Extending Structs

adding own features...

from Sins Forums

My question:

Is it possible for us as modders to extend the capabilities of the structured options?

For instance, it would be nice if: StarBaseUpgrade offered additional modifications to planet it resides in, than those that are provided in it's 'upgradeProperty' enumeration struct.

It would also be nice if I had a way to modify the current galaxy, such as for a new "super" weapon ability which renders a massive explosion on a planet (which is easily do-able), however ALSO destroys said planet, or assigns it to uncolonizable.

But I can't because Ability and Buff struct sets are quite limited.

 

My reason for posting:

I've looked around and the only thing I can find is the ~5.5mb executable, which means these structs are built-in , and thus, since no source code will ever, nor should ever i suppose, be provided, I should stop my hopes and dreams here and just accept that the game won't permit me to modify to the extent I desire, correct?

Figuratively speaking, I'm steps away from the DLL-hooking cliff. Should be fairly simple, using dev.exe, to determine the location of these structs. Extending them would be the easy part - especially if I use ollydbg when the dev.exe runs an update to a mod's entity file during active gameplay.

Making them function properly when used is something much more complicated, and has kept me those few steps away from said cliff.
Since it's processed by some sort of binary reader, and filtered through directx channels of memory pool. Plus I'm experiencing that late-game 100% cpu low memory usage lag associated with this game, and I really need to write my own Profiler since the dev.exe doesn't having a working one, nor a working memory view, despite both being available menu options.

To be most direct, the .pdb for the dev.exe would literally fix everything if provided to community, since there doesn't appear to be any true customer support for this common 100% cpu lag issue.

 

The game is great, but it could be so much better with a little more feature rich modding capabilities!

modding
1,360 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

can't nuke planets and change mesh.  Game is too simplistically designed to show anything but planet elevators as a sign of improvement, so no multiple textures that change over time showing terraformation or destruction, nor can you change the class of the planet from terran to volcanic or volcanic to something else.

Dev.exe is just for testing to see if there are issues.  Sometimes it'll tell you there is an issue with a specific file, but all the other errors it records tell you nothing of their origin.

 

DLL stuff and whatnot, no clue.  If StarClad can't figure out how to really tweak the engine to use multi-core processors and how to get the GPU handling more stuff, GL.

 

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

With Sins you have to be creative. Maybe you can't have a starbase upgrade modify a planet but if you make the upgrade unlock an ability you have tons of more options to play around with.

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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Thanks for the replies guys, is definitely some food for thought and for use. Can't get enough of this game, really enjoying the mod "scene" :)