(missing) quality of mods

[tarsis]

i don't want to hijack the "Problems with Julan Ashlander/Other companion mods" thread so i start a new topic.

i want to know about your experiences with mods. i looked at a few, and they were - from the code point of view - awful. i mean *'really* bad. i guess the reason is that many mod creators have no programming background.

can someone with more modding experience share his point of view? maybe suggest some mod creators whose mods are acceptable?

[Zini]

The core problem is not that many mod developers are bad at coding. The problem is that the original compiler sucks. It has almost no error checking. With such a crappy tool even the scripts of professional software developers will end up as being of poor quality. And yes, I speak from experience here.

[DestinedToDie]

I seriously doubt every modder is going to have a background in writing code. And unless you are in a community project like Tamriel Rebuilt, there is no one to check if your scripts are of good quality. When you're on your own, there's no one to tell that you should rewrite your code to be more efficient and less of a clusterbuck (even if it works).

[tarsis]

i'm aware of the limitations, but the topic i mentioned is showing how much room for improvement there is. actually the code wasn't even correct if i understand correctly. that is what i am referring to when talking about poor quality - the fact that mods are broken or badly written. i have seen only a few mods, but if i generalize i guess i think twice before using any mod.

@DestinedToDie: this confirms my assumptions.

[Chris]

As Zini said, when you don't have proper error checking, even the best coders/developers will occasionally make "obvious" mistakes. This, combined with MW's comparatively poor scripting language causing modders to find... "creative", shall we say, methods to do what they want, and you end up a system ripe for messy results. This isn't limited to just modders, either; some of vanilla MW's scripts are quite bad too.

But hopefully with OpenCS, more modders will be able to have their scripts and such checked to catch errors that the original CS would've allowed.