Hey Folks,
We wanted to take a moment to discuss something that we’ve seen a lot of our players talking about lately, and something that’s important to us both as developers and gamers. Namely, we wanted to talk about the potential future and trajectory of mod support for Camelot Unchained, as well as what you can expect from us now. As a studio, it is our desire to support the growth of a modding community to the best of our ability, with a focus on providing the necessary tools in order to create addons that improve your experience. We’re also aware that, as a Realm vs. Realm focused MMO, we’ll have to keep a close eye to avoid mods that detract from the core experience of CU or take advantage of existing mechanics.
This week, we will enable a command line option in all builds that allows reading a modified UI from the user’s local disk. This is the first step towards broader mod support, and will provide our more tech savvy players with the opportunity to begin investigating customized UI. You can find the relevant steps to follow on our GitHub here, and we’re excited to see you get started on tinkering!
In the near future, we will be releasing a new command line argument that dumps the json data we use for our views and tooltips to disk. Our intent is to allow 3rd party developers to power their own websites or tools with the same data we use in an easy-to-update manner.
In the longer term, we also want to provide better support for sharing and loading mods. Several years ago, we rewrote the UI from the ground up using an architecture that was designed to be modded and extended. Each element of the system is registered by ID and then loaded by a central manager. We plan to add the ability to create sharable mod packages that retarget or add new IDs with this widget manager so that customizations for each element can be shared and loaded into the system in parallel.
While the above covers what we’re committing to right now, this is not an exhaustive list of our plans for modding support. We want to make sure that we handle this right, and that means listening to our community members as we go. It means taking careful consideration for what sort of mods fit in our game, which are beneficial, and what sorts of mods could end up being problematic for competitive play. We want players to have the option to create and modify their game in a way that improves their quality of life, and we will be closely monitoring feedback as we continue to work towards a more robust implementation of mod support down the line.
In the meantime, we will continue to iterate on Camelot Unchained, introducing new content and features from our Autumn roadmap, responding to your bug reports, and working with the feedback you provide us. We look forward to the journey ahead with you, and the team is excited to see what mods you put together!