Hard Light Productions Forums

Hosted Projects - Standalone => The Babylon Project => Topic started by: karajorma on January 25, 2006, 10:43:26 am

Title: Mods - Advice for campaign makers and users alike.
Post by: karajorma on January 25, 2006, 10:43:26 am
I've noticed a lot of people having trouble with the various TBP 3rd party add-ons so I thought I should give some advice on how to make up the folders that a mod should use. By doing this I hope to encourage mod makers to distribute their campaigns in a way that makes it as easy as possible for their users to run them.

For those using campaigns I hope this post is useful for figuring out what to put where if you download a mod that was packaged before this was written.

My first piece of advice to mod makers is this. It is best to distribute a mod in a fashion that requires as little work as possible for the end user. The best way to do this for a TBP mod is as a folder which the user can simply extract to their TBP folder. Not only does this make it easier on the user it makes it easier on you (Your readme will now consist of one line) and makes it easier on me (I don't have to keep explaining how to install it).
 In addition to these advantages you can install multiple mods at the same time without them interfering with each other if you take advantage of FS2_Open's mod selection functions.
Sound like something hard to do? It really isn't.

Users start here
First thing to do. Ensure that there are no spaces or hyphens in the path to your TBP folder. If for instance you installed to C:\Program Files\The Babylon Project. You should move and rename the folder so you end up with something like C:\Games\TheBabylonProject. (If you ever need to uninstall the game you'll have to change it back to the way it was originally)


Campaign makers start here (You may also want to check this (http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,36051.0.html) out)
Preparing the mod folder structure

If you're distributing a mod you would now use zip or rar. Point the program at the mod folder and zip up everything (including the mod folder itself). If you're running a mod simply run the launcher and go to the mod tab (features tab in Launcher 5.2) and click on the Select Mod button. Choose the folder you just created. Click run.


Hope that helps all you guys out. :) Here's the sample mod.ini (If you're a user rather than a campaign maker you can simply stick this in each mod's folder and end up with a launcher that looks like this).

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Title: Re: Mods - Advice for campaign makers and users alike.
Post by: madaboutgames on January 26, 2006, 05:06:34 am
Sounds good and more user friendly, I will use this for all future releases. :)

One Question though, what about cut scenes? as these are not meant to be in the data folder?
Title: Re: Mods - Advice for campaign makers and users al
Post by: karajorma on January 26, 2006, 06:29:41 am
You can place cutscenes anywhere in the path. They should work from inside the data folder or a subfolder of it but I personally always place them on the same level as the VP files.