[DEVBLOG#76] Introducing Vanilla Expanded Framework

Hello everyone and welcome to a quite important development blog.

Over the past weeks we were wondering if we made the right decision back in the day to keep everything independent, and we have now came to a conclusion we really didn't.

To put it into perspective - we have spent weeks writing a very complex code for the Cuisine mods - Cooking and Brewing, allowing us to make complex production chains easily - which in turn keeps the game interesting for you, and easy to mod for us!

Problem is, when we started working on mead for Vanilla Factions Expanded - Vikings, we noticed that if we simply duplicate this code it will cause a cascade of performance issues, slowing your game to a halt. Some code just cannot be duplicated.

How do we fix that? By creating our own framework. To make it easier for you, we decided to turn Vanilla Factions Expanded - Core into Vanilla Expanded Framework, meaning if you are already a subscriber to any of our faction mods, you don't need to do anything else. To those who are not subscribed to Vanilla Factions Expanded - Core, you will notice that some mods will now require it.

You probably heard rumors that Vanilla Factions Expanded - Core is bad for performance. Well, it was, but we have now invested several hours into fixing any performance issues - it runs smoother than vanilla now!

On day one, following mods will require Vanilla Expanded Framework:

Vanilla Factions Expanded - Medieval

Vanilla Factions Expanded - Settlers

Vanilla Factions Expanded - Insectoids

Vanilla Cooking Expanded

Vanilla Brewing Expanded

Vanilla Hair Expanded

Over the course of the coming months we will slowly move all the important code from other mods into this framework as well. I'd like you to know that this process takes an extraordinary amount of time and work from many developers you might already know, and I'd like to take this moment to introduce them:

So in the future if you see us releasing a mod, and the description will have this graphic:

It means you need to have the framework running for it to work.

I hope the reason for this move that I've stated is sufficient for you. I was always against using frameworks, as it's an extra thing you need to subscribe to, and I want to keep it as simple as possible, but in this case if you want quality mods in the future, this is the way.