I think what’s harder is to figure out a commercial model where you can manage to pay for the infrastructure and resource usage and write the associated client software.
The client software is the big one. ModDB has the others but is all but dead save for a few old titles. Vortex really did Nexus a lot of favours; it’s turned into a great program, making modding easy for non-techie users.
Curseforge is fine enough, modrinth is better, but people need to understand that at the end of the day you are just downloading hundreds of little programs off the internet and that there is little oversight into their content or behavior
Technically, it would be possible to run the games themselves in a sandbox. I mean, games are a class of software packages that really don’t need to have access to my system as a whole.
That’s really more on Microsoft or Apple or Valve or the Linux distro maintainers to work out, though – I don’t think that mod sites are in a position to do a lot about that, even if mods exacerbate the need for such a thing.
This is good. Modding can turn into the deepest dependency hell ever and not having access to a specific version of mod A can make mod B that you really love unusable. See: Skyrim VR and Unofficial Patch.
I feel like that’s really more an argument for a very small number of mods – the ones that everyone depends on – and I don’t think that the modding site can honestly do a lot to fix that. I think that it’s kind of on a game’s modding community to choose to depend on things that won’t go away. Maybe make the license more-prominent, so that really critical mods that other mods depend on can have a license that permits forking or something and are source-available. Like, highlight mods that don’t both permit forking and have source available and are dependencies of other mods in red or something.
Nah, its easy. Just change the mod to something that removes rainbow flags in the game, they’ll delete it real fast. Probably will delete it even if the game originally never had them to begin with.
I don’t want to use their bloatware launcher. Games already have enough bloatware launcers as it is, I am not willfully adding another one. Fortunately I can still directly download from the site, but I have to log into an account and I hate having like a hundred accounts.
Also, I just don’t like the idea of one website having a near monopoly on mod hosting. I would prefer multiple places, ideally ones without requiring an account or pushing bloatware.
Vortex is not a launcher, it’s a mod manager. And you don’t have to use it, there are alternatives. But you should use a mod manager, manual installation/uninstallation is really bad practice that can and will break things.
You can also use Mod Organizer 2. Connects to their site, but you dont have to. Virtualizes the mod folder for Creation Engine games so its much cleaner to add/remove mods and even have different install profiles
It doesn’t though? There many games for which I use ModDB and many games have modding communities on dedicated websites.
Some of the biggest modding communities (GTA, Minecraft) don’t really use it at all. It’s very popular with TES and Fallout (not surprising considering the original name was TESNexus), but as someone who has spent a very large amount of time modding Bethesda RPGs, many good mods aren’t found on Nexus, even for those games.
I love Nexus. I uploaded 3 mods over the years, and with their donation point system (you get points each month based on unique downloads), I got like 15 free games from their store by this point.
At least you can get the mods from Nexus. If you have the GoG version of a game and the mod you want is on the Steam Workshop, that royally sucks.
(yes I know you can get most of them with SteamCMD, it still sucks)
I wish NexusMods didn’t have a near monopoly on mod distribution.
I mean, it’s not hard to start a mod site.
I think what’s harder is to figure out a commercial model where you can manage to pay for the infrastructure and resource usage and write the associated client software.
The client software is the big one. ModDB has the others but is all but dead save for a few old titles. Vortex really did Nexus a lot of favours; it’s turned into a great program, making modding easy for non-techie users.
I wish there was a git-based mod distributor.
Minecraft is pretty much the only game with a large enough modding scene to support multiple platforms
on that note: reminder that curseforge is not as safe anymore
at least thats what I’ve been reading here
Curseforge is fine enough, modrinth is better, but people need to understand that at the end of the day you are just downloading hundreds of little programs off the internet and that there is little oversight into their content or behavior
Technically, it would be possible to run the games themselves in a sandbox. I mean, games are a class of software packages that really don’t need to have access to my system as a whole.
That’s really more on Microsoft or Apple or Valve or the Linux distro maintainers to work out, though – I don’t think that mod sites are in a position to do a lot about that, even if mods exacerbate the need for such a thing.
What’s wrong with nexus mods?
Well for starters they keep making it harder to actually delete any mods you uploaded there.
This is good. Modding can turn into the deepest dependency hell ever and not having access to a specific version of mod A can make mod B that you really love unusable. See: Skyrim VR and Unofficial Patch.
Yeah, that is absolutely something I’ve run into. To me though the matter of control of the content has to rest with the creators of said content.
I feel like that’s really more an argument for a very small number of mods – the ones that everyone depends on – and I don’t think that the modding site can honestly do a lot to fix that. I think that it’s kind of on a game’s modding community to choose to depend on things that won’t go away. Maybe make the license more-prominent, so that really critical mods that other mods depend on can have a license that permits forking or something and are source-available. Like, highlight mods that don’t both permit forking and have source available and are dependencies of other mods in red or something.
Nah, its easy. Just change the mod to something that removes rainbow flags in the game, they’ll delete it real fast. Probably will delete it even if the game originally never had them to begin with.
I don’t want to use their bloatware launcher. Games already have enough bloatware launcers as it is, I am not willfully adding another one. Fortunately I can still directly download from the site, but I have to log into an account and I hate having like a hundred accounts.
Also, I just don’t like the idea of one website having a near monopoly on mod hosting. I would prefer multiple places, ideally ones without requiring an account or pushing bloatware.
Vortex is not a launcher, it’s a mod manager. And you don’t have to use it, there are alternatives. But you should use a mod manager, manual installation/uninstallation is really bad practice that can and will break things.
Unless that recently changed but you dont have to use their mod manager
You can also use Mod Organizer 2. Connects to their site, but you dont have to. Virtualizes the mod folder for Creation Engine games so its much cleaner to add/remove mods and even have different install profiles
You don’t compile all your packages from source, do you?
It doesn’t though? There many games for which I use ModDB and many games have modding communities on dedicated websites.
Some of the biggest modding communities (GTA, Minecraft) don’t really use it at all. It’s very popular with TES and Fallout (not surprising considering the original name was TESNexus), but as someone who has spent a very large amount of time modding Bethesda RPGs, many good mods aren’t found on Nexus, even for those games.
I love Nexus. I uploaded 3 mods over the years, and with their donation point system (you get points each month based on unique downloads), I got like 15 free games from their store by this point.
At least you can get the mods from Nexus. If you have the GoG version of a game and the mod you want is on the Steam Workshop, that royally sucks.
(yes I know you can get most of them with SteamCMD, it still sucks)