About the Custom Packs! :)
- Thread starter LazDude2012
- Start date
Being able to send your friends a code for a private modpack so they can play on your server or even just play with the same mods you play is a great idea. Making it a button in the launcher is pretty amazing. But when the FTB team said you need permissions to get any mods into your private pack you start to run into some problems.
The biggest problem is the fact that some people just won't give permissions. sp614x won't give anyone permissions for Optifine no matter how much you ask or beg. Then there's people like Azanor (not trying to insult him, just using him for a quote) who have blatantly stated,
"Only people I am personally acquainted with have any chance of me giving permission for their mod pack."
Fat chance of getting permissions for a mod pack with mods like this.
The second problem is the fact that some of them simply won't respond to most people. Eloraam is busy all the time and probably won't answer too many emails, and when she does, fat chance she's going to respond to some random server own that asked for permissions.
The custom packs is kind of like communism. Good idea on paper, not so much in practice.
The biggest problem is the fact that some people just won't give permissions. sp614x won't give anyone permissions for Optifine no matter how much you ask or beg. Then there's people like Azanor (not trying to insult him, just using him for a quote) who have blatantly stated,
"Only people I am personally acquainted with have any chance of me giving permission for their mod pack."
Fat chance of getting permissions for a mod pack with mods like this.
The second problem is the fact that some of them simply won't respond to most people. Eloraam is busy all the time and probably won't answer too many emails, and when she does, fat chance she's going to respond to some random server own that asked for permissions.
The custom packs is kind of like communism. Good idea on paper, not so much in practice.
Good news everyone, someone made a spreadsheet showing what mod authors want you to do to get their mods on your modpacks. Most mods thankfully just want aknowledgement and links to their thread/wiki, and a few want to be asked.
spreadsheet
spreadsheet
Well then I take back what I said, for the most part. That certainly makes private modpacks easy as far as mods that alread give FTB permissions.
Now we just have to get permissions for all the other mods not in the packs
[DOUBLEPOST=1358461312][/DOUBLEPOST]Do you or anyone else know who posted this spreadsheet in the first place?
Now we just have to get permissions for all the other mods not in the packs
[DOUBLEPOST=1358461312][/DOUBLEPOST]Do you or anyone else know who posted this spreadsheet in the first place?
So basically, the only ones you might not get (assuming you are polite and collect everything in advance and give all credit where it is due) are Gravity Gun/Portal Gun, Traincraft, and Xycraft (due to it being in a very alpha state). So no big losses there.
Most of the mods on the page weren't a problem with getting permissions so much as getting their attention. It's the mod authors that don't like their mods in modpacks that is the problem.
Which, as it turns out, isn't actually all that a problem, since most of them don't ask anything more than credit and making sure that you've got all your ducks in a row before launching your private pack.
Yea, you can download and use any mods you want to by yourself. Custom packs are specifically for servers so everyone is on the same page.
Yeah - which was exactly the big hope we had for custom packs, that we could have a simple server setup all of our friends can join easily. Needing full permissions makes it easier to just pre-package it ourselves and host it on our server, without the comfort of the FtB launcher. What we'd really like is actually just Mindcrack + Mystcraft + some custom configs.
I really hope the FtB team manages to produce a way to basically allow players to get the Ultimate Pack *minus* some mods and custom configs as private pack. That way, it'd be covered by the Ultimate Pack permissions already - yet give server admins some room for customisation.
There's no reason you have to use the FTB launcher to distribute your mod pack, it just makes things a bit easier. Heck, if that's all you really wanted to do, you could try this:
Tell your buddies to get the FTB Launcher, run an instance of DW20 pack and run an instance of Mindcrack pack
Tell your buddies to get MultiMC
Distribute a config pack to your buddies, which does not contain any mods whatsoever. Tweak whatever settings you feel are balanced for your server before distributing.
Tell your buddies to install the instance from the config pack and to direct MMC to their (feed the beast folder)/Direwolf20/mods and /Mindcrack/mods folders for the relevant mod jars.
???
Profit!
