Who are the programmers (who create mods)?

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svaucher

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I've noticed many people who are creating mods, but, correct me if I'm wrong, most people are mostly keen on creating new graphical components (armours, castles), story lines, and quests. I'm a software developer (actually specialising in reengineering) and have no talent for designing 3D models. I was wondering who else has a programming background.
 
Programming is my main calling, but I dabble in all sorts of stuff computer related.
Although, other than some dabbling in Photoshop, I'm not very good with graphics and no good at all with modelling.

So what are you working on mod-wise?
 
I've absolutely no programming background, I just learnt a lot by opening .txt files from various games (The Battle for Middle-Earth, Rome - Total War, M&B...). I usually use the Unofficial Editor, but knowing how the .txt files work helps a lot.
What is reengineering exactly ?
 
No programming background whatsoever. Nothing even remotely resembling it until, um, three or four weeks ago. Learnt everything right here from the wonderful people on these forums. :smile:
 
Janus,

I don't have a story in mind, but I'm looking at different actions that I would enjoy having included in mods. I've added dueling to my game, I'll add brawling (taking a break after wasting a few hours on it). My current "project" (I'm really a geek, coding when on vacation...), is to add messengers to the game. So instead of asking for something directly, you could send a messenger to do it. You could also receive a message asking you to do something... it could be very flexible, but it actually surprisingly hard to implement without data structures and the ability to store state in troops.

My two main difficulties are can be illustrated in a fictitious strategy mod:

You want to ask your allies to attack an enemy base.

1/ How to have in interface to specify where to send a message for a free form game. Your allies could be in any city, and you don't have a way of building dynamic dialogs to specify which city to send the message to. I could hack the python generation scripts though. It would then be difficult for a "real" modder to use...

2/ How to hold the information you want to send. I'd like to have a callback script, but I cannot hold state in the messenger. I thought of using items (letters), and there would be a generic script that would do a switch, e.g. if messenger has <send troops letter> then send troops from destination of msg to origin of msg elseif... But I cannot hold third party information like attack other party, since there is no way to pass that information. An obvious hack would be to limit the feature to 10 messengers and hold state in 30+ variables... For someone who's currently reengineering 100 KLOCs of spaghetti code, I'm not too keen on that.

sv
 
Gandalf, reengineering means figuring out what a program does and how it works when you have limited information about it. I said that my current project consists of 100 KLOCs of reengineering, that means without documentation, going over 100,000 lines of program (without any of the original developers to talk to) to recreate the documentation and modifying it so that new developers can work with it.
 
Since keen non-programmer have responded, I'll clarify the term callback that I used when describing my messenger. It means for example giving a script another script to execute when a specific condition occurs.

As an example, I sent a duel script to the list. To use the script, you can specify who is your opponent, where you're both placed, and a script to execute if you win and another if your lose. This means that you could reuse the dueling script without having to redefine a new mission_template every time as the victory trigger will call (example) $victory_script. That script is specified from the dialog, but is executed in the mission triggers.

For my messenger "project", I'd like to specify a script to execute if/when a messenger gets to destination (adding a quest, spawning troops), and another if he gets killed (e.g. reputation of killer faction and sender faction is decreased).
 
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