When they're done?



By not making any more of them. There's already enough dilution of talented people (modelers, scripters, skinners) in the community over a trillion "let's make a recreation of X IP!" mods that will never come to completion.



There's not really any mods that require play testing at this point.

It's a vicious cycle. Someone with no knowledge of modding the game goes "well let's do X" and then maybe someone steps in and says "you know you can't do that" and then they go "hey, we can do X with the full mod tools" and start the process all over again.

I would like to think, as many of the above described do, the mod tools are some giant glowing package coming down from heaven with DLL linking and a scripting engine and a bunch of other crazy stuff but it's not. I expect it to be the particle editor, some new documentation, and some fixes for the hard-coded cap/ship limits (please, if anything, this) and maybe a delink of EntityTypes to build structures (defined in their own .entity file). It may be more than that, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Somewhat paradoxically, many of the mods seem to either take the "unrealistic expectations" road or the "model-replacement" road where new gameplay is thrown out the window in favor of a bunch of ported models. That's nice but Sins with IP X models is still Sins. The best mods, and the best modders right now, are people like Uzii who take the existing gameplay and add onto it. There are also people like ManSh00ter and Ditchdigger that haven't released any major mods (to my knowledge) but know the bounds of what can be done and use the existing frameworks to do stuff like attack modes and mines and electronic warfare ships and such.

I'm certifiably biased - Dawn of Victory came out of Empire at War with a trail of dead IP mods behind it for similar reasons. And I do think the major teams like the ST and SW ones will pull it off, because people like Stress and Evilejedi are really experienced in this field. I hate to go around posting "everyone has an idea about a cool mod, how about implementing it? how about understanding if it'll work or not in the tools you have? how about learning to script, model, texture, what have you yourself and form a team based on competency", because I've got markedly hostile reactions from doing so before, but when I see posts attempting to shoehorn existing IP models into Sins roles, or talk about extended scripted campaigns..I can't help but feel it's a waste of the community's patience, time, and expectations.

A lot of hopes about the mod tools I think are unrealistic - such as a scripting ability. The game has no scripts in it, so it just wouldn't make sense that out of the blue we'll be able all of a sudden script whatever we want

I also agree with the above points, though. A lot of work goes into the more serious stuff. And some things just aren't suitable for the game. The "model" mods can sure work if that's all you change, but changes to gameplay mechanics aren't infinite in possibilities so some things just don't work.

I have a lot of respect for Uzii and his mod because he's constantly pushing the limit of what we know can be done with what we've got available, and doing a damn good job with it.

I also think our possibilities will keep expanding as Ironclad adds new content to the game. There's already a campaign coming in the expansion, which likely means a scripting engine will be put in place. Hopefully it's something they'll let us use for our own creations (I don't see why they wouldn't ). So, as the game evolves, so will the overall capabilities of mods.