Adapt CKAN to RimWorld?

[richard]

I've just finished up 600+ hours playing Kerbal Space Program, and the modding scene there is extremely vibrant. I believe a huge part of that success is CKAN enabling the easy discovery, installation and management of mods.

CKAN is a tool that can find, automatically install and update mods for players. Mods can have dependencies and recommendations.

Modders can support installation through CKAN with no change to what they're doing.

As I understand it, CKAN should be adaptable to installing RimWorld mods. It uses a well-defined metadata system that has been brought over from other very mature packaging systems.

And it's Open Source, and maturing very quickly.

[macrosblackd]

One of the bigger things I'd like to see available is something similar to ModOrganizer with the ability to set up profiles and easily launch say, Vanilla or Ultimate Overhaul Mod or MyFavMods. I've been meaning to poke around with this idea a bit more but my time is mostly taken up by work and my knowledge of injecting and using virtual file systems is non-existent.

[crazybmanp]

Yea, something like a CKAN would be super cool for Rimworld, since it would functionally replace mod packs being distributed as large packs, instead it could be loaded as a package file.

I would almost be up for doing this myself, but i don't think i have the time for doing a bunch of development for free.

[crazybmanp]

I'm gonna post here in case someone else has decided to make a CKAN version for rimworld. I am currently setting out to, in my free time, learn about the inner workings of CKAN and modify it to work with rimworld, much like CFAN for factorio. If someone else is already doing this or knows someone who is already doing this please tell me so i can instead help contribute to that project.

(Note: this is not a promise that this will be finished, but i am attempting it.)

[Jaxxa]

I'm gonna post here in case someone else has decided to make a CKAN version for rimworld. I am currently setting out to, in my free time, learn about the inner workings of CKAN and modify it to work with rimworld, much like CFAN for factorio. If someone else is already doing this or knows someone who is already doing this please tell me so i can instead help contribute to that project.

(Note: this is not a promise that this will be finished, but i am attempting it.)

You might want to jump on Slack and talk to people about it there.

I think that definitely_not_fluffy and skully are working on a mod website, thegentleman was / is working on a CKAN type program.

And I am working on a Mod Orginiser Program that I should have done soon, it is just enabling / disabling mods from a windows program with some Checking on the load order based on additional .xml files.

Similar to what you said all of this is not a promise that this will be finished, but I an attempt in spare time.

[JerryBi]

Looking at CKAN i found next :

making simple corrections to readme.txt and creating empty GameData folder we can make ckan.exe think that rimworld folder is a KSP folder so it will start working.
rimworld.exe need to be renamed \ copied to ksp.exe (or how it is named)

using version of rimworld we will see many of ksp mods so we can append every mods for rimworld with tag [rimworld] or something similar to filter mods.

In such way CKAN can be used currently without any problems

If someone can talk to CKAN peoples and convince them to help, they easly can extend their support for mod base of rimworld, for sure.

[HaploAW]

If someone can talk to CKAN peoples and convince them to help, they easly can extend their support for mod base of rimworld, for sure.

I second this suggestion!!!

[TheGentlmen]

Hello people, I am making a ckan for RW.

Sadly I've had like 4 hours to work on it in the last 2/3 months, so don't count on it coming out any time soon.

EDIT: Between work, family, piano lesions and more work their appears to be nearly no time.

[Deimos Rast]

I don't think this is outside the realm of possiblity, but I don't think it likely.
I come directly from KSP and to split a hair, I think you have it backwards - CKAN is good because the modding scene is exceptional, not the other way around. As I understand it, the modding scene was great before CKAN as well.
However, the CKAN people are pretty busy with getting CKAN to work with just KSP. In fact, they just had a leadership hand over and a pretty big change in policies on how they handle things. CKAN is not without its draw backs or detractors (but hopefully that is in the past now).

Despite all this, I don't think it's out of the realm of technical possibility, since both games are based on the Unity game engine. Beyond that, I know little about what makes them work under the hood, except to say that how they handle mods seems to be completely different (XML vs CFG; although .dlls are still prevalent). That, and KSP, while a cranky beast to be sure, seems to handle changing mods on the fly a whole lot better than RimWorld does.

TLDR: If it's going to happen, it will have to probably happen from this direction.

[Thirite]

If the nexus didn't require login for anything over a megabyte it would be perfect; I've used it from Oblivion to New Vegas, and the endorsement and tag systems are great. A board on a forum suffices but it's not exactly ideal.