News - DBolical

Articles that are authorised will be added straight to the home page, though there are limitations noted later in this article

Intro

Before we get into it, a brief preamble - the sites have been wanting to implement a system like this for a long time. It’s been a frequent concern brought up by developers in the community that it was sometimes difficult to coordinate releases alongside articles that provide context, installation instructions, and the like. The DBolical sites have strict codes of standards that our editing team hold all articles to, and previously, articles were edited prior to going live in order to ensure a consistent standard of quality across all authorised articles on the site. However, as ModDB and IndieDB have grown, this process can be slow and tedious (especially when we know you have hot news to share) so this enhancement will not only reduce the workload on our team, but will also make it easier for you, the developer, to get your articles out on schedule.

Solid article standards are part of what make IndieDB and ModDB great places to post your development updates

System

When it comes to micro-edits, you can see a lot more details by going into the source editor for an article, allowing you to adjust preview image sizes and more at a micro level

From now on, when you post your first article of the day, you will have the option to verify it immediately or schedule it's go-live date using this feature when posting:

This might result in a small increase in low-quality articles, but our content moderation team will still be manually checking and editing to ensure the quality remains consistent. If you want a better chance at your work being immediately well-received, here’s a quick run-down of the main edits that our team tends to perform even on good quality articles:

• Text shouldn’t be centered, and instead should be the default left alignment or justified
  
• Image previews should be 600px across or centered
• Grammar should be correct and properly proof-read
• Headings should be used to break up major sections of your article and avoid walls of text
• If your article is announcing a release, use the handy download button widget in your article

Whilst sticking to these rules before would increase the speed at which your articles are verified, sticking to them will still result in your mod page looking more professional, and save our content moderation team time in editing your articles manually.

Usage

Following the regulations and content standards below will ensure you don’t get one of these on your article!

There are some limitations to this system, and a few things our content moderators will continue to enforce:

• Previous rules regarding authorisation (minimum image limits, formatting, and so on) all apply
• Articles shouldn’t be uploaded more than once every 48 hours and frequent article posters might have articles archived to give other profiles time on the front page
• You must have been a member for thirty days and pass a few other backend spam checks
• Terms of use continue to apply - no obscene or graphic content
• Failing to meet all of these criteria may result in your article getting archived or deleted

This has been a long-requested change to the site’s news system and we hope the community gets a lot of good use out of it! Leave a comment down below on how you feel about this system and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

The Steam Deck is Valve’s newest foray into unconventional PC gaming, announced on the 15th of July, and it will start shipping this December to anyone who pre-orders the portable in advance.

With its shape and control setup, similarities between it and the Nintendo Switch are already being drawn by fans.

The Steam Deck is effectively a portable PC, packing similar hardware to a Playstation 4 (though the basic model at $400 comes with only 64GB of storage). Whilst it comes with its own built-in OS, the PC part comes in when Valve’s Lawrence Yang confirmed that “You can install whatever you want on it, you can attach any peripherals you want to it.” The OS can be switched out, other games (that aren’t necessarily on Steam) can be installed on it, and the system can function as a portable gaming computer.

The Steam Deck is designed for maximum compatibility with as many games on Steam as possible

With the ability to modify the core OS without jailbreaking the device - a very unique feature compared to the vast majority of other handhelds - this begs the interesting question - would it then support mods? Valve’s own Pierre-Loup Griffais confirmed that support for Steam games that have built in modding (from the Steam Workshop, potentially) is both possible and working. This means the vast array of UGC available there will be accessible to players even whilst on the move.

The Steam Deck features 64 GB of storage on the standard model, though a model with 512 GB of storage is available for those willing to fork out another $250 for it

If one can modify the contents of the system, though, that also opens up the vast majority of other mods available elsewhere - for example, Source mods that usually have to be mounted separately from the Steam Workshop (and thus are primarily hosted on ModDB) could very well be possible to install and play on the go. Ostensibly, modding on the go is a possibility, if one were to install a conventional OS like Windows that would support tools. It’s likely only a matter of time until peripherals like keyboards and mice are available in some capacity for the handheld.

The Steam Deck has a battery life in the 2-8 hour range, depending on the intensity of the game being played.

Gabe Newell, Valve’s founder, cites the Steam Deck as “establishing a product category that ourselves and other PC manufacturers are going to be able to participate in”. In other words, he’s hoping this is the start of a wave of handhelds that contain comparable infrastructure to a PC. Though Valve’s previous experiments outside of PC gaming have been mixed - the Steam Link, for example, never really gaining traction, and the Steam Controller being infamously unergonomic - this one looks to be a step in a new and interesting direction. In the meantime, you might want to draft up a list of interesting mods to install on Valve’s Half-Life games.

The Architect: Paris is an in-depth city builder developed and published by Enodo Games. Whilst many city builders have a more generic setting, this one places special emphasis on having a dedicated foundation for its style - France’s capital, Paris. With the ability to customize buildings right down to the shape of its windows to modifying entire districts at once, and with the freedom to transform the city into a medieval settlement or a futuristic trading port, the game encourages player freedom in designing their own vision of the city.

