CS community meta discussion

I never joined the discord server, nor do i recall any dramas, what is going on? this appeared on my email inbox and im very confused . . .

 

I never joined the discord server, nor do i recall any dramas, what is going on? this appeared on my email inbox and im very confused . . .

Well the whole "Jade has a manic episode" part aside it's mostly just a broad strokes discussion thread about the community
A lot of this after the unnecessary arguing is mostly just brainstorming and trying to figure out ways the community could be made more lively, i.e reaching out to streamers, making it easier to get into modding, and other ways of refining the forum. It also inspired Serena to make that thread about the new forum themes, and some other adjacent activity.
The underpinning question through all of this has been "It's slightly annoying to get into CS because the community is fractured and Nicalis is not invested in maintaining the community because they've historically just left the forums to be the aggregator of CS fan opinions and CS+ programmers / musicians

 

this appeared on my email inbox and im very confused . . .

Not entirely sure how this could happen, either someone has emailed it to you or the Watch button was accidentally pressed at one point.

 

I think it's because of the new 'Trending Content' feature that got added to the forums, or something adjacent to that.

Maybe andwhy is cooking?

 

From the launcher you'd be able to click on the mods displayed and install them. The launcher keeps the client-side download percentage updating, downloads the file from the doukutsu club server, then unpacks it into the user's preferred install directory for the given mod (which would probably default to a generic mod install directory)

I hope this isn't considered an unwanted bump (I also got the email), but:

As someone who has casually enjoyed Cave Story mods in the past, a mod launcher, even a buggy minimal one, would be really appreciated.

Edit: before I talk more about that, I thought I ought to mention that the modding wiki almost certainly qualifies for Indie Wiki Buddy which will automatically redirect any user of the extension away from the old Fandom wiki to the new(er) independent one. There's a form on their home page for the purpose of requesting that a redirect be added.

As for my old mod installation method:
In the past, I managed mods by finding the file, downloading the zip to my downloads folder, extracting the zip while trying to ensure I don't end up with Downloads\doconfig.exe by mucking up folders during extraction. Then mucking about with profile files, if I was upgrading the mod, occasionally losing progress by doing the transfer backwards and overwriting the wrong file (modern windows file explorer makes such tasks so tedious I rush them).

Even though I could have a folder specially for cave story mods, in practice I'd let things pile up in my downloads folder, and then sometimes rely on bookmarks or sifting through search results () to find the zip online again when returning to the playthrough after a break, only to find I already had the files needed.

All this is the sort of thing that nowerdays I'd probably want to try automating somehow, either by using a pre-existing tool built by the community (e.g. Everest/Olympus Celeste), misusing an existing tool, or mangling HTML with Python (if I was feeling very confident/bored).

 

@Mint the dark forces that operate the Cave Story Tribute Site Forums Algorithm Email are demanding a better launcher... Also sorry in advance if Serena gets annoying in your dms about homestuck

 

@Mint the dark forces that operate the Cave Story Tribute Site Forums Algorithm Email are demanding a better launcher...

I don't know what you are talking about but I currently have no plans for the launcher at this moment.

 

I interpreted the "dark forces" thing as a joke, but I just want to clarify:
I don't expect anyone to work on the launcher or intended to pressure volunteers in any way.

I was responding to the part of the discussion a while back where there was a disagreement as to whether anyone (specifically more casual players/inexperinced mod users) might find a launcher useful and why.

 

Don't worry about it, Mint's gonna be busy all month anyway, perhaps with a final fantasy, of the 16th variant? ;D Also Visions of Mana and Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Let the silly dork play her games X3

 

(It was a joke just so we're all on the same page)

The future of Cave Story's gotta wait I've got to play another final fantasy game because I haven't played enough of them obviously.

The most that could be done in the meantime is just saying "Yeah I wanna see this happen" and maybe brainstorming shit about it but all the brainstorming in the world won't really solve the whole "There's nobody that actively wants to work on the program" problem but idk I've seen some random threads here get necro'd lol.

Though for what it's worth, it's still helpful to really put your thoughts out there on what your idealized "Cave Story Mod Launcher" would be even if it just gets put on the backburner for who knows how long.
I for one think it would be pretty sweet if I could just click a button and it would download and launch a cave story mod and I could easily access it from that same program again, it's convenient and it could also maybe make waffles for me too.

 

Don't worry about it, Mint's gonna be busy all month anyway, perhaps with a final fantasy, of the 16th variant? ;D Also Visions of Mana and Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. Let the silly dork play her games X3

I haven't even picked up visions yet because I got blindsided by Castlevania and had a friend lend their copy of Pokémon XD so I've been doing gen 3 grinding as well whilst resisting the urge to replay moon and balancing that with work and my weekly stream, give me a break.

If I were to get back to working on the launcher I'd want to make the code less bad first either way and I would first need the creative energy/time/drive to do all that.
One thought i had was to just allow drag and drop with mod zips to instantly add them to your mod folder and add it to the list though to make unzipping/moving a lot more convinient (by essentially automating it).