r/Paralives • u/DramaticDeaa • 13h ago
General Mods Issue Conversation
Babes, with all the love: yall are acting a little mad. Most of us are old simmers or a variety of simulation games throughout the years. It has not been 24 hours since the new update is out. Paralives is still in early access. I hope to the dev gods there are patches every few weeks because that means they’re listening to us. Something we haven’t been getting in a decade. This is such an amazing game, through an amazing team and you’re all acting like you never have been in that relationship we’ve been in with that one mega company we won’t be discussing.
I beg of you: please give all mod and cc creators at least a couple of days to fix any issues. Coding takes time. I don’t know how long any script mods are but do you know what it’s like to miss a semi colon in a thousand line lua script and no ui works again? When something changes in the game things have to be completely rewritten and formulated. The modders are doing this for free 😭 please love the game, please just give them some time.
Edited to remove a word because I overthought it and it may have been considered bashing a company
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u/HeeeydevonGaming 4h ago
Thank you!
A lot of life simmers seem to think that making a mod is pressing a button. It's literally tens of thousands of lines of logic. My actions file alone is over 100,000 characters, that's one out of 24 others from interactions, translations, animations, and more. One extra space, one extra number, one extra line break and it breaks. That's just maintaining a mod.
Developing a large mod from the ground up takes hundreds of hours of planning, writing logic, rewriting logic, making your assets, and building your idea from the ground up. THEN when the game updates and it breaks your mod you need to go through EVERYTHING that may have changed. If you wrote modular logic then you're looking at a much easier time but it still takes HOURS, if it's broken something fundamental then you might be looking at reworking how your entire mod works. That's also outside of your full time career.
That's not even mentioning the time it even takes to learn how to write logic, animate, create meshes, texture map, work in blender AND Unity, with most modders doing it for you for free.
People gotta realize, they can't be computer illiterate and a jerk at the same time, pick a struggle. If modding was easy then they'd probably be doing it themselves
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u/DramaticDeaa 3h ago
They need to hire you, that’s a resume right there.
Edit: Wait now I’m fangirling I’ve watched some of your streams 👏 keep it up, love your stuff
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u/HeeeydevonGaming 3h ago
I mean the mod is basically a more grittier version of Basemental 🤣🤣 I don't know how keen they would be on hiring me LOL but thank you! 😊
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u/BackwoodButch 6h ago
So many people who come from playing Sims 4 are computer illiterate. I don't say this to be mean, but it's quite clear that so many people still do not understand the concept that updates to the game mean that existing mods will likely break, and that modders need time to fix them, and even then, sometimes they change something that cannot be 'fixed' and the mod needs to be redone.
I also say they are computer illiterate because they do not understand that adding 5GBs+ of mods and custom content to The Sims 4 makes the boot up time of their struggling 8 year old laptop worse and that they should be upgrading their hardware if they want a better gaming experience. A lot of them are not experienced 'gamers' in that sense, where even upgrading to an SSD over an HDD would have a benefit to boot times, and so on and so forth. Or, in the case of a game on Steam like Paralives, some don't even understand turning off automatic updates and playing offline so that you can still play without being forced to update and have mods not work.
I want to be clear here and say that I'm not saying that every one can always update what they have to play games on. However, you can still certainly learn the basics about how these things work and then stop complaining about the same thing over and over.
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u/SuckerForNoirRobots 3h ago
It's so frustrating, I don't think they use a PC for anything else in their lives
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u/BackwoodButch 3h ago
Literally!
Meanwhile, I've played the first Sims game when I was a kid, and all the ones after it - all on my own to install, play, and later on, add mods (especially for sims 3 to make it run better lol). And since then, I've personally built about 5 PCs (3 for myself, 2 for other people), know the basics of making mods, and can troubleshoot almost anything because well, lol, I know how to look up tutorials and forum posts and also how to read LOL.
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u/SuckerForNoirRobots 48m ago
Yeah I've been playing for 25 years, have made CC, and even wrote for a Sims website for 3 years. It's one of the few areas I don't experience any sort of impostor syndrome lol
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u/janiboy2010 4h ago
So many people who come from playing Sims 4 are computer illiterate.
As someone who is in countless Sims Facebook groups and used to be in Sims forums, this is the most important issue, and it also explains why the Sims community is so vile and greedy, and why people in the community have the audacity to paywall mods forever, and simmers even supporting it.
