Call to Arms. How do we manage to keep Mods compatible to each other ?

Having quite a bit of experience with modding and communities, i see a considerable problem approaching Xenonauts Modding. Unlike some other games, there arent any mod-specific file types/extensions, but you always replace stock content.

Due to the amount of files involved, i dont see a realistic option and how to get mods running that share common files, as strings, weapons and stuff. I dont have any suggestions on what to do, but i believe this could become a major, major problem in the days ahead. Basicly, people would be limited to play/combine a handful of mods, and any mods that share files would pretty much be incompatible unless you manually merge any files required, which calls for time and is prone to killing your game by false merger/copy&paste etc.

For example, i would like to release a mod that i made that adds a Heavy Pistol and a Light Machinegun, but it would only be able to be used by people that use no other weapon / total mods. Its a big problem in my eyes.

Any thoughts regarding this ?

indeed you are forced to play with single mods

Or you can always look around, learn a bit about what makes the mods clash and make them compatible yourself. I know - not the answer for the regular player but at the moment unless someone comes up with a simple Mod Management Tool to do it for us, it can't really be changed

hmm make them compatible yourself nah cant see me do that in a million years even when i wanted to

It's not that complicated, it's just time consuming. First just back up everything the mods edit to be able to easily recover the files if you mess something up. Then check if the mods actually modify the same files (which means they will conflict) - then open those files, check them out and see what's different from the original vanilla file. Edit in the different content from the mods separately and it should work.

Kevin, if you actually tried that once you wouldnt suggest doing it that way to anyone else.

Its a MAJOR pain in the arse. 90 % of time, you will have broken your game. You expect the average gamer to open up 4+ files, 2 versions of each and copy / paste the right content from the right file into the right file ?

lol !

Most of the time, it actually isn't that complicated, so long as you know what you're doing.

But it's the knowing what you're doing part which is the problem.

I guess, as well, there's always going to be complex things that can't be easily resolved. It should be easy enough to automate the merging of two mods that simply add in extra content (e.g. extra weapons) but if you're changing existing content I'm not sure there's any easy way to deal with that.

Kevin, if you actually tried that once you wouldnt suggest doing it that way to anyone else.

Its a MAJOR pain in the arse. 90 % of time, you will have broken your game. You expect the average gamer to open up 4+ files, 2 versions of each and copy / paste the right content from the right file into the right file ?

lol !

Actually I did that to combine Lore+ with the Armored Assault mod.

It's not that hard.

Although like Kabill said it depend on what the mods do.

Actually I did that to combine Lore+ with the Armored Assault mod.

People are even using Armoured Assault? Heh. I guess I should update it and post it properly at some point.

Kevin, if you actually tried that once you wouldnt suggest doing it that way to anyone else.

Its a MAJOR pain in the arse. 90 % of time, you will have broken your game. You expect the average gamer to open up 4+ files, 2 versions of each and copy / paste the right content from the right file into the right file ?

lol !

I've done it, yes. I assume we aren't talking about making XNT compatible with something of similar magnitude though.

There are a couple of things that have to be done.

1) Work out which mods are up to date.

2) Work out which mods are going to play nicely with each other.

By establishing those, it's all grunt work after that, to slowly merge mods and test everything, and the testing is probably going to be the biggest part of the work.

Kevin, if you actually tried that once you wouldnt suggest doing it that way to anyone else.

Its a MAJOR pain in the arse. 90 % of time, you will have broken your game. You expect the average gamer to open up 4+ files, 2 versions of each and copy / paste the right content from the right file into the right file ?

lol !

Amen to this. Not only that, but sometimes someone will release a mod when they're already using another mod that changes their base weapons. For instance, I wanted to install the Corporate Weapons mod, but all of the guns were using values from Into Darkness and I'd have to totally rebalance them all for use with vanilla. If I tried to release the mod I'm working on, everyone else would be stuck with double ranges on everything since I use a larger LOS mod.

Meh, since when did mods become "average gamer" stuff? It's always been a geek thing to mod the crap out of your game. If you can't diff two plaintext files together then you really don't have any business poking around the innards of a game.

I might come off as an elitistic pr*ck for saying that, but really now it's not that difficult if you really want to. If editing textfiles is beyond ones capability then perhaps one should forget about mods.

1. You necro'ed this thread

2. you come around like an elitist pr*ck, yes.

3. if you tried modding this game, and instead of adjusting rifle damage to 50 tried some REAL modding, like, creating new stuff and merging it with 1-2 popular mods, you wouldnt post such utter BS.

There is a reason the community coders took up the challenge, and its not because they are elitists.

"If you can't diff two plaintext files together then you really don't have any business poking around the innards of a game. "

wow, such BS. You have literally no clue what you are talking about regarding XN modding. lol.