Disclaimer: This guide is intended for everyone, not only the mod authors. Still, some knowledge of the Sins' file structure and the general "what things do" would be needed for anyone wanting to convert/update mods themselves rather than wait for mod authors to do it.

There have been a lot of questions on the forums lately and complaints about patches breaking mods, so first I wanted to take a little time to explain why mods need to be updated. The engine for Sins is very much data-driven. Basically, whenever Ironclad makes changes they change the same files we do for mods. Entrenchment 1.01 > 1.02 is a good example. In 1.02, Ironclad boosted the Scout ships' attack range. So the new entity files for these ships are different than in any 1.01 mod, because the mod used the 1.01 files as the base. Thus, to match the 1.02 change in the mod, the mod author essentially has to make the same change to his files that were made to the stock game. Simple numerical changes like that example don't usually make mods not work at all, though, but simply give you mods with older stats. Where mods break completely is when the format of these files changes. The engine is very systematic. It reads the files line by line, and depending on the entityType (that's why it's the first line!) it knows what the file is supposed to have. If the mod does not have the same format as what the game needs, the mod crashes. A good example of this was the change from Sins 1.05 to 1.1 for abilities to be able to use resources. In 1.05 files all abilities automatically had a listing for antimatterCost. In 1.01, there's a brand new line to select whether it uses antimatter or resources and the next several lines are different based on that selector. The format of the file has changed, so trying to load a 1.05 mod in 1.1 resulted in a spectacular crash.

There is no way to avoid this. There is no way for Ironclad to add things to the game and not have it break mods. So, the mod authors have to update their mods for essentially every patch that includes GameInfo and String changes. But there are a lot of files in GameInfo, and a lot of strings. Doing it by hand is a very tedious process and that's why many who don't know of good tools to help complain about how long it takes.

Thankfully, there are some very good tools designed to help with just that. My personal favorite (and Ironclad's) is Beyond Compare, a file/folder comparison program, and what this guide will be showing off. It allows you to compare an entire folder's worth of files and the program will show you line by line differences in each and allow you to merge changes easily and error-free. No typing, no scrounging through each file to see what changed. It's a great tool and it greatly cuts down on the time needed to update a mod.

So, let's run through an example to see how it works. I'm going to mock-update Bailknight's 1.1 version to Entrenchment. As any mod author would know, this would be a cringe-worthy process by hand because everything turned upside down.

• First, you need to set up your folders. The way it works is it merges from the Source to the Destination. So your Source folder should be your old files, and the Destination the brand new patch files. The idea here is that you're transferring the changes you made for your mod to the new vanilla files.

Then, start up Beyond Compare, select Folder compare and give it your Source and Destinations:

Now, as you can see, the folder compare is pretty messy. But, we expected that since going from 1.1 to Entrenchment is a major change. On the left is the 1.1 mod, on the right are the Entrenchment vanilla files. Red means the file contents differ, blue means everything's peachy. As you can see it's also pretty smart, for missing files it just puts blanks since there's nothing to compare.

Now, I'm not going to go through every file here, but let's update, say, the Kol's entity file:

Now there are a few important things on this screen. First, on the very left you see a long white bar with red throughout. This is like the file overview, which shows you which parts of the file are different, in Red. You can click anywhere in that overview to look at that part of the text. Second, in the left file view you see two yellow arrows pointing right. In the right file view you see two yellow arrows pointing left. These show up for lines with differences (or missing lines) and give you control over how the merge goes. Since we're doing Source > Destination, you'll want to be using Merge Right (so, the arrows pointing right).

Here is where the knowledge of what's in the files is needed. You have to know what to merge and what not to. In the picture above, the differences are the addition of the 5th ability slot, and the line for fighter physics. You know that these are things that Entrenchment is supposed to have, so you certainly don't want to Merge Right, as that would delete those lines to match the old file. So, leave them alone. Let's jump to something with a bit more meat, weapons:

Now, looking at this screen we know we need to merge right everything except the fireConstraintType line. Also notice the file overview box on the left has its view shifted and the section we're looking at is boxed. All you need to do then is to select which lines you want to merge, and click the arrows!

Bang. All done. The yellow marks on the right file show which lines were changed and as you can see they match. I also selected Ignore for the fireConstraintType line (right click > Ignore) so it would stop showing red since it does not need to be changed. Just follow this method for the other changes in the file, and in less than a minute you'll have a file overview that looks like this:

All the red is gone, and you're good to go! Again, the green bands show ignored differences, and yellows show changes made. These are visible in the overview box on the left as well, but might be a little hard to see in the screenshot. And that's it, you're done with the ship.

As you can see, this is a very safe and fast way to update the files. It has a few more advanced features (like it can show only the differences rather than the whole file) that I didn't mention, but I'll leave those for you guys to explore and set it up the way you like it. It saves you a ton of hassle having to dig through the files yourself and it's very, very hard to mess up if you know what you're doing.

It would take me probably about 2 hours to update the entire GameInfo folder and make sure everything is as it should be.

As a final note, there are probably other file comparison programs out there and you're of course welcome to try them out.

Hopefully this helps modders have an easier (and faster) time with mod updates. Using a file compare app certainly cuts down on a lot of headaches.