Hello,

as most of you, who have ever taken a look at the mod section of Toribash, have noticed, the current state of the modlist is more or less a tragedy. Since I joined over half a decade ago, I haven't seen a single effort made to sweep the list of old, broken, unplayable or simply useless mods. I became fed up with it and came to the conclusion that there was something that desperately needed to be done about this.

I decided to go through all of the current default mods in toribash, check whether or not they properly function in the newest version, make sure that there are no duplicates or other faulty entries, categorize them with tags, document the whole process and then give it to the dev-team, to hopefully make good use of it and revamp the mod system as we know it today, to opt for a newer, more user friendly and organized version, that would make things much easier and leave the game a better one, for new and old players alike.

Mods are a major part of the game, and just neglecting this essential aspect of the game wouldn't be right in my eyes.

I have set up a document (part 2) which illustrates my current work and the results I had with the purge so far. I also elaborate on the entire process furthermore. My plan and action course is to go through all mods ingame, check them for their playability, make sure that they work properly and without hiccups (things like broken player positionings already are a major annoyance, because nobody wants to tinker around with the gamerules for minutes on end, to start a mod) and then assess in which category (or multiple ones) they fit best, to straighten the way for a tag system, that could possibly and hopefully be implemented in the future. I tried making my judgement as clear as possible and also added quite a few notes that illustrate my train of thought on the matter. I try to be as objective as possible, and not let personal preferences influence my decisions. I don't want to appear to be discrediting any of the people responsible for making these mods, as I am sure that there must definitely have been quite some effort put into all of this at some point. I just want to try my best to enhance the toribash mod experience as much as possible, by cleaning out redundancies and plain unnecessary entities.

I will use this thread to keep the forums updated on my progress, although you'd get the fastest updates by checking the Google doc. If you notice any discrepancies, faults or mistakes I have made, please do not hesitate to contact me on the forums, so I can take a look at the matter and make sure that everything is correct.

I want to especcially thank Risk for his help with all of this, as he already did a similar project back in november 2013, but pitily did not have the time to finish it. He was so kind as to let me use his work, so I could use it to push forward my efforts significantly and to jump start my project from now on. Thanks also go out to JtanK and Ishi for their help in this matter. Your efforts are greatly appreciated.


So long,
Nobuddie.

awesome initiative! found an error though. aikido3, aikido4, and aikido7 are not duplicates of aikido.tbm, although they may or may not be duplicates of each other. they all disable body and leg grabs and aikido 4 and 7 are self-damage only. i think aikido3 and aikido4 allow grabs from hand to shoulder and aikido7 only allows it from hand to elbow.

as aikido7 is the final and most-played version, i'd suggest keeping only that one.

Thank you. I try to play one or two rounds of each mod to get a grasp of what changed and to test them out, but playing multiplayer mods in singleplayer does get boring fairly quickly, as you would imagine. I cannot touch all the bases, obviously, in this case I didn't even think about grabbing and testing out what exactly changed. I do go into the gamerules to compare the versions but that only brings me so far, because things like these are not really observable there. Thank you very much for the heads up, I will revise the list in the suggested manner then, as I really am not too knowledgeable on the aikido field. If anyone else has more info on these sort of subjects, go right ahead and contact me. This is, after all, a project by the community, for the community. :)

forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=433783
This might help a bit. Great initiative and stuff.

That is indeed very helpful. I will bookmark it and definitely put it to good use in the later stage of the project. After I finish the initial draft I want to go over the "survivors" to further add tags as needed, a couple more basic ones but a couple of specific ones as well. Using more tags and having more possibilities might be more work, but will also offer far more precision in the end result, which is ultimatively the aim of this. Precision while searching for mods, while trying out mods, while making mods. It is not only the players that benefit from this; mod creators will have an easy to use and extensive database to check whether or not their idea was already carried out by someone else. This could nip the clutter in the bud by a great deal.


edit; due to the immense amount of words and mods that stretched the document into unbelievable lengths, I have split the list into 2 parts. The first part features all of the categories just like before, while the other, new one, only includes the duplicate, redundant and broken mods, basically the bad side of the modlist. This way it is easier to distinguish between functional and broken or otherwise bad mods. I have adjusted the documents and did some other tweaking and fixing concerning the structure. I am making absolutely spectacular progress, which I didn't expect at all.

Ummm....
http://forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=322560

Rubash already made it :/
Back in 2011...

MarkmOd 2.0 by rb coming soon idk when...

Oh, I had no idea. Nevertheless this keeps on standing. There are a few downsides to this though, as I believe that there shouldn't be a 3rd party involved in making the basegame better. The mod hasn't been updated in quite some time and furthermore, most people will never even be able to find or use it. (Think of all the players who don't care or even know about the forums, and the majority of users who do not have access to the search function). It's great to see someone else other than Risk and me has thought about this and thank you for showing me that thread, as it could definitely help me find more tags etc. Also; I have already put an immense amount of work into this so far and I will not stop near the end because someone else had a similar idea a couple of years ago.


edit; alright, after around 20 hours of work I have finished going through all mods and categorizing them. It's been a hell of a lot of work, but I did enjoy it and I found a couple of gems here and there too. This doesn't mean that the project is finished though. I will continue to work on it, in the way of adding various tags that could be used to filter the mods appropriately and I will think about even adding short descriptions, like I suggested, to all of the mods listed in the first part of the document. I really saw what kind of gigantic mess the mod list actually was. So many mods were broken in the way of wrong player positions, objects not being displayed correctly, instant annihilation right at the beginning of the game or otherwise unplayable. Quite some work, but I'm happy with the outcome.

Great work! Do you think there's any need for further purging, replacing barely playable mods with good mods etc?

Cheers. As far as I can tell, some not-so-bad mods have bit the dust, due to corrupt gamerules. Let's face it, nobody wants to tinker around with the gamerules for 10 minutes before finally being able to play, especcially new players who haven't even grasped the game itself completely will not go near any mods that are broken in that respect. I think there's a fairly good base of mods out there now on the list and there's always the possibility of new one's coming in, it's not like the mod days are over. I'd love to already start moderating the mods that come in though, but there's no easy way to see newly uploaded mods and going through the list to luckily catch one is just too much effort.

this is all being sorted out in one of the next versions of tb. Many changes that you've suggested and more are already planned.