Questions about creating mods

[Dacy]

How are mods created?

 

How extensively can they change things? I would love to get the base editor to be better organized and searchable by such things as type of material, size, properties such as whether or not it can be tinted, gives light, has collision, etc.  We started working on an online reference tool, but first of all, that's more difficult to use than a mod would be, and secondly, as we have found with another project, various people will object to various sources of programs, such as Google, Windows, and Apple; they all have their haters who will not use those products.

 

Last question has to be, is there anyone who writes mods who could and would help on such a project (if it's even possible, I'm asking from absolute ignorance here).

 

Thank you!

[AboveTheChemist]

Generally speaking, mods take an existing game asset (like a zone texture, sound, costume piece) and modify it. A big exception is popmenus (and custom windows, which are kinda related), but otherwise you need to know what the existing asset is and where it resides in the directory structure in order to be able to modify it.

 

My modding experience is quite narrowly focused on popmenus and map textures, so I can't say for certain if the mods you propose to the base editor are feasible or not. I think it would involve modding UI elements, which I have no experience modding and I can't recall any examples of same. I think if you could locate the existing assets that define the parameters of what you see in-game for the base editor, then it might well be feasible. I don't have access to the game assets at the moment but the next time I need to dig into the piggs I'll take a look and see if I can find anything that relates to the base editor.

[Dacy]

Thank you! It would not necessarily have to change the UI, just be something that could be called up in game to, for example, search for things that can be used as doors. Or things that are tintable. Once you find the item, maybe it can take you to that item in the editor. I’d love rearranging the editor, sure, but realize that’s a lot. 

[AboveTheChemist]

4 hours ago, Dacy said:

something that could be called up in game to, for example, search for things that can be used as doors. Or things that are tintable. Once you find the item, maybe it can take you to that item in the editor.

 

I am not sure about that last part, as I am not sure if there is a slash command that would allow that, but what you describe sounds like it could be accomplished with a popmenu. You could have the different categories (doors, tintable, etc,) as submenus and each could list the various items within and could provide the user with the search term to type in the base editor menu. That's assuming that a slash command doesn't already exist, and there is every chance that it does. The wiki slash command page (https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/List_of_Slash_Commands) is well maintained so it might be worth a look there for a slash command that does that.

Edited December 4 by AboveTheChemist

[Dacy]

There is a search function in the editor itself, but it is very limited. When you say, that's assuming that a slash command doesn't already exist, what slash command would you mean here? I wasn't clear on what you meant exactly, sorry.

 

[AboveTheChemist]

No worries, I should have been clearer. Typically in popmenus you'll have a slash command of some kind that is invoked when you click on an item in the popmenu. I assumed that you were referring to that kind of functionality when you said:

 

6 hours ago, Dacy said:

Once you find the item, maybe it can take you to that item in the editor.

 

Ideally the way I think the popmenu would work is that you would open it and drill down to the item you wanted, click the name of the item, and it would (theoretically) take you to that item in the editor. But there would need to be a slash command available that would allow one to open an item in the base editor based on its name or code or something. I am not sure if such a slash command exists, and if not then the popmenu couldn't have that functionality. But, such a popmenu could still be useful, because folks could at least see a list of the base items that might fit the category they need, and they could manually search for them based on their name. Or, assuming that slash command doesn't exist, you could set it up so that clicking the item name in the popmenu would print that item name in the chat window, and users could copy/paste the name from the chat window to the search bar. I'm just tossing out some ideas to make the menu as useful as possible, even if the slash commands aren't there to make it work exactly like the ideal menu might work.

[Nerio72]

This looks to select an item, but I assume you have to name the item you want to select

/base_select  Select base object.

https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Base_select_(Slash_Command)

Edited December 4 by Nerio72
Added link