Quote:
Kana said:
A general question...
When you make a mod, what process to you follow?
How much pre planning do you do? What do you do?
Which data file do you start with first? Second?
Do you start from scratch, or do you just type over other entries?
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I've never actually published a mod, but I mod the heck out of the game for my own amusement.
The first thing is documentation. Weeks or months down the road, there will be another patch. In SEIV, there was the TDM mod, which I always used as the base for mine - and it had new versions at least a few weeks after any vanilla patch (sometimes in between). Then I need to update my homegrown mod. So, you have to keep straight exactly what you did, file by file. I use a text file for that...
I always start with the base files from the game or mod I'm editing. The first thing I do is to capture in my mod notes file what the big picture is - what I'm trying to accomplish. So I'll write at the top (above the file by file details) stuff like...
"BC1 - separate warships & auxilliaries. Need to restrict warship hulls to not include non-allowed systems. This would appear to be done via requirement Get_Design_Ability_Component_Count("<ability>") <= 0, where <ability> is the actual ability type of the component. Also looks like Get_Design_Specific_Component_Count("<component>") <= 0 would work, with <component> being the actual name of the component to exclude. The latter would be required to distinguish between fighter/drone launches vs satellite/mine launchers. Need to use Get_Design_Specific_Component_Count("<component>") to restict number of actual Supply Storage, Ordnance Storage & Solar Collector components individually by warship hull size, to allow a reasonable amount but preclude making warship-hulled ammo or supply ships. Want to restrict weapons on non-warships - how (maybe give all "auxilliary systems" the cargo ability with amount 0 and let the 50% cargo rule handle it)."
As you can see, I make notes to myself about what might work - helps me to remember why I did something. Then, as I note specific changes in the files I'll put "[BC1]" at the end of the change entry if that was in support of the "Big Change" described under BC1.
That done, usually I do the techs file first, since everything else depends on them. I try to test little bits at a time, because if you spend all day modding and then it won't load, it's hard to figure out what you screwed up. The modding docs are pretty sparse (even in SEIV - they are positively missing so far for SEV), so you have to run little experiments to see how things really work. Cheat codes are your friend when doing that...