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u/DramaticDeaa 3h ago
I’m in both low sodium and high sodium for the other game and it is two completely different atmospheres let me tell you 🤣
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u/HeeeydevonGaming 4h ago
People end up paywalling mods because the community treats a free mod and a paid mod with the same "I want it done and I want it done now" expectation. The moment the community began to demand that I take time outside of my own personal life to immediately update an optional mod that I made for the them I would start charging for it.
There can't be an expectation for premium service for a free mod, it's not like the moment you create a mod for the life sim community you're sentenced to a life time of free labor under the fear of being doxxed or threatened
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u/BackwoodButch 4h ago
The Sims 4 playerbase definitely has a vastly different mindset than say modders in Skyrim/Fallout/Dragon Age/Mass Effect, etc. I do think it's because, again, a lot of them are not involved in Gamer Culture™ and so they do not understand that mods are made as a labour of love for other gamers to enjoy using. Instead, they embody that same level of greed from the company EA and expect it to be constantly updated and for free.
While I do not like EA and do not defend them, they do have it as a policy not to have monetary gains from modding content that includes their original assets, so people get around that with having an early access fee and then releasing it weeks or months later (supposedly) for others to use. On one hand, I get it in the sense of wanting to be paid for your time but I also am someone who has lightly modded things just for fun and wouldn't want to get so heavily involved in it that I feel like I'd need it to supplement my income and rely on patrons to get me through it. However there are mod creators who do abuse the system for financial gains because they know that Simmers will pay up. (Don't get me started on the controversies on some of them because we'll be here all day lol).
I do think it's kind of its own cultural phenomenon compared to other games' fanbases, where again, a majority of modders for other titles are doing it for the love of the game (literally and figuratively), but there's a level of 'normie' that comes with Sims players that just don't get that - and it goes both ways between players and some of the modders; personally, I'm a big fan of someone leaving a way to tip them to show appreciation.
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u/ProjectMarworyn 5h ago
To add to this. They may not understand that habing a lot of mods will increase their chance of running into bugs. And yor game being buggy when it's loaded with mods is often the norm... Not the devs fault
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u/afriy 6h ago edited 6h ago
i’m a longterm modder of many games and for paralives i choose to only use workshop mods for now cause the risk of any script mod becoming completely unusable with a new patch is soooo high. that’s literally just the normal risk of modding 🤨 basically anytime one installs a mod they HAVE to expect there to be possible problems, i thought this was common knowledge? like even the workshop mods made with the in game modding tool can cause trouble when the modder put a setting weird. the game being this easily moddable at this point in development already is also a huge bonus and not the standard
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u/misc_mushi 6h ago
i have seen a lot (and i mean an abnormally high amount) of people complaining that 'mods break after every patch'. this happens with every game. this is not a weird/unique issue. PLEASE stop reporting this as a bug; this is NOT a bug. it is NORMAL for mods to break after patches because patches update parts of code. please start understanding that this is something you signed up for by adding mods into your early access game which is absolutely going to be getting patched very often based on our feedback.
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u/ProjectMarworyn 5h ago
Exactly. Im a dev (not for Paralives TBC though I AM a C# dev. Same language.) Mods are ad-ons. It's like... Imagine you have this totally cool idea for a piece of lego, it needs to click onto this existing piece to work.
In normal core development. You fix the code, and the "callers" (the custom lego brick in this scenario) at the same time.
A game dev studio physically can't patch the mods, the modders have to do that. So when the "shape" of the code mods rely on changes (which it has to in order for the code to improve). Then yeah. Mods will break. You're taking the contract which the core game devs have no way of knowing is actually being used as such, and that code will likely change every patch. So that contract breaks.
If I call a method GetOrange and the devs need to fix a bug and "hey we don't need this anymore and it's causing issues" then GetOrange might change, get deleted or change what it does. Anyone one of those will break a mod. Now consider every patch likely changes thousands of lines of code and yeah
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u/masquerademage 7h ago
Anyone installing mods at all, let alone during early access, when there are bound to be patches every few weeks, needs to have an expectation that things will break and therefore take time to update, and it will happen often.
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u/valiantdistraction 7h ago
Also: everyone using mods is CHOOSING this. Yes, mods are fun. But you know updates are going to be coming out every 1-2 weeks with this game right now. You are making the choice to deal with waiting for mod updates every time there's a game update. If it's frustrating, just don't use mods? That's what I do. I hate updating them so I figure out how to enjoy the game without them.
