From my understanding, the Highlander contains all of the same event hooks as added by Long War 2, but none of the gameplay changes. Is that correct? I am not a modder (but am trying to start) and don't really know the difference.
If it is, I have some questions.
1. Why doesn't Long War 2 just run as a separate mod on top of the community highlander, that way only 1 core framework needs to exist and it doesn't need to be updated separately from Long War 2.
2. Does the community highlander contain the bugfixes of Long War 2 as well as the new hooks?
What is the difference between Long War 2 and the Community Highlander?
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LordYanaek
- Posts: 940
- Joined: Mon Jan 23, 2017 1:34 pm
Re: What is the difference between Long War 2 and the Community Highlander?
As far as i understand every change Pavonis adds to LW2 is ported to the CH (so it contains bugfixes and new hooks).
The CH adds a number of additional changes on top of this so it's more "complete". Some of those changes are backported to LW2.
I'd guess Pavonis prefers keeping their own core for stability reasons. The CH is likely to have additional bugs on top of vanilla and LW2 specific bugs and Pavonis doesn't want to deal with those (they have enough bugs to deal with already) so they introduce features they think are stable enough and/or useful for their own mod. Maybe in some future time the CH will be perfectly stable and this won't be an issue.
You can run LW2 with the CH if you need features specific to it but it takes some manipulations.
The CH adds a number of additional changes on top of this so it's more "complete". Some of those changes are backported to LW2.
I'd guess Pavonis prefers keeping their own core for stability reasons. The CH is likely to have additional bugs on top of vanilla and LW2 specific bugs and Pavonis doesn't want to deal with those (they have enough bugs to deal with already) so they introduce features they think are stable enough and/or useful for their own mod. Maybe in some future time the CH will be perfectly stable and this won't be an issue.
You can run LW2 with the CH if you need features specific to it but it takes some manipulations.
Re: What is the difference between Long War 2 and the Community Highlander?
There are several reasons why they're separate.
Like LordYanaek says, we provide the highlander in LW2 to try to be as certain as possible that they'll work well together, try to avoid user error (as much as we can, anyway), and try to make it as easy as possible to get up and running just by subbing to 1 mod. That's also why all the standalone PI mods were integrated into LW2 instead of being dependencies. It isn't quite as bad with the workshop, but gets hairier with people using nexus mods. They'd have to be sure to update things in sync and trying to juggle 8 different component mods all with different updates and versions to get one combined LW2 experience seemed like a bad idea and a recipe for tons of bug reports. Not to mention the fact that XCOM2 has no official way to control mod load order, adding another source of trouble on top of all the others. It'd be an awful situation if the mod is always broken because people subscribed to the component mods in the "wrong" order! (Why should that even matter?)
Also, the CH didn't exist as such when we first released LW2, so suddenly removing the highlander from LW2 in an update would immediately and silently break everyone who was already subbed to LW2 but isn't subbed to the CH. When we first released LW2 I mentioned on Reddit that I thought a community highlander would be a good idea, but it wasn't clear if there would be any real desire from people to make that happen. Fortunately it was picked up by some pretty talented and prolific modders, so it had a great chance of success. But who could tell? It could have just as easily resulted in a half dozen different people all claiming to have "the" community highlander, each one incompatible with all the others and with everyone bickering with everyone else a la classic open source fork wars; or nobody at all creating one.
Our highlander package doesn't really contain any gameplay changes either, essentially all of the "Long War" of LW2 is in the mod packages, not the highlander package (although that's probably an awfully subtle distinction for anyone who's not an XCOM modder given that it all comes in the same mod). It was specifically designed that way, and one of the reasons (for me anyway) was that it lets it more easily be used as the basis for a community project. This is why the LW2 highlander and the CH are mostly interchangeable, but the CH is a superset of LW2. In theory we could have released LW2 as two separate mods: the highlander, and LW2 itself. We elected not to do that, for the reasons in the paragraph above. I don't think that really would have solved any problems anyway, because if we had separated them and marked our highlander as a dependency for LW2 it still makes that highlander the "official" blessed one for LW2, so there is still the issue of potential duplication of effort and other issues you mentioned.
In a perfect world we wouldn't need two, but I don't think there's really an elegant solution to these problems without some first class support from the game itself, unfortunately, specifically around mod load order but also perhaps having a mechanism to elect a mod to provide the highlander package may be useful. Speaking for myself, I also think it's important that the CH be independent from PI (in the sense that it's not an official PI mod) to be truly considered "C", but I'm certainly happy to have code shared between the two.
Like LordYanaek says, we provide the highlander in LW2 to try to be as certain as possible that they'll work well together, try to avoid user error (as much as we can, anyway), and try to make it as easy as possible to get up and running just by subbing to 1 mod. That's also why all the standalone PI mods were integrated into LW2 instead of being dependencies. It isn't quite as bad with the workshop, but gets hairier with people using nexus mods. They'd have to be sure to update things in sync and trying to juggle 8 different component mods all with different updates and versions to get one combined LW2 experience seemed like a bad idea and a recipe for tons of bug reports. Not to mention the fact that XCOM2 has no official way to control mod load order, adding another source of trouble on top of all the others. It'd be an awful situation if the mod is always broken because people subscribed to the component mods in the "wrong" order! (Why should that even matter?)
Also, the CH didn't exist as such when we first released LW2, so suddenly removing the highlander from LW2 in an update would immediately and silently break everyone who was already subbed to LW2 but isn't subbed to the CH. When we first released LW2 I mentioned on Reddit that I thought a community highlander would be a good idea, but it wasn't clear if there would be any real desire from people to make that happen. Fortunately it was picked up by some pretty talented and prolific modders, so it had a great chance of success. But who could tell? It could have just as easily resulted in a half dozen different people all claiming to have "the" community highlander, each one incompatible with all the others and with everyone bickering with everyone else a la classic open source fork wars; or nobody at all creating one.
Our highlander package doesn't really contain any gameplay changes either, essentially all of the "Long War" of LW2 is in the mod packages, not the highlander package (although that's probably an awfully subtle distinction for anyone who's not an XCOM modder given that it all comes in the same mod). It was specifically designed that way, and one of the reasons (for me anyway) was that it lets it more easily be used as the basis for a community project. This is why the LW2 highlander and the CH are mostly interchangeable, but the CH is a superset of LW2. In theory we could have released LW2 as two separate mods: the highlander, and LW2 itself. We elected not to do that, for the reasons in the paragraph above. I don't think that really would have solved any problems anyway, because if we had separated them and marked our highlander as a dependency for LW2 it still makes that highlander the "official" blessed one for LW2, so there is still the issue of potential duplication of effort and other issues you mentioned.
In a perfect world we wouldn't need two, but I don't think there's really an elegant solution to these problems without some first class support from the game itself, unfortunately, specifically around mod load order but also perhaps having a mechanism to elect a mod to provide the highlander package may be useful. Speaking for myself, I also think it's important that the CH be independent from PI (in the sense that it's not an official PI mod) to be truly considered "C", but I'm certainly happy to have code shared between the two.
Re: What is the difference between Long War 2 and the Community Highlander?
Thanks for the extremely long response. That was quite an interesting read.
There are already mods I'm interested in which use the Highlander, so I might try to get that working with Long War 2, since Long War 2 has pretty much made the vanilla game unplayable (that's a compliment) and I want some other cool stuff as well.
There are already mods I'm interested in which use the Highlander, so I might try to get that working with Long War 2, since Long War 2 has pretty much made the vanilla game unplayable (that's a compliment) and I want some other cool stuff as well.