[moddable] - Build your online community with instant(!) mod support

Hi guys!

After months of hard work we are thrilled to announce [moddable] is released to the Asset Store: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/29573



[moddable] is a professional tool to add mod support to your Unity game, with the lowest possible integration overhead and learning curve.

Mind a (really) short tutorial?

Let's imagine this is a method somewhere in your current or future Unity game:

public void Shoot(int firepower) {
....
}

Just add 1 word of code above the method, thus change to this:

[moddable]
public void Shoot(int firepower) {
....
}

This is ALL there is to it, this and not more! All other processing and mod bridging and execution logic is done by us!

Add the attribute [moddable] to a few more methods and member varibales and at that point YOU - the gamedev - are done. Let the online community do its magic. Why not release your game early? With modding your customers can already invest in your game and have fun with it + sharing experiences with their friends.

Demo game:
https://moddable.softrare.eu/#manpages/demo.html



Features:

- Text based mods, no extensive IDE needed at all for modding
- Integration is easy and abstracted from your native game functionality in an aspect-oriented approach. Just add "[moddable]" above your methods/member variables, ->Done! - built-in console for debug output and even modding at runtime.
- JS-like modding language
- Automatic generation of template mod, exposing and explaining your game mod API, no extra action needed on your part: (arrows indicating cross-execuability between mod and native game, automatic function stubs and documentation generation)


- Define the mod function execution time (before or after the native method in the game), even override native game functionality completely by mods, or disallow any aspect of it (even decide per exposed Unity method): thus total control and flexibility.
- Mod execution order (if needed)
- Passing Unity Parameter values to the mods
- Passing Unity method return values to the mods
- Many built-in and ready to use mod functions. Need more? Just write them in Unity, expose, and ready.
- Extensive documentation for the base API: https://moddable.softrare.eu/#manpages/api.html



Planned Features:

- Share mods online
- modders will be able to create custom GUIs using uGUI (acutally a lot is already included, but as of yet largely undocumented)
- Make mods Multiplayer-ready
- Mesh importing
- Prefab/component browser (imported meshes inclusive)
- Creating events/callbacks in mods
- More built-in API functions (bridge between mod and game)

Platforms:

At this point, [moddable] mod loading from files is suitable for Standalone players, but it's planned for all platforms through an online platform in the form of an overlay (you will be able to completely avoid this functionality if you want sharing of your game to happen exclusively "offline"). "Live modding" through the built-in console works everywhere already.

Resources:

Website
Demo
Tutorial
Modding Manual
API

 

We are looking for a solution to allow in-game AI programming by users. Specifically, we would like players to be able to write their own AI code for the robots they build in our game.

Would it possible to use [moddable] to support in-game scripting?

I would prefer to have a code editor built directly into the game itself, rather than requiring users to run our game in a window, and have another window open with Notepad++ or Sublime text. How hard would it be to get an in-game code editor working?

The asset looks great! Nice work!

 

Hi! It's very possible. You would have to integrate the code editor yourself, but in theory you can already now test live coding within the included console. In any case, if there are any difficulties just let me know and we'll assist you as well as possible in resolving these

 

Sounds good!

Our use case is this:

1. We are creating a realistic robot building / robot combat game. In the game, players use our "Robot Workshop" to create their robots.
2. We do not plan to support online multiplayer. Instead, players will create AI for their robots and share their robots with other players to fight AI vs AI.
3. We plan to expose a bunch of user-generated values to the AI. For example, all robots will have access to a pathfinding "findNearestWaypoint()" function that will come from a Unity navmesh, as well as position, rotation, battery, heat, and other state variables. In addition, players will have the ability to add "sensors" to their robot. When an enemy enters a one of the sensor trigger zones, the AI should be notified.
4. The AI should be capable of sending raw input commands to the robot's motors, just like a button press on the keyboard or a controller would do.
5. We would like to have complete flexibility for players to script any sort of AI they would like: behavior tree, FSM, utility, etc.

So, several questions:
A. If players wanted to separate their AI into several different user script files, is this possible?
B. Can players define classes / methods in the user script?
C. How likely are things to break if we were to encode the scripts as JSON instead of writing them to a file? Ideally, all of the information required to build an entire robot (mesh, textures, data, and scripts) would be encoded into a single JSON file for ease of sharing.

Thanks for the help and insight! I like that [moddable] looks a lot like javascript. This should make the AI scripting portion of the game accessible to a much wider audience (i.e. schools / students / teachers).

 

A. Right now, that is not possible. The script files that are run correspond to real existing cs classes within the Unity assembly. Of course you can mod multiple files, meaning multiple scripts per game and/or game object within a single mod.
B. They can define methods, yes.
C. The system works with .modd files, an easy to learn JS-like modding language. You would have to unwrap the files from JSON, before presenting them to the [moddable] engine for processing.

We agree that JS makes it easier to learn. At the same time we are keeping the advantages of cs/Unity's object-oriented approach (you can still access other objects, in example through http://moddable.softrare.eu/#manpages/api.html#CallNativeFunc)

 

Thanks for the help. You have done a great job with this!

 

Thank you, please come back any time if you have questions!

 

Why are you using JS-like language - not C#?

 

Hi! Sorry for the delay! Well, we had to build/license our own compiler and writing a pseudo-objectoriented JS compiler is more or less the difference between a development time of 6 months against 2 years probably The difference with many other packages is that we really parse the plugin code ourselves instead of just handing it all over to the C# engine and letting it execute. By doing this we can execute specific bits of plugin code whenever a method is called which is decorated by the attribute [moddable] in example, so flexibility is much higher in comparison with seemingly comparable packges.

 

Hi there,
do you still plan to add "live modding" to support plattforms like IOS and Webgl?

 

Hi! "live modding" already works for all platforms!

 

Very cool thank you!

 

Hello, I own and have used you UMMO script which is excellent and based on my experience with that I would like to purchase this as I'm sure it will be the same high-quality.. my question is the planned features include mesh Imports which I believe are imperative for a moddable game
That is in your plan so I was wondering what the status is.

 

Hi! Thanks a lot for your question and your nice words about uMMO! Mesh import is not in there yet natively, very sorry to tell you. But be sure to realize that you could always implement this yourself for any game! [moddable] is itself moddable in the sense that you can always just add functionality and call it in your mods and let your players use it just as if it was native functionality. I hope this helps!

 

Would it make sense for us to collaborate, and to integrate an upload to mod.io button into the [moddable] plugin @softrare? To give you some context, we've built a Unity plugin that provides cross-platform hosting, discovery, moderation for mods and UGC (similar to Workshop) which works on PC, console and mobile.

You can see some of the Unity games using our mod SDK such as Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and Skater XL on our website.

 

How to perform "live modding" in other platform? Is there any tutorial on this?

 

I wonder if moddable is supporting Playmaker. I made my game almost fully with Playmaker and seeing [moddable] word makes anything moddable makes me excited. I hope if such "action" (Playmaker) can make my Playmaker FSMs or variables moddable too.
If such can be done, this would be a great buy for me!