One mod at a time

Its not technically a mod. More of a way to designing maps.

The features of different mods and addons can be easily merged. Well... may require some knoweledge about how to use Wordpad/Notepad, but i think that's not a problem at all.

hmm weird even after moving the mods out of the mod folder and replacing the files back to the original files, and trying to use the "bigger hangar" mod, it's still not working...

Which Mods did you combine foodro? How long did it take?
I am asking because the peeps doing the Mods are interested in making their own better not spending time combining others. So I better learn how... any advice is appreciated

Thanks

The how really depends on the mod. Since pretty much every object and ability in Sins has its own entity file, the mods that just change existing values or add their own files generally aren't very difficult. For example, if you have a mod that makes pirate raids happen every hour instead of whatever it is now, that mod modifies the gameplay.constants entity only. You can easily combine it with any other mod that doesn't do anything with gameplay.constants - say if a mod made all ships have 2x everything (damage, hp, whatever). All you'd have to do is copy the pirate modified gameplay.constants over the ship mod's, and you just combined 2 mods.

In reality, few mods will be this simple. A lot of mods will end up modifying the same files, and often the same things in the same files. In such cases, assuming the mod release will be converted back to binary, there's nothing you can do. If one mod modifies Terran planets to have 2x the tactical, and another to have 2x the logistic points, and both are in binary, the modders themselves would need to merge the two. If they weren't in binary and you were handy with modding yourself, you could just add the additional modifications into one of the files.

Now, on top of that we have the Strings file. Anything new that gets added will often also have added strings in English.str to describe and name the new research/ships/abilities/etc. Since there's only one English.str, you'd need to manually pull out the strings unique to one mod, and put them in the English.str file of the other along with combining the GameInfo files..

As you can see, combining "simple" mods can be easy. Combining complex ones/total conversions won't be, and it will be up to the modders to try and make theirs as easy to combine as possible

Hope that helps!

Yeah, I'm doing that with the ST mod too. But here's a pickle for your consideration

Infocard states, weapon names, "Good against: " messages, etc are in the strings file also. In our ST mod, for example, it wouldn't make sense for torpedoes to show up as "Missile damage: " in the info card, so we'd have to change it in the strings file to say "Torpedo damage: ". Or Cloaking to show up as "Phased Out". Now, just changing the value but not the id would still leave a functional mod when merged with another string file, it might just say weird things based on whatever the original strings were.

To avoid that, I'll have to create new strings for the new states/weapon names and figure out how those are referenced to begin with, which would most likely involve changed to some files in Window, which in turn might create more conflicts depending on what it's being merged with..

In short: Meep Not that I mind the extra work, I'll try to make it as clean as I can, but I doubt it will end up being as simple as merge extra strings from one into the other

In your case, it'd be far easier to just change the default descriptions, and doing so would still make the mods mergeable; in fact, it'd probably be a bit easier, or at least cleaner (count wise). The reasoning I have, anyways, is that if I want to merge your extra...technology lets say, with my mod, but don't want torpedo's in the infocards, I would use my mod's files as the base, and tack on the appropriate files from yours (thus I'll still have my (default) infocards in place).

The second method works, but it's not really necessary due to what I just mentioned, as well as it will leave much higher counts/more strings/etc.

Meh, it's a toughie ^.^