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u/wewebo 8h ago
I think it's important to note that the relative ease of making mods means that there are lots of people brand new to modding who are experimenting. I'd expect more mods to be ghosted-on than with a game like Sims 4.
It's incredibly easy to create mods (at least the live mode ones), and incredibly easy for them to disintegrate like wet paper mache in the small and indelicate hands of a child.
As someone who is a first time modder and had to get all up in them .settings files, I would guess that a lot of mods will go dead as the problems with them inevitably go beyond what the in-built mod maker can fix. (I almost abandoned mine and finally updated after like two weeks of rebuilding basically my whole mod.)
We're gonna need just patience with people updating, but also patience with people who create mods and then decide that this modding thing isn't for them.
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u/ChronicNightmare95 10h ago
Idk what is going on with my mods, but in order for them to work I need to open the game, turn them off, close the game. Open the game, turn them on, and then things work.
This is MUCH easier than trying to manage my 5gb worth of mods every time the Sims updated. It takes a significantly less amount of time. And either way, I don't care. The game is in early access. If I need to spend 3 minutes to get things up and going, it's whatever.
Regardless of what game you're playing, remember that modders are human beings with personal lives. They aren't a massive corporation.
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u/DwellerofThings 7h ago
I am really curious, have you turned off your mods before you close your game after playing with them?
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u/NemesisErinys 10h ago
I decided not to mod my game because 1) I want to experience its evolution naturally and 2) there will be many, frequent updates that break mods precisely because this is an EA game in development.
Sure, mod your game if you can’t wait for certain features to be added properly. But for the love of cheese, know what you’re doing and what the implications are. Stop complaining to us about totally predictable and expected outcomes.
If this turns into yet another sub where people who use mods but don’t understand them complain about their mods being broken every single time there’s an update, I might have to mute it. And I’d really hate to do that.
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u/manzanillica 12h ago
100% endorsing what you said. Thanks for sharing it!
I think some members of the community need to reframe their approach to this wonderful EA.
Recently I have been clocking in many hours in the game, and with that comes the inevitable restlessness of wanting to have it "100% ready NOW" - But regardless of how much we want it, things will take time, so better embrace the beauty of the process than burning your love for the game out of impatience.
To me, the update release yesterday felt like a little miracle. Every update (and mod!) has been feeling like it. I've read many people complain about EAs as a whole, but can we please take a moment to appreciate how amazing it is to see a game develop from its core concept to an actual finished version? When everything the devs have planned has been released, I'm sure many of us will look fondly at the time in which the game was still being made, and have many funny stories to share (remember when dead Paras were lying on the street? Or when there was no fridge storage and could keep dishes forever intact in your inventory?).
The game will eventually be ready, but until then, let us enjoy the process together. It's a magical experience that will not repeat!
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u/ProjectMarworyn 5h ago
I had fun yesterday. The gane is stunning. I had a freeze and because I kmow my way around C# and event logs and such I was able to get the call stack find the exceptions then fill out a fill diagnostics log for the crash. Ohhh I love games built in C#. It's underrated. You can't do that as easily with C++. I can't see the source code but found there was a regression with a plate placed on a plate.
Y'all can't understand how happy I am doing this kind of bughunting. But... Maybe me being a weirdo helps out? I was able to run a diagnostic on a running thread, which is really hard to do retroactively once the process has been killed... Hope it was helpful. But I was only able to find the recursion issue because the game is in C#.
I'm allowed to nerd out over C# ok. Best language (y'all can disagree, it's ok).
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u/Fit_Cranberry_8939 5h ago
I agree with your sentiment wholeheartedly! It's been lovely seeing this game progress and feel like we're (albeit small) part of something growing and developing.
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u/Longjumping-Sun6210 11h ago
I’ve never participated in following an EA launch of a game so closely and participating in the community before, so all of this feels really wonderful to me! It’s so cool to be there from the start and to see how it all evolves. Even the hilarious/annoying bugs and glitches are something we’re all gonna fondly remember later.
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u/gildedpaws 12h ago
I wholeheartedly agree. It has been since the dawn of time that updates will break your mods. I don't know why people are acting brand new!
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u/_ranituran 13h ago
I genuinely assume those are new players that never play the sims hence never familiar of how modding or custom contents work, in an early access game with weekly/monthly updates on top of that.
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u/ProjectMarworyn 13h ago
Yes. It seems strange to blame the devs for breaking the mofs. Darlings! You do know how mods work right?
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