Such a creative focus naturally begets a lot of ingenuity on the part of players, with lots of room for learning from one another and taking inspiration from others’ work. Thanks to the new official mod.io support, players can easily share their work with one another, creating new designs and providing modular support for new building direction.

Mod.io is the newest business setup by DBolical’s founder, Scott Reismanis, and The Architect: Paris joins many other moddable games on the platform. There’s already some great picks on the game’s page for fans of the game - such as this deeply inspired and highly detailed building based on a real Parisian blueprint by pauljchris, or these London-inspired office buildings by Ivar. More variety can be found in colourful apartment blocks like this one by JigokuDoll.

Also worth noting is the developers run weekly community posts picking out the finest and most interesting creations by their community that week. This sets a great precedent for modders to get their time in the limelight and have their work promoted for the entire fanbase to try out.

The support provided by mod.io allows these downloads to be added directly into your game, and with the level of creativity allowed, there’s going to be plenty to dig into for prospective city builders as time goes on. You can read up on the necessary tools and methodology for modding the game here.

Hey everyone! In this article we’re going to be going through the major changes that are happening on the DBolical Discord, and send out a call to action for modders, developers, and users of the site to get on and get involved with the community! These changes are aimed at making the Discord a more welcoming place with more variety possible in conversations, and we’ll be describing the impact we’re hoping these changes have. If you want to check out the new and revamped Discord yourself, join here: discord.gg/5DTa2tf

Roles

The first major change we’ve done is implemented a new roles bot that will allow you to automatically assign yourself a number of roles on the Discord. The “game developers” and “mod developers” roles previously required manual addition by an admin, but no more! The other roles will also allow other people to see what your areas of interest are, and will factor into another change we made that we’ll go over later in this article. The biggest addition here, we feel, is the db-news role, which will be pinged for editorials, videos, and polls! More on that in the next section of this article.

The reason we brought in these changes was to broaden the potential engagement with the hobby we all love - game development. Automating the process means less overhead for admins, and more choice for the users of the server about how they want to interact with the community as a whole.

News

Next, we’ve added a few news-related channels - db-news and headlines-rss, with the former being an “opt-in” channel that you’ll receive alerts for if you sign up for the db-news role! Seeing as we’re turning editorial engagement and community features up a lot, this channel will be a busy place with new articles, videos, and polls to read and take part in every week! Even without the role, it’ll be worth keeping an eye on for anything that catches your attention. Meanwhile, the RSS feed will directly track headlines from the site, allowing you to see all the newest in modding and indie news as you browse the Discord, from 5am to 5pm each day! This isn’t all we changed, though, and the roles play a big part in our next section.

Channels

One of the big problems with the previous layout of the Discord was the game-specific channels. Whilst these are good in theory, in practice, it isolated our community of developers into niches. A Command and Conquer modding isn’t likely to have a lot of interest in Source Engine modding, and the result was closed off channels that rarely saw active use. As a result, we’ve archived these channels (don’t worry - if you were one of the few that had a good conversation in there, the channels will still be viewable, just not usable). In their place, we’ve created a new category and set of channels that cover more broad topics in both modding and game development. These channels are where you can post your WIPs, links to appropriate work, and also ask for help in that field.

ModDB talk received a few specific channels that give it a little more room for being modding specific, and on request, the IndieDB talk has received a Godot channel for discussing the Godot engine. All in all, these channels are much more inclusive of the varied and diverse community that makes up both sites, and will allow you a better access to taking part in the community.

Moderation

In preparation for these changes, we shuffled out old moderators and plan to bring in new moderators to help drive and start discussion, engage with users, and help brainstorm ideas to get the Discord community moving. If you’re interested in applying for the position of Moderator, please fill out the following Google Form (you will need to sign in with Google to submit your response): Forms.gle

Closing Thoughts

With the recent change in community management, we’re hoping to significantly increase activity across all social media and engage more closely with the community than ever before. This Discord is your Discord too - and together, we’ll make it a good place for everyone, modder, developer, or user. Join it here and be a part of our new Discord plan!

Mass Effect Legendary Edition Modding Tools Released

Mass Effect Legendary Edition came out this year, and is a collection of the three mainline Mass Effect games alongside all the DLC and many patches to bugs, visuals, and more. It’s a pretty solid collection and a must-have for any Mass Effect fan looking for an excuse to replay the franchise for the thousandth time.

Of course, the value of any game collection goes up a lot when you factor in mods - and thanks to the creators of Legendary Explorer (shortened to LEX), modding for these games has just been turned up a notch.

Whilst many mods were made for the original Mass Effect games - Mass Effect Happy Ending Mod (MEHEM) being one of the more popular hosted on ModDB - it was a difficult process to create any substantial new content, and one that the older games simply were not built for.

LEX features easier script editing thanks to compiling tools, level editing, and direct integration with BioWare’s plot system for editing the course of the narrative more comfortably. More features are planned, as well as stability improvements as LEX is in public beta and “not yet stable”, as their twitter reported.

That being said, the tools are released and ready to use. Many detailed mods have already been created for Legendary Edition, and as time goes on, we can only dream of the mods people may make with this powerful new toolset.

If you want to grab the tools, you can do so here. If you make any awesome new mods for Mass Effect Legendary Edition, be sure to share them under the new game page on ModDB here.