» Mon Apr 08, 2013 4:17 am
Good morning everyone. I hope everyone had a safe holiday.
I'd like to talk again about immediate and future plans for Frostfall and beyond.
Near-term: Frostfall 2.3
Frostfall 2.3 is almost complete and has a rather lengthy set of optimizations, bug fixes, and a few new features, like water puddles that gather at your feet when drying, greatly improved hand warming animations, and tent cut-through mode. I'd like to have it out sometime this week if some things fall into place.
Future: Campfire, Last Seed, Frostfall, and more
I've run into a bit of a problem. At some point, I would like to start working on Last Seed. Like Frostfall, LS will rely heavily on a robust camping system in order to accomplish its goals. I always intended for LS to "inherit" FF's camping system. The more I worked on the logistics of this, the more of a nightmare scenario this started to look like. What if the user has LS and decides to start using FF? Vice versa? What if they uninstall FF or LS, what happens? How much does each mod need to know about the other? What if someone just wants to use the camping components? And so on. I also have a separate, semi-related issue in that I can no longer update Frostfall on Steam Workshop because I have now exceeded 100MB in Frostfall's main download (uncompressed; they won't let me compress my files there).
With that in mind, it's really started to make sense to break the camping component of Frostfall out of the main mod and make it a required master instead. The campfire in Frostfall has always been, to me, the heart and soul of the mod, and now it will be in a more technical sense. Campfire: Advanced Camping and Supplies will be a stand-alone camping system. It's the same camping system from Frostfall, and future versions of Frostfall will require it as a master (the main camping system will be removed from Frostfall itself). This way, both FF and LS can inherit and use the same core camping system, and also contribute their own additions, like Snowberry Extract (in the case of FF) or waterskins (in the case of LS). Or, you can decide to use Campfire by itself if you want to use one of the most feature-rich camping mods available, without all of the extra gameplay baggage from Frostfall and Last Seed.
There's also something else coming down the pipe, called Core Components. This is a modder's resource that I and Crysthala are currently working on, and will have a life far beyond the Survivor Series. It's main purpose is to add common, easy to use crafting resources for other modders. It's a COBL of sorts, if you're from Oblivion. It has things like generic armor dyes, new crafting workbenches, and so on. Frostfall will use it for the spinning wheels; you will use linen thread and sewing to create linen cloaks. This will help break up the traditional dumping ground of crafting recipes that is the Tanning Rack. Core Components is designed to be very lightweight and will not serve much use on it's own, but it will enhance and unify a lot of mods. Anyone who uses Core Components for their armor crafting recipes can use the same set of armor dyes as everyone else instead of implementing their own, for instance. There will be more information about this resource soon.
http://i.imgur.com/t96LXav.jpg
I'll be happy to answer your questions about Campfire, but hopefully there won't be very many of them, because as I said, it's really nothing new. It's just separating this into more modular pieces so that I can manage this more effectively, and also hopefully fix bugs easier since "who does what' will be a bit more clearly defined.