Problem: Not being able to load plugins on ipad, and having different platforms with varying locations of plugin installation, makes things difficult for new players. Combined with essential game features being completely missing without plugin use, new players are left with a sub-par experience.

Suggestion:

1. Create a repository for plugins that approved authors and maintainers (think PCC) can maintain.

2. Create a plugin option on the configuration menu that allows a user to scroll through plugins and select which to install and remove.

3. Create a Red/Yellow/Green system of identifying plugins that are broken/have some bugs/have no known bugs.

Further thoughts: Your technically savvy player base is a huge resource of untapped potential. Eliminate the manual effort of installing plugins and new player retention should rise as a result of a better first-time experience.

It won't be official, but I have plans for this as a part of a very large upcoming project. It will have basic website, allow installation of plugins from within the game, automatic updating of plugins, ability to set permissions to who can download it (your guild, your friends, your guild + friends, etc), ease of use for developers (toss your github repo into a form, and we'll manage releases/updates/etc).

Unfortunately, no iPad, both because of dumb Apple restrictions and because of my hatred of the company.

Not even Blizzard has something like this for World of Warcraft. The answer for World of Warcraft was created by the community.

http://www.curse.com
http://www.curseforge.com

The above links are for just one such community resource that includes an auto-updater/installer. Curse even technically supports other games, but their support for other smaller games is less than stellar, and they don't have any plans to update their auto-packager for smaller games.

http://voupr.com has some similar features, but is underused for a variety of reasons that i don't have the answers to. It also has some sort of installer/updater available, though I'm not sure if it's limited to one platform.

Implementing this via plugin doesn't solve the problem at all.

Savet is actually right, all the community solutions for plugins are completely unacceptable to achieve the goal of player retention and to show off the plugins as an actual feature of the game to regular new players.

It's the same story with the PCC, it sounds like a great idea but the tools available and the official support of it is lacking to actually harness the potential and utilize the work that the players are putting into it. Anyway, I digress..

If you want to harness the proper potential of plugins we need an in-game accessible plugin repository in a menu labelled something like "ship software mods" or something, fit it into the RP context that players are downloading player built ship modifications.

It has to be included in the client because your new player will not typically discover it until after they have made their decision about whether or not they want to stick with the game. We are deluding ourselves to think that people don't decide only to stick around so long because of the changes in the experience that certain plugins offer. The major ones being targetless and droid buttons, for instance.

+1 to OP

It shouldn't be up to the devs to setup a plugin repo and vet authors. That should be up to the community to do. What would be nice, though, is the ability to see what plugins are installed and toggle them on off. That's about as far as the devs should go with this.

And if they don't do this, vital tools are unavailable to their iPad users.

It's already possible to run plugins on iOS, it just has to be done manually at the moment.

In fact, here you go, add this at the top of your plugins:
<sometable>.PLUGIN_DIR = Platform == 'iOS' and 'plugins/<somedir>/' or (<sometable> and <sometable>.PLUGIN_DIR or '')

then whenever you need to use dofile() call it like this

dofile(<sometable>.PLUGIN_DIR..'<filename>')

then just manually dofile() the main.lua

Regardless of what your intentions are, they don't have the time right now to be spending it on something like this and it's Apple's fault they decided to remove plugin auto-loading.

Here's an image showing the path to create the "plugins" folder.

http://i.imgur.com/O6ojvkj.png

"It shouldn't be up to the devs to setup a plugin repo and vet authors"

The second part no, but the first part yes. If the devs don't setup an official plugin system to do it theres no way to ensure it gets mainstream support, theres also no way for it to come load on the client and not require a new player to go through the process of learning how to find and install plugins which usually doesn't happen until after the player has made the choice to stay with the game.

It excludes the possibility of someone finding a plugin like targetless and saying "oh wow, this game has a great plugin system, I could have some fun with this".

I don't accept that this is possible with a community based repo, it just isn't the same.

