Moddable features from a single file (like characters or attacks)

Question

I'm currently making an RPG in Unity and I want to have all attacks (and characters) in files next to the .exe in a Assets (or Mods) folder.

I want the file format to be like *.atk or *.chr and inside the file you set parameters like the attack name or the attack type.

I also wanted to add hardcoded functions that you call inside the mod file like DoDamage() or createSprite() which basically lets the modder tell the game what the attack does.

I'm fairly new to Unity so does anyone know how I can incorporate this?

Answer 1

Answer by MUG806 · 3 days ago

Unity is pretty bad for this kind of thing and doesn't have very good modding support out of the box. Depending on the type of data you want to load, as some things can be loaded at runtime reasonably easily. For example if you want to load text and number data or simple images there are ways of doing it. It becomes much more complicated if you want to load meshes/animations/prefabs etc.

0 Show 5 · Share

andrew-lukasik · 3 days ago 0

Share

Unity is pretty bad for this kind of thing and doesn't have very good modding support out of the box.

Please let me disagree with you here. It's not that this or that engine lacks something (all engines can read text and bin files) - it something very different - modding support requires specific game architecture which surprises developers who are new to this and think about this as some kind of feature to add after the project is completed (multiplayer support being similar case).

If you think ahead and design your game to read text files, then modding is rather simple - you just read different text file instead...

MUG806 andrew-lukasik · 3 days ago 1

Share

Allow me to disagree further. Yes of course, modding basically always just comes down to loading in data at runtime, and does require that you have a specific plan for this which you are going to have to implement yourself in a lot of cases. However in some engines you are given tools that make loading in assets at runtime much easier. Unity has no such thing, so you are having to create a custom solution for it. Unity is also very inconsistent with the kinds of data that can easily be imported at runtime (eg it has solutions that allow the loading of texture data dynamically, but not for other various data types that can be imported via it's editor. Yes of course you can do it yourself if you put the work in, but that would be true if you were using no engine at all, and the whole idea of a game engine is to have prebuilt solutions to common things game devs need, and this is one place where unity doesn't help you very much.

andrew-lukasik MUG806 · 2 days ago 0

Share

That is true. No built-in utility to read/write gameObject at runtime as yaml/etc is disappointing. There are some pieces of that in Dots (ability to write/read World as binary file) which is a step in good direction but even that is incomplete and doesn't work out of the box (which is slightly infuriating I admit).

Show more comments

AnOrdinarySandwich · 2 days ago 0

Share

@MUG806 @andrew-lukasik Hey guys, I'm curious if you think LUA could be used to implement this kind of thing? I've played around with it in minecraft modding so I know with the right API its pretty robust, but I don't know enough in regards to its capabilities within unity.

Moddable features from a single file (like characters or attacks)

1 Reply

Your answer

Welcome to Unity Answers

Follow this Question

Related Questions