[EatThePath]

Phrases like "just break stuff" and "imagined consistency" certainly read as some form of judgement, even if they're not intended as such.

In any case, those outcomes seem practically inevitable to me. As PH says, the only way to avoid them is to not ever update anything your mod relies on. The common wisdom I've gleaned even with the big name game engines is that you stick to the version of the engine and any middleware that you started the project with unless you have to update something, because otherwise you risk introducing all sorts of subtle bugs in parts of the game you're not paying attention to at the moment. And of any game I've modded, looked at modding, or consumed mods from, I can only think of one that even comes close to FSO in terms of developer care for trying to avoid compatibility breaks for modders and responsiveness when they do happen.

The only real alternative I can imagine is a basically dead engine development where at most a new version every five or six years keeps it running on modern systems, and I think that'd be a real shame.

I have seen some mods that seem to automatically change to the newest released mediaVps

Mods can be set up on knossos to do this, some surely are. And they shouldn't be, for hopefully now-obvious reasons.

[Mito [PL]]

I'm baffled as to why nobody mentioned the fact that yes, you can force a mod to use any FSO and MediaVPs version you want it to. The former can be done from the Knossos interface and the latter by modifying a couple values in the mod's mod.json file, I'm sure there's plenty of people around who would happily walk you through this simple proccess. Although I warn you: there is no compatibility or freedom from bugs guaranteed. In case of the FSO version, just because you might hit some novel bugs in newer nightlies.

In case of MVPS, it's because while the FSU team did try to attain maximum compatibility, at some point the packages needed a major refactoring and broke most of the mods that defaulted to the newest MediaVPs. Or at a different point in time, the MediaVPs added a couple magnificent weapon variants and subsequently players wanting to launch Blue Planet with the newest MVPS found themselves crashing on startup because the added variants together with all Blue Planet weapons jumped just that little bit over the weapon class limit.

So generally, I definitely want to encourage exploring mods' compatibility with newest MediaVPs - and preferably if everything is seemingly fine, reporting the fact to the mods' developers or whoever manages them on Knossos at given point in time - but beware that things can get more or less broken and don't be afraid to roll back (preferably reporting the bugs to aforementioned people too; helping locate the bugs is very important for mod makers too). Generally, the rule is that the more a mod resembles retail FS2 (less custom assets, scripts ect.), the more likely it is to cooperate well with newer FSO/MVPS.

Edit: Okay, I was wrong, Asteroth already mentioned it. Whatever.