@Savet: I will be making it incredibly easy for noobs to use. Someone merely has to point them to a website, where they download an application (Windows, OS X, Linux, and Android) which will handle everything for them. It optionally enables a server to listen to connections from the game client plugin it installed, so that users have an in game UI for installing plugins. This technically may be against the EULA, so it warns users about it before turning it on. It is unlikely GS would ever act on it, as it's relatively obscure and not harmful.

Assuming you/GS trust me. The programs will be open source with a public github repo, and I strongly encourage independent review.

@TRS: That is possible, but if the application is advertised via 1/100 classibot style, it can have a high enough exposure to help retain players. It isn't optimal, but GS is obviously very busy and this is quite a bit of work to implement.

@draugath: So very true on the part of disabling plugins. I can kinda work around this by using an external program with the plugin..

TheRedSpy, no other game that supports any sort of modification has created it's own official repositories. These have always been community driven efforts. I don't expect Guild Software to do any different, and if they do, they're wasting their time. The only thing they probably should do is create an interface in-game that allows for the management of plugins, similar to what World of Warcraft already has.

If a game with 8+ million subscribers and boatloads more money and manpower doesn't waste their time on this, then why do you think Guild Software should? Any sort of official repository of 3rd-party offerings brings with it a liability that no developer wants to take on.

Because a game with 8-million subscribers doesn't actually need plug-ins or community built software to stay ahead. It's a nice thing to have anyway, but it forms less of a part of the core experience of the product. It's apples and oranges to compare WoW to VO.

If we had a really good configurable interface with lots of different modes people wouldnt be bothered so much by plugins, but the fact is that when people discover targetless or droidbuttons (for tablets) it's a big game-changer and we see often see them have one of those "ah ha!" moments where they realize there's something here beyond whats just visible at first glance.

WoW doesn't need to show its players that from the beginning because it stands on its own. We have people who rock up and go "who shot at me, I can't see any players in my sector". Integrating targetless as an option in the game may be a way to solve this problem, but for as long as they refuse to grab plugins like this and build them in, this is the next best thing to solving a wide variety of problems.

I'm going to toss a couple pennies in and say I have to agree with Savet and TRS. If you want an example of a company does something like this, just go look at Squad and Kerbal Space Program. Squad actually culls many of the better mods and plugins and makes them official features.

I'm not saying that's what GS should do (who am I kidding, yes I am), but some kind of official support would help.

Along the lines of expanding the ingame management of plugins, I have actually written a mockup for a new plugin loader that supports dependencies and other meta-data for the identification of plugins. However, this is all moot unless raybondo were to have the time and wherewithal to act upon it. Even then, it's still not a trivial matter to implement. I know there are many amongst us that wish we could contribute more substantially, but due to the failures of past experiments, it's not likely something to be expanded upon soon again.

At this point in time, rather than hoping for an official repository, I think we should take VOUPR and look to making it better. Move all plugins and information away from vo-wiki and use the community projects forum for discussion only. An alternative would possibly be to seek out another location that could meet our needs.

While I wasn't happy with my initial attempts to use Curse and CurseForge, they do provide a lot of services for getting information from users to developers and vice versa.

Plus, leaving this entirely in the hands of GS, you likely won't be satisfied in the long-term with what may come about, and you'll be stuck begging for more changes that have to be shuffled into the regular mix of game development and repo updates.

You keep bringing up wow, but wow has a history of incorporating plugin features into the client. Threat meters is a good example. If Vo did this too, my suggestion would be moot. But the response to feature requests is: "it's in a plugin"

Additionally, the example provided for loading an iPad plugin is rediculous.

I really wish somebody would explain what's wrong with voupr. It seems to work well enough when I use it.

the problem with vourp is plugin authors are selfish and hate things they didn't make themselves

the second problem is calder wrote it a couple years ago then vanished, but he at least manages to renew the domain every now and then....

the third problem is you still have to manually install the plugins

but other than that it is better than all other existing options (the community thread, the wiki plugin list)

Thanks, CS.

Additionally, the example provided for loading an iPad plugin is rediculous.

Yeah, welcome to iPad. Enjoy the pain.

OK, so if we embrace voupr, then perhaps that could be an entry in the settings menus.