Mod: Updated: Drives 'R' Us v4.1

[ExplorerBob]

As an avid WW player, I've tried most of the mods available for the game at one point or another. I liked the game enough to start working on a mod of my own, and I acquired the free copy of SAIS, so I could pull info from SAIS to make my projects more like the original.

Hopefully this background will lend some credence to my belief that Drives 'R' Us is the greatest mod going right now. I spent a good amount of time on the original version, and it's gotten better with each new revision. The only mods I regularly play now are my own, Teeming With Life, and Drives 'R' Us -- more so Drives than Life.

In fact, Drives' presence is somewhat intimidating; my mod has a few good things about it, and some features in the pipeline (variable relations, for instance, which is still in development), but Drives has so much great stuff already in that in some ways, my mod is a bit superfluous. We differ in some aspects of design philosophy, which is why I continue development; there are some things about WW that I think could be better. Drives builds off of WW, whereas my mod builds more from the source, in some ways, which is SAIS. If I didn't have that in mind, though, and I wanted to develop straight from Weird Worlds, there wouldn't be too much of a point in making a mod, 'cuz this one already has so much going for it.

I haven't checked the actual mod files as much as my own, so I'm not sure as to the viability of the idea I'm about to propose, but do you think it would be possible to combine the better parts of Teeming With Life with Drives 'R' Us?

[sgqwonkian]

ExplorerBob, you're making me blush.

There's plenty of design space left out there, by the way. Drives'R'Us is almost entirely just items. One area it's pretty weak in is quests and races. There's another 50 or 60 weapons that could be made for the game without getting old, too.

As to your notion of combining my mods together. It's been on my "to do" list for a while. And I'd probably throw in a tiny bit of the Sgqwonkian Crisis mod... well, one or two of the better bits.

Speaking of feeling "superfluous" or being "intimidated" - go take a hard look at Sgqwonkian Crisis sometime. You know how you feel in regards to my recent stuff? Well, that's how I was feeling in relation to Phlagm's Even Weirder Worlds - it was so slick compared to my freshman efforts.

The important thing is to just publish. Hammer it out, put a rough draft out here. There's a reluctance to do so, a desire to polish until it's shiny. I get that. I look back at old Sgqwonkian Crisis, and cringe a bit. The truth is, modding is complex enough there's always something to fiddle with, you'll never be 100% happy. You can go back and fix it up later.

I had this amazing Weirdyssey mod I was working on for 4 to 6 months solid. It was gonna be great, and I didn't want to spoil the secrets by releasing a rough draft. Then my computer crashed and I lost all of it.

But, I digress... Definitely, in my plans, I intend to put out a melded version of those mods, and I'll probably add to it the Time Capsules and Esmeralda mini-mods, and maybe some of my favorite parts of other people's mods, too. It'll take a while, though.

Anyhow, thanks again for the kind words. I'm glad you like my stuff.