utility for making mods?

[Kurdran]

does anyone know of some utilities that makes life easier when creating mods?

[IckyJoelIdeaVole]

For graphical changes, your best bet is the standard set of image editors: Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. On the free side of things, the GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/) is a decent alternative. I haven't done much on the graphics side of things (and can't at the moment, in fact, as a RAM failure on my laptop has made my copy of WW inaccessable), but I've found the best results by using Paint Shop Pro and the GIMP interchangeably, whenever one had a needed feature the other lacked.

As for the data side of things, there's absolutely nothing in the way of easy editors or toolkits. Just dive in with your favorite text editor and start tinkering. The modding guide on Digital Eel's website (http://www.digital-eel.com/modguide/) is an excellent (although unfortunately incomplete) resource.

The best advice I could offer for data editing is to find something from the base game that does something similar to what you want and alter a copy of that rather than building things from scratch. Just dig through it all and try to get a feel for how everything works. Most of it is more or less intuitive as long as you've got the mod guide close at hand.

Good luck with your efforts. I'd love to see more activity show up in here.

[clomaka]

I concurr w. IckyJoelIdeaVole. There's a utility out there that's mostly for checking weapon placement on ships, but once you get that worked out it's not that usefull. Just go through all the text files, paying special attention to the !filename.txt files in the default folder. That and the mod-maker's guide is all we have to go on. Like most modding, most of the work is just getting the workflow/kinks worked out - after that things go pretty quickly. Just a note on that, tho- quests can be pretty buggy and time consuming to test, even when you have a pretty good idea of what's going on.