We all know its happening, but, the question is
why?
My opinion;
I doubt think its cause the forums suddenly turned trollish or savage, cause its actually nicer to noobs than it was last year.
methinks it may be lua's fault. Last year, a big bomb or a small pack were considered above par if they were made well enough. now that we have lua, first mods look especially lame. It used to be ''this laser could be better if it had a glow like numguns, and fix the sprite'' and; wala, you had an impressive mod. now with the advent of lua, its all like, ''so what, it dosent have a charge sequence where it shoots out tons of little particles that attack people like dat won partical accelerator iz gotz no DL go home u damn troll''. Now odds are, you arnt going to make any kickass lua mods if you haven't any .ini experience, and most users wont get any .ini experience cause they wont post their .ini mods up for feedback.
so many new modders are turned away before the learn lua, and many would be modders never post their mods.
not that i dont like LOVE[2dlolitsapun] lua, but we need more ini mods for people to learn from.
What do you think

I've made several complete factions none of which I have released. I didn't release them because they were bad first mods. My suggestion for new modders is to go to the irc channel for critique. It's what I did and am still doing until I make something I feel has a substantial amount of quality. I am not opposed to making a thread either though.

Tldr: New modders can only improve if they have others offering criticism and support.

Last I knew the IRC went kaput...

From what I hear, the community was way worse before.

A lot of the non Lua mods I see are great; I hope other people see that they are great too. I've seen a lot of Lua mods that are only mediocre as well.

M1014 = Lua'd Shock Rifle for me (I think both are amazing).

I love you so ♥♥♥♥ much.
Duh there was a sticky and everything man what the hell

Oh, I take it that means it's up again. Is this the official unofficial server that Daman set up or the datarealms server?

While we all love Shook and his crazy pack of mods, many other mods are turned down due to lack of Lua, for example, Stone Crow's Crow Guard is a full faction but only has 2 pages or comments even after 2/3 of a year and 286 downloads. Shook, however received 295 downloads within 2 days.

Are we really turning down core ini for fancy Lua? Well basically yes, as i browse around the forum i notice all the Lua mods seem to get all the downloads and critique, leaving everyone else in the dust. Further More, all this Lua talk made noobies think that Lua is required for a good mod. This is sorely Untrue, for the M1014 is a really well made mod, however, most lurkers and noobies skip it for lack of any Lua.
I'm not saying we gotten any worst, but we are definitely subtly causing a decline in mods.

Now as an good example of us being nice, this is what we should be telling all noobies:
http://forums.datarealms.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=18510

We tell them how to improve, whats wrong, and tips and tricks from the pros.

he started out with boxes as heads, we told him nicely it was a little ugly, he changed it to more suit our eyes, as we continue to suggest things, he listens, and takes full advantage of our comments to improve his faction and earn him more respect.

Other threads were this occurred include SAW and the Corosis.

As for what we don't want is:
the DUM=E Incident
Whereas we berate him with resprites and all kinds of things, not realizing the attachable armor and other extras.

Now, i can't find very many threads as mentioned above, however, that's because all the Noobies are scared shitless by our community.
So all they do is throw them into the mod dump, where everyone always tells them they say it goes, where it will not recieve any constructive Criticism and the modder will never know how the public feels about his mods, therefor, still afraid to post their mods.


Just my thoughts, for any noobs who are reading this, go and release your mods and please say: [released because i needed criticism to make it better!]

lua ♥♥♥♥ tends to be more interesting really

Along with the fact that lua is hard enough to learn from scratch anyways, and with the fact that the wiki, one of the sole reliable sources of lua tips/stuff, is nuts, it makes it harder and harder for newer people to learning lua, its like trying to learn how to read off of cereal boxes, theres only so much you can get without a dedicated source, which in turn makes less people put out potentially good mods, because blahblahblah it dont have lua, while the people who do know it well are getting bored with modding, without doing an awful lot to pass on how to learn (from what i'm seeing). So we're essentially demanding for a rapidly decreasing product, and still have the same/larger want of it. thats my 2 cents

Once again I cannot stress how valuable a resource the irc is. It provides near instant feedback on any mod you need critiqued, many talented spriters frequent it and can help improve sprites, and many of the Lua gods are on irc. I wrote my first Lua script with help from CC48's Lua tutorial and the people in the irc. I do agree though that Lua can seem very intimidating and hard to learn to newer modders but if they have questions they can ask them either in a thread in Mod Making or in the irc.

It's the unofficial one. It's not as bad as one might think.

Lua is horrible to me, I can't get anything from it. .ini coding is easy enough to get the basics, because you can tell what everything means, I can even do some gml, but Lua is just undecipherable to me.

Ini code is a variable based construct with absolute no logic. Naturally it's significantly easier to learn than Lua.

Lua is actually a pretty excellent language to learn for a first-time programmer; it offers an introduction to structuring logic and developing skills without overcomplicating the syntax or making anything too hard.

There's no shortcut to learning Lua; it's a process of investing time.

yeah too bad it is 100% better than the old IRC because it ACTUALLY HAS FUNCTIONING SERVICES and no more of those SHITTY TROLLERS

there is a shortcut to learning lua btw: learning english

it is p much the same thing.

The real problem is learning all the functions and things special to CC.