We’re also committing to supporting Vortex on SteamOS. We’ll be targeting vanilla Steam hardware like the Steam Deck and Steam Machine. We won’t be officially supporting any other configurations, but as Vortex is an open source project community developers will be free to extend support for their preferred Linux distros as they please.
Imagine an easy to use open source mod application with versions on every major OS. No ads. No slow download options. Just functionality.
If only I had some talent.
The software isn’t the hard part, it’s the storage for the mods and networking infrastructure to get them out to people. Add in commonly requested features like comments, tagging, search with filters, and a website and you have a recipe for a wildly expensive and fairly complex product. As shitty as Nexus is, they have evolved into the YouTube of mods. A single entity hosting fairly sizable infrastructure to provide a free as in data theft service to basically anyone with a pulse.
I am curious to see if there is a good solution to decentralized data storage that isn’t redundantly copying the data X number of times and hoping for the best. That alone would go a long way towards solving the infrastructure issues.
Magnet link for the actual mod download? Then you just need some fairly standard forum software in front. Let the users host the decentralised data.
What happens when people decide not to seed anymore?
Any GIT repo ?
And who’s hosting that git repo?
Just like any other FOSS project:
Devs chose a repo of their choice, the distributor (in this case Nexus) choses a repo (GitHub is either free or very cheap for FOSS projects) to check for compliance, vulnerabilities, etc and then it’s cloud natively packaged for distribution.
This is how Flathub, Homebrew, and the Universal Project distros are built and distributed.
I bet Nexus would save a ton of money if they went this way.
Oh good centralized under github instead of Nexus, that’ll solve all the problems!
I’m not sure how long you’ve been modding games, but nexus is a treasure despite its problems and the way it has scaled was to suit the need of the userbase.
Don’t get me wrong, flathub is great, but there’s an insane amount of other variables in the mix with modding games that makes it much more complex then just downloading a package. Not to mention the entire ecosystem built out (thinking things like wabbajack, mod organizer, etc)
Vortex is (going to be?) open source, for what it’s worth. Still dependent on Nexus tho. We need a “Lutris for mods” with community sourced scripts
And a lot of spare time.