Unity as a modding tool?

News & General Discussion
1

Just an interesting thought that I’d like to see people’s opinions on…

Have any PC devs considered porting the raw Unity scene file with their games to allow for level alteration along with something along the lines of the “Create your own level” pack included with the Lerpz tutorial?

2

Probably not. For one thing, Unity only outputs standalone packages, and that’s not so fun for modding; especially with paid games.

In addition, you’d pretty much have to open-source your entire game to make it editable with Unity.

What could be an interesting method of doing this is moving all your actual code to a DLL, and then making “wrapper” MonoBehaviours to get to your code…

void Update() {
  DLL.ThisComponent.Update(this);
}

You could probably even make some sort of check so that the game doesn’t run unless it can find the full files on the computer. [/code]

3

Code modding in any game can be very tricky. What I meant is simply modifying the main scene file or creating a new scene file for map editing, or the inclusion of new units (which would require some extra coding, but you could probably just include the snippets of code that modders would be interested in inside the DLL file).

4

I understand what you’re saying, but allowing somebody to edit your scene with Unity includes giving them source access to all your scripts, which most game developers probably won’t want to do.

5

You can always use Unity just as a base engine, and make an filesystem appart with some logic (you can choose to compile or not your files too)

6

Never thought of that. Seems like a good idea