fixomaniac

I'm sorry, but that's just flat out not true. If instead of installer .exe files all of these were simple .rar or .zip or even .7z files one could install all 93 packages with a few clicks. Just select them all, right click extract and point it to your plugins folder. Done. And the default behaviour of most extraction programmes is to keep folder structure intact so the result is the exact same as if you were running an installer. This is not difficult or complicated. Anyway it seems the installer problem is acknowledged and worked on. That's going to be the game changer in my belief. I greatly admire all the work being done, and don't get me wrong that 450MB download with the dependency tracker is a really good idea. My problem is only with the installers which scare off 99% of people who want to get started with mods. If at the end of this new players can, with a few clicks, install almost all dependencies they need and a bunch of the best mods with them I can guarantee a flood of new players.

93!! Installers! I really appreciate the effort but putting these packs together is mostly wasted time. Who's going to run all those installers just for dependencies?

Does it still use the installer exe for every single download? Because whatever improvements you can make that one thing always holds me back from downloading anything.

Awesome. Anything to make downloading more newbie friendly is a big step forward in my opinion. I would offer to help but my plugin folder is, not surprisingly, one giant mess.

I haven't read all of this thread, so apologies if what I say has been gone over already. If anything step one should be getting rid of the ridiculous installers that still come with certain mods. I don't think that happens here so much but on the LEX it does and it makes it completely impossible to bulk download. Anything from the LEX is completely unusable to the newbie (even if it does have that dependency tracker). Because I'm crazy I built a script to automatically go through the stupid installers for me but no sane person would ever think that was a good idea. Everybody has a zip programme, everybody can copy paste something to the plugins folder. All dependencies should all be bundled into one big download. It really doesn't matter if the person doesn't even need half of them. It's worth it if it gets rid of brown boxes and the need to install dependencies for dependencies etcetera. Just create a big pack with every single dependency in it and be done with it (I would exclude stuff like relots perhaps since it's very clear that it needs the original model). The biggest problem for people newly getting into mods isn't the the mods themselves but the dependencies. Anyone coming into this is going to look at that and correctly identify the depencency system as insane. It may have been a halfway decent idea in 2003 (I doubt it) but it's mindboggling that it's still going on. Even now after years of building my plugin folder I still sometimes get brown boxes after downloading something new. I'm not part of this community so I'm just giving my outside view as someone who came into SC4 mods quite late (2011 at first). The first mod I tried to download after NAM was some kind of train station that had an ungodly amount of dependencies, some on other sites (and thus some with those ridiculous installers) and some I had to google. My friend who also likes games like SimCity gave up at that point and has never looked at SC4 ever again and I can't blame him. I persevered but only because the eventual quality of the mods and the effect on gameplay was (and is) so amazing. So in conclusion: get it to a point where a new player can just download the dependency pack, a building and plop it in their plugin folder without ever having to worry about getting a brown box.