Future of Modding

Sun Jun 11, 2006 9:40 am by opwnageo

Ok, after having read a lot of tutorials and other things, and examining arghs toolkit a little bit, I know what I would like to do.

I'd like to with the help of a few experienced modders, try to develop the toolkit further into a collection of modifications that basically means anyone could just drop the scripts in to accomplish mod features more quickly.

Arghs Toolkit primarily works with adding ships, but what I want to do is template more of the objects, such as adding a bases and planets, adding thrusters/engines, adding factions and other things just by adding a template in and changing some of the relevent paths and variables to what the user wishes.

These templates would be heavily commented with the meaning of those variables.

What I'm hoping to achieve is a standard of modding where instead of coding 5 ships, you'd just copy and paste 5 script files and change the paths and appropriate variables to add those ships in, much less painful than coding each one by hand or copying and pasting between files.

Obviously there would be base templates for freighters, light fighters, heavy fighters etc so the changes a person has to make are minimal.

Also a variety of game balance mods that can just be dropped in, such as Arghs weapon balancing modifications, physics changes etc.

This would provide a framework codebase, for which more advanced modders can expand on to achieve what they need to more easily, but still have the freedom to be creative.

What I'm asking for is that a few people help with this by submitting scripts to me based on how Argh did things, I am working on the ships thing at the moment.

What I'm hoping to do is make it more efficient, for example seperating the code for hardpoints (as they differ and cannot be taken as a template) into seperate smaller files, which are just added with the templates, and maybe also seperate packages, which means you could have varying packages for testing by just dropping them in without the need to replace code.

I hope you guys can see where I'm going with this and I hope that some of you may want to help with this project.

If it seems interesting!

If not I will probably soldier on all on my own hehe.

Sun Jun 11, 2006 10:54 am by buckaroobanzai

So far I made a Bar Maker utility. I think it's a progress.

Mon Jun 12, 2006 7:57 am by opwnageo

Well, this is to template and standardise code mainly ... not provide programs, think of this as a code snippet project.

Anyone else interested?

Mon Jun 12, 2006 12:06 pm by Cold_Void

i have a set of weapon tweaking scripts that alter every weapon's core stats; speed/refire/power/damage - except that i removed all mark6's and higher - part of the 'gearing down' in my mod is removing excess equipment that screws up balance maths and makes coding harder - eventually i'd like to expand every gun series to full mark 5, but just reducing them saves headaches when making loadouts;like where you have to go to check to see whether the gun mark actually exists first

one thing i've been using more is modularizing repetitive code; such as with argh's shield link script which i adapted to replace all the shield_links _and_ their hp classes with my own LF/HF/VHF sets
the same thing applies to loadouts, where the loadouts file is full of lights - instead of having a load of lights to look through for what i really want to see(equipment)i just replaced them by types, eg 4 docklights/2 contrails/ 8 lights etc

there is a big problem with the template approach though, which is basically that any game thats created from a template and not really worked over using the full range of creative talents a modder should draw on, just won't be fun. that's my complaint about a great deal of mods really; they've added hundreds of ships and they're all essentially indistinguishable stat-wise. you've gotta have soul baby

i will give you my weapons scripts if you want, because i am more concerned with giving modders a powerful tool for macrobalancing their game than handing out mod templates for the lazy (which i'll admit, i'm one of - but overall i think that my toolkit based mod is virtually unrecognizable as the toolkit with all the extra capships, new *attractive* icons for everything, retextured/themed interface, coded(named) capship hardpoints, afterburner conversion from thrusters, physics hacks, hp-class/power/and cargo volume balanced system, new neuralnet pilot voice, anonanon)

so, email me your email and i will send the scripts + weapons file - however it will not be click-n-runable, since i separated out all the missiles and mines and the mark 6 & highers are missing - but its still a better start than trying to do the same thing from scratch

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