One thing about mods that irritates me is that most of them are so large. There are loads of mods, all of which add new civilizations, units, resources and whatnot. Most of the time I would like to get only one or two things out of a big mod. For example, I'd like to have the additional resources from GreenMod (minus ancient temple), without any extra units or other tweaks. There's a thread whose author claims to have done this, but for some reason he's missing tea, sulphur and ancient temple and has added cannabis.
My proposal for a solution is quite straightforward: split all mods into their basic building blocks. Even to the level of having a separate mod for each new resource and unit. The new civilization mods are already doing this pretty well - each one only contains that civilization and nothing else (the civ and UU being bundled is okay).
With the help of my mod combiner program (see sig), it's very easy to combine these mini-mods into larger ones. When I get mod dependencies implemented, it'll also be possible to create one "virtual" mod, which doesn't add anything in itself but depends on all components in a certain mod pack.
Another thing I've noted is that when old mods are made "1.61 compatible", they're still based on an old version of the game. For example, somewhere between 1.09 and 1.61, the iLimitedWarPowerRatio of almost all leaders was increased by 10. When I create difference files from supposedly 1.61 compatible mods adding new civilizations, I get loads of reports about "changes" to this property as a result of the mod still having the 1.09 file. There are several other cases like this.
The solution for this would be that mod makers would keep their work in a difference format in one way or another. My program does not yet have any aditing capabilities, but the upcoming version 0.4 will feature a very simple text editor. Since my program produces a single difference file per mod, those files could also be used for distributing the mods.
I understand if mod makers will want to wait a bit for my program to mature a bit (version 1.0 is not too far), but please give these things some thought, and share your thoughts with me.
My proposal for a solution is quite straightforward: split all mods into their basic building blocks. Even to the level of having a separate mod for each new resource and unit. The new civilization mods are already doing this pretty well - each one only contains that civilization and nothing else (the civ and UU being bundled is okay).
With the help of my mod combiner program (see sig), it's very easy to combine these mini-mods into larger ones. When I get mod dependencies implemented, it'll also be possible to create one "virtual" mod, which doesn't add anything in itself but depends on all components in a certain mod pack.
Another thing I've noted is that when old mods are made "1.61 compatible", they're still based on an old version of the game. For example, somewhere between 1.09 and 1.61, the iLimitedWarPowerRatio of almost all leaders was increased by 10. When I create difference files from supposedly 1.61 compatible mods adding new civilizations, I get loads of reports about "changes" to this property as a result of the mod still having the 1.09 file. There are several other cases like this.
The solution for this would be that mod makers would keep their work in a difference format in one way or another. My program does not yet have any aditing capabilities, but the upcoming version 0.4 will feature a very simple text editor. Since my program produces a single difference file per mod, those files could also be used for distributing the mods.
I understand if mod makers will want to wait a bit for my program to mature a bit (version 1.0 is not too far), but please give these things some thought, and share your thoughts with me.
Ditto...
