[IDEA] Why SH5 Modding is Broken and How To Fix It

[raymond6751]

I read through the first post and could not help wondering if the author had heard of JSGME mod enabler.

I have many mods enabled and didn't have to fiddle with them. TDW has given us the option of tweaking any setting in his UI mods, but there is no need to do that as his work runs perfectly with defaults.

As someone has pointed out, new players should take the time to read the details in the mods they intend to try, since most mods do provide them. The modders of the bigger works have been very clear in their features lists and implementation advice.

This is a community effort with a vast variety of modded changes to pick from. We have a treasure trove of riches -- for all three versions of Silent Hunter!

[gap]

Originally Posted by raymond6751

As someone has pointed out, new players should take the time to read the details in the mods they intend to try, since most mods do provide them.

Indeed, I have said that we need for better documentation for some mods, but I should have mentioned that in many cases new players hardly read the very first rows of readme files, thus incurring nightmarish problems wich are easily avoidable

[Bathrone]

Originally Posted by raymond6751

I read through the first post and could not help wondering if the author had heard of JSGME mod enabler.

I have many mods enabled and didn't have to fiddle with them. TDW has given us the option of tweaking any setting in his UI mods, but there is no need to do that as his work runs perfectly with defaults.

As someone has pointed out, new players should take the time to read the details in the mods they intend to try, since most mods do provide them. The modders of the bigger works have been very clear in their features lists and implementation advice.

This is a community effort with a vast variety of modded changes to pick from. We have a treasure trove of riches -- for all three versions of Silent Hunter!

Hi Raymond and thanks also for your comments

I do use the mod enabler. One of the core problems of this very basic approach to configuration management is that it is not a parsing patch utility, it in fact overwrites whole configuration items at a time. Thus clobbering previous patches using the same configuration item.

This is a key problem because popular mod lists like sobers mod list causes a situation where individual mods overwrite others. I'm now in the process of having to hard code merges in menu.txt as an ugly hack to getting his mod list working all round.

As for documentation, I have spend almost a week documenting the mods in sobers mod list. I originally offered to give this info to Sober but hes now suggested I do my own thread. Thats fine. I'm happy to do this work for the community.

The problem though is when people try to say the doco is in the mod discussion threads and readme.txt files. Its true for single mods, but when you put together a mod list there is a need for additional documentation for users to merge changes and other mod list specific settings to not arrive at a corrupted setup. I've been trying to document this too and I will publish that work to the community.

However, all this work Im doing would go away if we all adopted proper processes used in software development. It would no longer be a user burden to deal with. And as I've said, the mod authors would benefit from a standardised platform by focusing testing efforts from users.