Creating your own Mods

[Max | Crunchy Leaf Games]

EDIT:
We now have better documentation and tutorial on modding on our Wikia.
Here's the site: http://3030deathwarredux.wikia.com/wiki/Modding


Original Post:
Hey guys,

we're still working on better documentation for uploading your own mods right now, but here's a quick primer to get you started!

Here's how to start:

- Right-Click '3030 Deathwar Redux' in Steam library
- Click "Properties"
- Select "Local Files" tab
- Click "Browse Local Files.."
- Open the "mods" folder
- Launch "3030 Redux Mod Uploader"
- On the bottom left, enter a name for your mod
- Click "Create Item"
- Edit the description if you like (leave the rest for later)
- Hit Save & Submit
- Wait for "Success" message
- Close the 3030 Redux Mod Uploader

Congratulations! You have just created your first mod folder, with a descriptor file, an info file, a default image, and the correct folder structure. And you've also uploaded it all to the Workshop (but it's still set to private, so only you can see it)


Now to get the mod to actually do something, you'll have to:

- From the mods folder, open the "packages" folder
- Open your mod folder (it should have the same name you entered earlier)
- Now open the mod_info.txt and follow the instructions


Once that is done, you've only got to update your mod on the Workshop:
- Launch "3030 Redux Mod Uploader.exe"
- Select your mod from the list
- Check you are happy with all the descriptions
- Change Visibility to "public"
- Hit Save & Submit
- Wait for "Success" message

Congratulations! You have uploaded your first real mod to the Workshop!

Now quick, go tell someone about it! :)

[Diarmuhnd]

nice. I just picked thiss up, and grabbed the FireFly testing mod. I miss that show.

[Mike B]

Hi Diarmuhnd, Let us know if that ship worked ok. The image rolls a bit much for the ship trails placement to match but I think it works ok.

Hi karljuhlke, We are reviewing how ships are selected to be on offer at stations. For now I find that reducing the price forces it to show for testing. There is also code for higher class ships to be restricted to higher 'Tech Level' star systems.

Forcing Your ship to Show:
To make it show for now, use the Ship Price and Tech Level of any of the lower value ships and it should be on sale at most stations from any early save game.

Future Ship Screen:
As we anticipate players will like to Mod and share ships (add more and more, rather than replace ships) so we already plan to allow the Ship Buying Screen to allow a second page of ships or a scroll down option. This will mean we don't have to restrict the ships unless we want to for game-play reasons... like making some hard to find.

Ship Trails:
Ship trails come from the Center of the ship, like... an exhaust port. Currently it can't be changed. It would be better if it came from each Thruster but we had a concern it might lead to too many particles being made in big battles. We'll consider improving it in the future.

Ship Thrusters Placement:
Thruster Placement is done as in the example below for the Arcter. This has 3 Thrusters each side.

The 1st number is the Left or Right shift. So half have to be minus (unless you want a central one). 2nd Number is how far back from the center of the ship (0,0) they are. So as the Arcter is a little bigger it's thrusters are set back around 76.

[thrusters]
-11,76
-16,77
-21,78
21,78
16,77
11,76
[/thrusters]

Afterburner Placement:
At the moment, the Afterburner placement will be default, as it was added to the game later in Dev work, so it has hard coded placement for some existing ships where it looked just too bad.

Ship Trails Size:
There is currently no way to directly increase the trail particle size via ship files. You could enlarge the thruster trail particle images for all ships.

Roll Issue:
If you make ship images where they have a high roll (banking, leaning over whilst turning), then the thrusters do not shift to match well. This is more obvious with wide ships. This might get improved if it is annoying to a lot of people.

At some point we'll summarize these things in a wiki/guide entry for Modding Ships.

[Mike B]

FYI: I've gone back an corrected my earlier post, the ship trails just come from the center of the ship not from the Thrusters. I guess you could say it's like and exhaust port.

I think it was planned to make it come from the thrusters in the past. Since the initial game ships started small and didn't have wide ones, it was generally good enough.

Probably there was also a concern that it might allow too many particles in multi-ship fights if all the ships generated trails from each thruster. We'll look in to improving that sometime.

[IronHead]

babo turret count, changing turret count to 4 didn't do anything is there a script I must replicate to be able to use four turrets instead of one?

[Max | Crunchy Leaf Games]

Hey IronHead,

the "turret?" definition is an off/on setting.
Ships can currently only have a maximum of one turret.

[wiidad]

Just curious, but are there any mods in the works that would add new stations with new npcs to interact with? I see people mainly modding ships, but nothing in the way of new npc/plot/crew type content.

[Max | Crunchy Leaf Games]

I'm not sure if adding completely new stations would work, as the game world is currently one of the few things that are still hard-coded.

Adding NPCs, as well as dialogue, story, and scripting for them is all possible. A few modders are trying it out already, though there aren't any public mods as of yet.

Hopefully we'll see some popping up in the future :)