Hi everyone!
I hope you all are doing great and enjoying games! We are hard at work making the modding update. The update itself will come in November whenever it is polished enough. There are so many ideas on what to make and how to make it convenient to use. At this rate we could do modding-only updates for the next year. It is so easy to go into the features rabbit hole. But not all of them are important.
Together with the modding update, we are adding the most requested features. At some point I should do another round of performance improvements, because the builds I am getting as feedback are massive and glorious.
Custom Regions
One of the more requested features was having an option to limit the world map to a specific region. With the modding update, you will have some presets with an option to build your own. Regions work by defining a play area rectangle and including/excluding specific countries. Overall, it is a modified demo, I guess. This should work wonders with cities modding.
Vehicle Type Combinations
It made a lot of sense to finally improve the vehicle types option in the new game UI. You will be able to select any combination you want. This simple-looking feature was hell to implement. There were days when the game was not in a state to be launched at all. Some might wonder why, but programmers should know the fantastic feeling when you change one variable type and get 100+ errors in the whole codebase. Most of those fixes are simple, but some require deeper thought due to how systems work with one another. And then there is the time when you fix the last error and press the build game button, hoping for the best.
Modding
The main update feature is coming together nicely. Most of the work from the last blog post was on the modding system and how the game handles everything. At the end of the day, this is the single most important part.
You will be able to browse, download, enable, disable, and create mods in the game. The game will take care of trying to load mods or go into the "safe mode" in case there are crashes with some of them. Mods will be made using a Git friendly format, allowing for proper version control if needed. This also opens up custom tool options for modding. For exporting to the Steam Workshop, you will have an option to compress your modded files to prevent edits or leave them open for others to study.
The in-game mod browser will also have a separate info view with custom descriptions. This can be as fancy or as simple as the creator wants. Apart from that, there are categories. For the Steam build, there also will be Trending, Top Rated, Latest Uploads, Friends Mods and Favorites sections.
At this point the base is almost done, mainly Steam features are left. The next step is to have proper in-game tools for creating and editing mods. Will share some of these tools in the next blog post in a week or two.