New Year, New Mods
Posted by HJfod on 01/01/2024
2024 could just be the most exciting year in GD modding since the birth of modern modding in 2021. The release of 2.2 opens up endless new possibilities, and represents a chance to rework the fundamentals of modding with modern hindsight. In this blog post, I want to shortly explore some of the most interesting developments we have ahead of us in 2024.
2.2
2.2 has really thrown a curveball to modding. All old mods have been rendered unusable due to their code being so heavily tied to 2.1. Modders' knowledge of the internals of how the game works has been heavily set back, given how much the game changed. Some old mods have even been rendered completely obsolete, as they have been implemented as vanilla features in 2.2.
However, all of this brings with it an insane amount of new potential - a ton of new vanilla features to explore and enhance, a lot of new things to discover, and a chance to get rid of old legacy code that has been a burden on modding.
As an example, BetterEdit is going to have a wild time - the 2.2 editor is so different from 2.1 that even the fundamental nature of the mod may have to be rethought, as many of the features that put BetterEdit on the map are now part of the editor itself, or no longer make sense to exist in their old form. However, the 2.2 editor still definitely has place for improvement, and BetterEdit will have a field day figuring out all of those places.
Geode
Thanks to 2.2 making all old mods non-functional, Geode finally has a real chance of fully replacing old mods and ushering us a new age of modding. With Android support coming alongside 2.2 support, Geode will even bring us the ability to make mobile mods with ease - truly revolutionary, given that the mobile modding space has for all these years consisted of essentially just two mod menus.
We will have to see how fast modders are capable of making new mods, however given how eager many modders have been to use Geode for 2.2, I suspect we won't have to wait long for some really exciting mods to come out.
Making modding accessible
Towards the end of 2023, we started to see some really interesting projects being made, such as Dash and Geode Studio - projects that aim to make modding more easy to get into. I suspect that throughout 2024, we will see more projects aimed at newcomers; more thorough documentation, better tooling, and a lot of tutorials. With Geode, we have pretty much solved all of the hard low-level issues that modding has, making it simple for experienced modders to help make modding more approachable for newcomers.
2.3
It might seem a little early to start wondering about what 2.3 might have in store, but given that RobTop has in the past talked about how he wants the update to focus on long-awaited features from the community, it might be worth giving it a ponder - since modders are the ones currently implementing those long-awaited features. Maybe Rob might even enlist the help of some modders to work on 2.3.
Final Thoughts
Writing this blog post felt like a weird AI-generated advert... Hope you got something out of it anyway. Cya ;)
-HJfod