neoforged
Make the dependency error screen undeniably clear
Questions like this are not at all uncommon when speaking to players who are playing with mods for the first time:
To a developer who actively makes mods, who understands the structure of how mods are made, how they're loaded and so on, the solution to this problem is painfully obvious. But while the issue is laid out in a pretty clear manner, to brand new players the way to solve this issue or how it was caused might not be.
Mods differ from the standard way of installing an app. All apps I've downloaded in my life have always either come bundled with their dependencies so I never see them, or they download them as part of the installation process on your computer so I never see the action. The user is never prompted to install them themselves, which makes sense as that would 100% kill retention for apps. Thus users aren't even aware of the concept of software dependencies most of the time. Its entirely possible and likely that a user would be exposed to this concept for the very first time when they download a mod.
Since this is a foreign concept to alot of first time players, I think it might be worth helping them out with a brief explanation explaining what caused the error. Something along the lines of this would work:
"Mod developers may choose to use other mods to make their mod function. When this happens, you need to make sure you install those mods as well"
This would help users better understand what to do when presented with this issue. It can be shown to players with a tooltip when hovered over a (i) icon, or maybe the error screen would be split up into types of errors with better explanations of what the errors are, or it could be a modal. How its displayed isnt super relevant as long as its intuitive for the user to find the error and read it.
To that end, making it easy for the user to fix the error would also help. The user should know how to install mods at this point, so simply providing a link for them to download the missing mod could help immensely in allowing them to self diagnose issues. This could be done by allowing us to specify a "link" field in our dependencies that adds a button on the right that, when opened, opens a link to CurseForge or Modrinth for the user to download the mod.
These things would go a long way in mitigating those painfully obvious, beginner issues that players face while trying to learn how modded works.
This could even be expanded to perhaps a system in Neo for improved error logging. Maybe if its an intentionally thrown error by a specific mod the dev can add something to their error that allows them to specify how the error occurred and how the user can fix it, or link them to their discord/github to report it to the developer in the same way that the dependency one does. Maybe crashing the game could throw the user back into the error screen with convenient buttons like "Copy Crashlog" or explanations as provided by these self-explaining errors. All these things could go a long way towards allowing users to more easily understand whats going on, allow them to solve them on their own, and, if expanded, could even provide devs with ways to give users more helpful information when their mods crash.
Of course ^^ this part may not be in the cards, just something to consider in the realm of "making errors more user friendly"
