So I have noticed a lot of negativity from people recently. Some members are just not being as helpful as they could be. The people who are giving negative criticism/are not helpful with their criticism are just adding to the downward spiral of the forums. The forums have been going downhill for a while, whether it be newcomers not reading the rules or members being rude. I have seen some members that have been around a while just slam people who are learning with negativity. It could be someone attempting to update a mod from another site or someone posting something they made that gets slammed. Trying to update a mod is a good start into modding. They will learn some basics of jbeam. When they ask a question about jbeam dont focus on the fact that its a not a beamng.com mod, just focus on the fact that they are trying to add mods to the game, something that should be celebrated, not looked at negativily. Also, I hate it when those people who post their project to the forums get slammed just because it's not the best. Not everyone starts off at your skill level. Just because you have a higher skill level doesn't mean you should insult the person learning. Instead, guide them along, give them tutorials and explain to them how to do something. These people who negatively criticize grind my gears. They could be so much nicer. The could help, but instead they don't help, they just state what's wrong. They could word it a bit nicer, so it doesn't come across as rude, and maybe even post a link to a tutorial. That would make the forums a better place. Frankly i'm tired of the negativity but sadly there is not much i can do about it. /rant
Speaking as someone who's dealt his share of blunt advice: the main issue is effort. Making complex* mods will require effort on the creators part, there's no other way about it. The good mod makers all put in loads of effort, doing their own research, looking at official content, experimenting, loads of Google and so on. However, most of the questions asked about mod making here show absolutely zero effort. This is why we tell you to go to the wiki, or google it, or we might ask what you've done and post your files/work. Show some effort from your side. If you don't show you're willing to put in your own share of effort, then you'll probably never get a mod done, and any time we spend helping you is wasted. So how do you show effort? Well, show what you've done. If you get pointed to a tutorial, or the wiki, or Google: go there. Read it, view it, listen to it, search it or whatever you need to do. Put in some effort. Nine out of ten times it's clear by the question you're asking whether you've put in effort or not. To use the thread that led to this thread (I'm guessing) as an example: "How to convert old vehicle mods to work with 0.5.6?" Pardon my French, but that is one shit question. Mostly because nobody knows: it depends on the mod you're trying to convert. That means that (even if you specified a vehicle) anyone wanting to answer the question would have to do the entire conversion themselves before being able to tell you how to it. That means we're not helping you, we're doing all the work for you. Apart from that, the question shows no effort on the asker's part: what has he tried? Which vehicle is he converting? What does not work? Where has he looked for answers? tl;dr: show us you're willing to invest the hours upon hours required to make a mod, or stop wasting our time. * Vehicles, scenarios with custom scripts, maps, UI apps and so on. Not dishing the work that goes into (good) skins, sounds mods, configs and so on, but the technical skills required for those are minimal.
I agree, Some people just write a question into the forums, mostly beeing newbees, and others just be like, "Has been requested a million times, use search bar, go and *** yourself.." Even I sometimes write a question down, or have a bug report etc. Same story there. I mean, most people get classified by there PC or post amount... If they have a bad PC, they are bad people.. Same with post amount.. I dont get it.. Only because someone plays the game on lowest settings, he isnt stupid or anything...
@Scepheo - I generally agree with the sentiment of your post #2 but it's toxic to reply to what we perceive as ignorance or laziness with vitriol of our own. There's an old saying "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" and I think it applies well here. A lame OP with zero replies is much less toxic than a lame OP with inflammatory replies. Even if it might frustrate the author a bit not to get any replies, I bet it's less frustrating than getting mean or passive-aggressive ones. Let's also try and remember that the game isn't documented well at all. Anyone without outside experience with scripting, modeling, game modding, and etc is generally up against a brick wall. Remember tdev's recent post complementing you and others? To refer back to the thread you quoted - for a non-technical person it's not immediately obvious that big, significant, game-changing updates are often being made to this pre-release video game. If a stable (post-release) game changed the format needed for mods it would often be exactly that simple: Mod Format 1 gets replaced with Mod Format 2 and here are the changes. Anyone who's been engaged in modding BeamNG is aware that this isn't true for us. Anyone from the outside needs to be told that before they can know. Dragging that concept out... if I walk in the door thinking that I'm asking a simple, straightforward question (What are the differences between what I perceive as "Mod Format 1" and what I perceive as "Mod Format 2"?) and all I get are "don't do it", "we can't tell you", "refer to the wiki", etc... does that look like something I need to study up on or does it look like I'm being taken for a ride or simply made fun of? Especially when the wiki looks like it does (sorry folks!). I'll quote myself a bit here... What I didn't say (and should have) is that he urge to be overly concise should also be fought. Someone asking a "dumb" question probably isn't going to understand a concise/oblique reference - it's frustrating to have someone give you "help" which you can't understand. In fact it looks a lot like trolling from the inexperienced users's perspective. It's all very frustrating for everyone involved of course. From "I can haz mods?" on one side to the soup nazis on the other.
