Factorio Forums

Disclaimer: Had another "awesome" feature idea for something that i'd like the rewritten modportal to include. Any form of criticism/comment (by fellow modders) is welcome.

What?

A flag to mark a mod version as "closed beta" ["experimental"][Edit1] to allow easy distribution to test players during development.

Why?

When making new mods it's often required to test-play the mod with some actual people, or maybe ask some friends to use your mod during their regular play and tell you if they finds any bugs. Instead of setting up a private ftp and telling them to regularly look for new versions (or worse manual solutions) it would be much easier if you could add those people/friends to a list of "beta testers" for a mod on the mod portal. And then[Edit2] mark development versions of the mod accordingly when uploading them to the portal, so that the beta versions can only be seen and downloaded by people on the beta testers list[Edit3]. That way they [interested players] [Edit4] would only need to click "update mods" in game and be always on the latest version, as a side effect any problems that occur due to automatic updates would also quickly be found.

[Edit 2020-09: Updated thread title, rephrased to stable/experimental terminology.]

Bump.
Base game has stable/experimental, mods need that too. Preferably an additional /private channel for internal testing.

/me casts greater resurrection

Would still like to be able to let players chose if they want a stable experience or the latest experimental bugfest.

Yes, I don't think it should be a 'closed' beta like OP suggested, but a way to mark releases as unstable and a tick-box when you install the mod in game to opt-in would be great.

Yea. I updated the OP + title. It's been a long time since i wrote that ;).

For the in-game updater it would already help if experimental updates weren't automatically checkbox'ed, i.e. not included in the "update everything" routine. Then i could manually add an [Experiemtal] tag to the in-game name and the player *might* just notice before they checkbox it manually...

Brilliant suggestion.

There are quite a number of mods on the portal that could benefit from this. Experimental status at least gives players browsing the mod portal a heads up that the mod is WIP. Some players might like the challenge in testing, others will know to avoid. Mod author's sanity would benefit too, and vanilla bug reports can probably be triaged faster in the knowledge that potentially unstable mods might be an influence.

I 100% agree, especially a tag for "unstable" versions is required. Mod development became so big, it requires more features for the developer community.

Regarding "private" I am unsure as it might open up mods being sold (subscribe to ... to get access to my private mods) - but I agree that a solution for all the "this the the mod for the xyz community server, please do not download"
is required...