Dear connoisseurs of interactive entertainment!

Recently, I had a question about the possibility of creating a playground on Steam. I wonder why the studio can't implement a similar function similar to that presented in Toribash Next.

There are assumptions about the reasons for the non-implementation, in particular, the problem of linking one account to Steam. Is this a key obstacle?

Happy Birthday Miles!

Can you further elaborate on what you mean by playground? I have played some TBN but I haven't really found a playground mode or setting before. Do you mean the steam workshop?

In that case, I myself don't know the setup to getting a steam workshop open, It's been too long for me to remember since I used to publish stuff for school pre-covid.

In any event, I could see how it could work utilizing standard file paths to allow players to subscribe to mods, atmospheres, scripts, or anything really that is already accessible via downloading through forums or discord. For this explanation however I can see that it hasn't been done probably yet because there's not really a reason to and is just an extra step that isn't necessary, since you can just download mods via commands, you can grab scripts off of the forums or discord, etc.

Whilst I am unaware of any big update choices or changes, something like a steam workshop would probably be a nice idea to think of if there were to be a substantial overhaul or change to how the Toribash website functions, and the in-game modmaker or anything creatively expressive in that manner. But for now, steam workshop is just that, a nice idea, but not on priority perhaps.

[edit] To add onto this, any code required to be put into the game to recognize a menu or way to navigate to steam or scroll through a subscription window via anything obtained in the steam workshop is probably another reason why it hasn't been done, and why it also may have been tons more easier to implement with TBN since the game was being built from the ground up within Unity, and thus these core ideas were infinitely more flexible to implicate than just building ontop of a very old game like Toribash. The same can be said for League of Legends for instance, really old game that's very buggy and any substantial overhauls or changes require lots of time and code to deprecate old code, add new code that works with the existing code, plug everything in and watch it break while you start patching as you go.

(Most if not all of this post is purely speculative and just my thoughts ^-^)

Thanks man!

Hbd Miles~~~

Szaszuniya. This aspect is also in my area of interest, but the key issue remains the integration of the marketplace into the Steam platform, which, in my opinion, can increase user engagement.

Toribash Next has initially been designed to operate as independently from our own servers as possible, so the solution of using Steam for most of the community related stuff made most sense as they have a fairly robust system for UGC sharing and basic economy / inventory management. We still had to essentially replicate the inventory system on our own for the Epic Games Store version of TBN though, which also left that version without trading + UGC sharing functionality due to time constraints and lack of resources - which wouldn't be the case if the game was using our own systems to begin with.



Migrating Toribash market or UGC sharing to Steam (or just adding it as an option) would mean the following things:

• We need to introduce a system to synchronize Toribash item database with the Steam setup.
  From what I remember, there was no way to programmatically update Steam Inventory Schema definitions - which means there'd have to be someone with direct access to our Steam Partner page (me or hampa) able to manually upload a new version of item definitions each time items get released, making IF work more complicated than it already is.
  
  
• We have to somehow make the 7+ million existing inventory items (with all their parameters like applied effects, games played, etc) compatible with Steam inventory system.
  To do this, we need to introduce some way of converting Toribash inventory items (linked to your Toribash account, tradable using existing systems within Toribash) into Steam inventory items (no longer linked to Toribash accounts but linked to your Steam inventory instead, tradable only on Steam Marketplace) and back - because there's no solution where you get to keep both at the same time.
  
  
• We need to essentially overhaul the way mod management works if we want mods to be available on Steam Workshop.
  While there's no good way to get mods in Toribash now, when you use the /dl command you can at least be sure that the mod you've got will work both in Free Play and Multiplayer. With Steam Workshop, that will only be the case if there's a system in place that mirrors any uploads done to Workshop to our own mod bank. Then to implement proper support of revisions-based UGC system on the Workshop, we'd also need to implement a similar system in our own mod sharing, which potentially means dropping backwards compatibility for all game clients predating the update as Toribash mods are currently designed to be final with your game client not performing consistency checks on mod files if they're already located in your local mods folder.
  We would also likely need to do mass uploads of all (or most popular) mods (+ replays and any other types of UGC we'd want players to be able to share) to Workshop, because otherwise you'd just have like 20 mods available there in total.

In the end all this would lead to is community fragmentation as you'd have a good chunk of players (mobile platforms + standalone) not being able to use functionality available to Steam users, which is the last thing Toribash needs with its already small community.