Best way to ship moddable game + No release editor build?

supagu

I'm working out the best way to package and ship my game.

It seems godot is designed to ALWAYS ship the game packaged. This becomes a problem for me as I want modders to be able to mod the game. This means I need to ship an editor build, as well as the raw assets.

So the problem is if I ship my game unpackaged, basically I have to ship the game assets twice: everything in the .import is shipped to have game compiled data raw assets to allow the editor to load and modders to do their thing

Seeing as this is the case, I thought well why not just ship the raw assets, and let the game compile on first load? But this code gets compiled out in a release build.

So I thought, why not just do a release build with the editor integrated, then I only need to ship 1 exe and the raw assets.... but I have been foiled again! as editor cannot be built with release.

At the moment I seems I am stuck shipping my game twice in order to have mod support OR I am stuck shipping the game and a second version of my game as an SDK.

Does anyone have any ideas around my problem?

TwistedTwigleg

I wrote a plugin that allows for loading scene files from the user's filesystem that might help. It needs a lot more work before it is even remotely to the point where I would consider shipping a game with it, but maybe it could serve as a reference for making your own modding system?

This page from the documentation apparently shows how to add modding/DLC support. It looks like it shows how to load .pck at runtime, which might help? I dunno, I only glanced through it, but perhaps it will be helpful.

But other than that, I don't really know. It seems there is not much out there with using Godot and mods right now, hopefully that will change in the future!