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 hereFirst 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 out)
Preparing the mod folder structure- Create a folder for the install - First thing to do is to create a folder for your campaign within the TBP folder. At the moment due to a limitation in FS2_Open you must ensure that there are no spaces or hyphens anywhere in the name. It's probably best to avoid capital letters as well for reasons I won't go into here.
- Install any VP files - If the mod has any VPs stick them in the new folder
- Install any data files - If the mod has any other files then make a new folder called data inside the mod folder you just created. Treat this folder as if it were TheBabyonProject\Data. (i.e if a file would have gone in TheBabylonProject\Data\Tables you stick it in TheBabylonProject\ModName\Data\Tables).
- Optional - Include a mod.ini file - A mod.ini file allows you to send users to this forum or your website directly from the launcher. It also makes the mod look prettier in the launcher. If the user has launcher 5.2 or below it is ignored anyway so it doesn't hurt to have one. I've included a sample one below. Simply open it in notepad and change the description and URLs to make it point elsewhere if you wish. Then stick it in the mods folder (NOT moddir\Data).
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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