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Providing utilities for modding Sins of a Solar Empire

Providing utilities for modding Sins of a Solar Empire

Hello,


I am considering doing a small mod (I will explain that in a different post later), and I was wondering if anyone would be interested in modding utilities for Sins GameInfo data. I am a software engineer by profession with extensive training in GUI design, thus this should pose no problem.

The only other public example I have of my work is a utility I made to speed up game frame rates by eliminating unnecessary processes and services. It is called GameTime, and you can view information about it at http://chrisberthe.com/GameTime/

I do not wish to just design a utility for my own use, and thus I will only make it if I see there are other people who want it.

Are there any suggestions for/any need for such a utility. 

I am not an experienced modder for Sins of a Solar Empire, so I am not sure what people would want.

The only thing I can think of at the moment that would be useful is the ability to collapse/expand sections of an entity/event/etc text file. Sins GameInfo files use a Parent node -> Child node structure, thus this would make editing files a bit easier, in my opinion.

What do you folks think of that idea? Any other ideas?

Is there even a reason to bother?

-Ian

20,868 views 29 replies
Reply #26 Top

Ill slowly do the ability/buff/entity editor. But I don't program every day or that often, so I have absolutely no ETA on when I will be done.

Reply #27 Top

Quoting EvilleJedi, reply 25
the important part of a file comparison wouldn't be the actual diff portion, but actually telling me what IC actually changed (in fact we just need IC to give us a read only CVS stub, all problems solved, we could pull the diff ourselves. all this text file comparison is so clunky)
End of EvilleJedi's quote

 

Hmmm... i am using a linux tool called KDiff3... a windows version exist but i have never test it...

 

By example, between two beta version of the mod 7DS, i was able to see directly what file was deleted, added and modified... only for the file in txt mode, i was able to have a difference line by line... merging is possible too...

 

Take a look at http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/ ... it is free ... it work on Unix, Windows, Linux and Mac...

 

Since kdiff3 can sync directory, it can be used like a mini CVS too...

 

Reply #28 Top

I'm more worried about changes to entities and abilities because my mod is all new content and not going to modify any files if I can help it, but just having a list of files doesn't alert me to addition or removal of entity attributes. so when I talk about notification of changes just looking at some silly .1 change in a value is pointless, I need entitiy structure and key word changes.