A NEW Modders Guide.

[Rayki]

I would like to request that someone generously donate their valuable time to writing a NEW guide for modding Civ Beyond Earth. While I agree Kael's guide looks nice and is probably easily translated from CIV:V to CIV:BE for those experienced with modding, I also know that for novices like myself it simply doesn't achieve the required result.

From my time attempting to follow the guide and piece together things for BE I have noticed there have been tag changes, directory and file structure changes as well as the addition of what I hear is the all important VFS.

At first I tried following the Guide perfectly to the letter but after hours of work I couldn't even get the basic definitions to add a new Civ working, just a couple of XML files. My mod showed in the mod list but no new faction, played with it for ages, tried going further into the guide, added icons and the trait, then tried again with the same result. Tweaked things, debugged, examined and got frustrated because nothing I tried had any effect, set files to load to VFS as I'd read on the wiki and here and still nothing. Started again, same result, hours later, started again, same result...Gave up for now in the hope a new guide would appear.

I've said it in another thread but I have tried to do modding before and the stuff struggles to stay in my head, so I've accepted I'll probably never be on a mod team or anything, but really it can't be so bad I can't pull it off at all can it?

Anyways anyone willing to help the new BE modders out I know I would appreciate it and so would a lot of others in the future.

Edit: Would just like to point out that at one point a lot of time was taken to link to correct CIV:BE files, not CIV:V, such as icons, and DOM images, etc. I only tried a direct copy paste in the end when nothing else worked and as I figured it really didn't want to work linking to CIV:V definitions. lol

 

[Nutty]

As for a new modder's guide, it's probably not going to happen. No one has taken up the mantle of even revising Kael's guide. There are lots of piecemeal tutorials floating around, but it's a herculean effort to write an all-encompassing guide like that.

As for dealing with your sponsor mod problems, the trick for this kind of thing is to not reinvent the wheel when you don't have to: just take a working sponsor mod, make some changes, test, make some more changes, test again, etc. until you've got the result you're looking for.

You will add the other mod's files to your new mod in ModBuddy (everything except the .modinfo file), then you'll examine the other mod's .modinfo file to replicate the <Actions> section (i.e., which files to set OnModActivated > UpdateDatabase), and where you need to set the files to VFS=true (hint: you're looking for import="1" in the <Files> section).

If the other mod includes Lua files, you should probably just leave them out of yours, and work with database changes only until you're comfortable with the process.

 

[Rayki]

Thanks for the advice there, I'll give that a go and maybe I'll get a bit further. As for writing the guide, yeah I'd figured I may be dreaming on that one. I am currently and have been for a few years now, writing a series of books, mine is only fiction so I can make up the details, I can only imagine what writing an instructional guide would be like. With my memory I'd be surrounded by computers each on different screens of the program so I could remember which buttons were there, wouldn't want to say "hit the button at the top left to save" and have them do this blindly and it closes something and loses all the work. Heheh

Guess I'll give the old surgeons scalpel a few rounds on some poor buggers new sponsor mod.