Not everybody we're playing with is fully computer-literate or has the time to deal with the multitude of steps involved in Minecraft modding (it's not even about being hard, just the effort etc.). FtB looks very nice, because it means almost no messing with files etc. and fetches the correct Minecraft version. We're already doing what you described, but it's just the little bit of extra hassle that makes it more involved (and removes us from the neat updates the packs provide) - enough to annoy some people, especially as we're all having fairly busy lives already.
There's an even easier way to do it - but it feels less right:
1) Make an install that works with all mods etc. setup.
2) Zip it up, host it behind a password.
3) Tell buddoes link + password.
4) Profit.
It just feels shadier than having a nice interface like FtB and allows less customisation on their part (e.g. with the texture support that's coming in now and the possibility to explore other packs, if they want to).
Alright people, I created this account for the sole reason of saying this, so Listen up! I read through this entire thread and have one thing to say that hasn't been mentioned by anyone else.
The simple solution to preventing any of the Private packs from going viral is in the Server.jar. If you don't distribute the Server files, then you won't have the potential problem of a bunch of people making servers and using your private pack that doesn't have all the permissions. Unless someone else took the time to compile a server with your pack's mods on it, there would only be the one server with those mods installed, and without the server IP, the pack would be largely useless except for single player.
I encountered this experience firsthand a few days ago when I got an e-mail from a server I used to play on about getting a limited edition key for a private FTB pack. It interested me, so I went through the short process and got the key and it worked, I've got the pack, But I have no idea what the server IP is yet so the pack is kinda useless for me because I don't play singleplayer anymore.
So that's my point. So long as nobody posts the Server files, there will usually only be one server running that pack, preventing ones that lack permission from exploding into mass popularity, and without the I.P. to the server that is running the pack, it's only good for singleplayer, possibly LAN mode as well, but that's it.
With this amendment to any of the ideas stated previously, the majority of the risk is removed. If any of you can think of legitimate reasons why this would not work, or if it's been mentioned why this wouldn't work, Please let me know, because I don't see any problem.
The simple solution to preventing any of the Private packs from going viral is in the Server.jar. If you don't distribute the Server files, then you won't have the potential problem of a bunch of people making servers and using your private pack that doesn't have all the permissions. Unless someone else took the time to compile a server with your pack's mods on it, there would only be the one server with those mods installed, and without the server IP, the pack would be largely useless except for single player.
I encountered this experience firsthand a few days ago when I got an e-mail from a server I used to play on about getting a limited edition key for a private FTB pack. It interested me, so I went through the short process and got the key and it worked, I've got the pack, But I have no idea what the server IP is yet so the pack is kinda useless for me because I don't play singleplayer anymore.
So that's my point. So long as nobody posts the Server files, there will usually only be one server running that pack, preventing ones that lack permission from exploding into mass popularity, and without the I.P. to the server that is running the pack, it's only good for singleplayer, possibly LAN mode as well, but that's it.
With this amendment to any of the ideas stated previously, the majority of the risk is removed. If any of you can think of legitimate reasons why this would not work, or if it's been mentioned why this wouldn't work, Please let me know, because I don't see any problem.
the bigger issue is that ass soon as you have the client files needed to play on the server you essentially distribute the entire mod (and there are people still playing SSP) which is already against the ToS of many mods,
and the installation on the client-side can be very easily copied to setup a server (config and (core)mods folders are just copied over)
honestly a enforced whitelist for downloading the pack is the only real solution for many "private pack only" mods: the private pack "owner" also provides a list of accounts that are allowed to download and use it (and can add and remove accounts at any time)
It takes like less than 5 minutes to copy coremods, config, and mods and just remove the client side mods. Along with getting the matching Forge. Hell, Forge now /has/ the Minecraft server in it (you can run it with java -jar MinecraftForgeZipName.zip), so you can copy that from instMods, or wherever your jar mods are.
That solves that problem very fast.
The solution would be that people simply stopped caring about permissions at all and gave modders who want to decide who can and cannot use their mod the middle finger.
That modders are so anal about these publics packs is pretty ridiculous (I mean, isn't the whole point of making a mod so that people can enjoy it?), that people think you need to ask permission to upload a pack to the users of your server is even more so. People have been sharing zips of modpacks since well before Tekkit was even created. Modpacks are as old as minecraft modding itself is simply due to the difficulty of installing minecraft mods.