading of addon content at runtime could be done (in fact, a command to load configs at runtime was tested in a few betas. Don't know if that feature is still in, but it did work.)
- Dynamic unloading of addon content would be much more complicated, so much so that it is unlikely to be implemented in Arma2 (little to no ROI).

But why would they add a sync tool to arma? Sync tools in my opinion work with games who don't have huge mod files. For example half life where maps are like 7mb? I don't mind to wait on that. But if you have to look at a in game download screen who is downloading 3gb. I rather get a decent error message where I can get the file and choose a fast mirror or torrent to get the mod.

[Big Dawg KS]

There's really no point in adopting such a strategy. The amount of user content produced in the community would make such a thing overwhelming, and the benefits would be pretty small in comparison. Finally, it would probably be way more beneficial for BIS to implement a way to better distribute/locate/install such content within the game, which would eliminate any need to "officialize" content.

And in terms of quality, a lot of times user content is almost on par with BI's; and I think many people would prefer if BI's artists spending time producing/improving their own content rather than polishing up some community stuff. And on the rare occasion that BI takes particular interest in a community member's work, it seems more likey that they would just bring them on board as part of the team.