Please Read This Before Modding Your Files

[Grandpa Troll]

It appears that you can make mirrors of every file in the mod folder directory, with one exception that I've found so far. The "iface..." files cannot be redirected, and you must change the basic files. So make sure you make backups.

So educate us AC, is this a good thing or bad thing?

Thanks

[Alinestra Covelia]

Okay, so what that means, if I understand it correctly, is this:

You can mod your game by altering the files. But if you do this in the core files, you'll end up modding the game permanently.

In later versions of RONTAP, the nice folks at BHG realized it's a pain to have to backup and restore all the old files. So they put in a nifty little way you can alter the game files in a separate folder.

This folder must be created here:

Microsoft Games/Rise of Nations/mods/yournamegoeshere/

(Note that you do NOT create it in the /Thrones and Patriots/ folder! Even if you have the addon, you must only put it into the /Rise of Nations/ folder.)

So once you have the /mods/ folder created, you can make subfolders for the various tinkerings you've made. Say Gramps likes his games with a really large population limit, so he wants to make a mod that puts the pop limits up at 1000 instead of 200. This is understandable, as he is very virile and has had many fierce and warlike grandchildren spring from his loins to make the world quake and tremble.

So Gramps can go into the rules.xml file and change stuff. But that makes changes to the whole game. Instead, a crafty and devious Gramps could make a mod called "GrampsPop" or something similar, and put it in this folder:

Microsoft Games/Rise of Nations/mods/GrampsPop/

Everything in this folder will exactly replicate the internal folder structure of the normal game. You can have an art folder, a tribes folder, and a data folder. There is only two exceptions that I know of.

First exception is the info.xml file, which tells the game engine what the mod does. You have to put an "info.xml" file in the GrampsPop folder. But this is easily done by opening a text file and typing this in:

[?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?]
[ROOT]
[INFO name="GrampsPop" description="Mod to make the pop cap larger, by Grandpa Troll. Grrrr!" version="1.0"/]


[/ROOT]

(The forum code requires me to use square brackets instead of the angular brackets < like so >. When you do your coding, make sure to use angular brackets.)



Okay, so we've done the info.xml, which is just a little procedural formality to let the game know what's what.

The second exception is the interface icon buttons. (These are the files that start "iface..." and they're in the art folder.) For some reason, these buttons are ignored if you change them in the mod folder. The game will not replace the iface buttons with ones you put in the mod folder.

So what that means is that you will have to replace the originals in the Rise of Nations/art/ folder or the Thrones and Patriots/art/ folder, depending.

Here is an example. We wanted to make a new Chinese unit, the "Jiefangjun Infantry". So we altered all the skin textures and put it into /mods/Jiefangjun Infantry/art/Jiefangjun.tga (the game only recognizes tga files). Then we altered its data in "unitrules.xml" and we put that into mods/Jiefangjun Infantry/data/unitrules.xml.

But in order to change the button graphics, we had no choice but to go into the core Thrones and Patriots folder, and to change iface_units_03.tga and the "half" variant. Fortunately there are some blank squares, and so I just put the Jiefangjun pic in a blank square. If for some reason the interface buttons have to be restored to the original, it's easy to backup a copy, or even don't backup and just redraw the blank space over the Jiefangjun Infantry.