FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

How can you configure mods externally? E.g. from a "game".

In my specific case, I want to disable the traders in the Mobf, disable the music in ambience, and disable thirst in the survival_modpack. My ideas:

• RTFM. There is already a good solution, but I have not found it.
• Fork the mods. This does not really scale. It will be hard to integrate future updates to the mods.
• Split up the mods, which kind of defeats the idea of modpacks. On the other hand, a "game" is also something like a modpack, isn't it? Modpacks can be nested though.
• Mods must implement a configuration API themselves. Probably quite tedious and your favorite mod will probably forget to make just one more thing configurable. So basically, I should send pull requests to the mods.

In general, this is probably a issue, which needs to be addressed by the engine/API at some point. However, what is the best workaround for now?

There's no real workaround that would help in a general way (for now).
For some modpacks (like MOBF and Mesecons) you may be able to disable things by removing the appropriate sub mods. For others, there's a config.lua or config.txt file that you can edit.
My IRC mod can be configured via the main config file (minetest.conf), while survival_modpack can read settings from a specific file in the world directory (survival_lib.conf).
Perhaps this should be taken as a recommendation for modders. We may need to agree on a "standard" configuration scheme.

There is a configuration menu to disable certain mods and modpacks for each world.

With mobf, removing a mob at least is easy: Either delete the subfolder or use the formspec gui to disable that mob. Other mods that one wants to change slightly (e.g. change only a certain feature of the mod) are more difficult. In most cases, that can't be covered by configuration I'm afraid - most of those changes are too individual. Discussing the changes in the topic of the mod might be a good idea. Maybe other players are intrested in that feature as well and it can be included or offered as an option in the game.

qznc wrote:How can you configure mods externally? E.g. from a "game".

In my specific case, I want to disable the traders in the Mobf, disable the music in ambience, and disable thirst in the survival_modpack. My ideas:

• RTFM. There is already a good solution, but I have not found it.
• Fork the mods. This does not really scale. It will be hard to integrate future updates to the mods.
• Split up the mods, which kind of defeats the idea of modpacks. On the other hand, a "game" is also something like a modpack, isn't it? Modpacks can be nested though.
• Mods must implement a configuration API themselves. Probably quite tedious and your favorite mod will probably forget to make just one more thing configurable. So basically, I should send pull requests to the mods.

In general, this is probably a issue, which needs to be addressed by the engine/API at some point. However, what is the best workaround for now?

In config, just change the top part of init.lua in ambience Mod. Change the frequency or volume of the music to 0.
local music_frequency = 1 --music (suggestion: keep this one low like around 1)
local music_volume = 0.3

. Or better still just delete the .ogg files that are songs. Init.lua will tell you which ones. They are the big ones.

To change while playing but do /mvol 0 (check the thread for the exact command) to set the music volume to 0 in ambience mod. There is also an /svol command to adjust the volumes of the sounds.