starting up a mod, any advice?

Some idea of what you propose to do might help with the advise you need.

How big a mod for example, covering what aspects of modding ?

And what sort of advise do you think you need ?

How much of the work are you going to do yourself ?

My experience so far of Sims modding is that unless your planning a very ambitious mod (like changing all the ship models), then you dont really need a team, one person can do a lot. But if your getting into really changing everything, then a team can get it done faster.

If your actually saying that you have an idea, but no idea how to do it and need other people to come on board who know how to do it, I guess you really need to post a thread announcing the idea and requesting interest in joining the team from each group. ie. ship builders, text file changers, beta testers, map makers etc.

However, bear in mind that once you announce the idea, it will of course then be generally discussed and likely critiqued, which may or may not be desirable.

I suspect you will find that those most able to help with an ambitious mod, will already be involved in 1 or more and may not be interested in joining another team, so generally asking for people to join a team, may not get the result your hoping for. In the long run, you may need to identify the people who have the skills you need, and persuade them to join in.

Personally, I do cosmetic mods without getting into ship models, on my own. I was involved in getting a huge mod going in another game, and left early because the rest of the group rapidly changed the original ideas to the point where my original concept was left out. If your going to make a mod, you need the leadership skills to hold a group together, be recognised as the leader (not a group of equals), and have the diplomatic skills to keep the mod on your track. Everyone you bring in will have their own ideas about how to do it, and have reasons why your ideas wont work. So you need to be able to forge a team and still retain control of it. Either that, or you need to be very sure that everyone shares your vision of the mod from second 1, and that everyone knows their place in building it.

It also helps if really big mods have a home base away from this forum, where you can discuss things in relative private. When the mods at a beta stage, you then announce it here.

WWW Link

Experiment first, learn the limits of the game engine before planning a mod so you end up with your mod fitting the game rather than trying to make the game fit the mod if you see what I mean.

Dig into the files, read the code (yes, read it like a book, er, um, not so much like a book), back up the fileset and...

(first, only mess with the TXT files located in the MOD-Directory, which you have to get from Stardock)

...start changing the variables around, one by one, or you might miss the source of a dreaded Minidump

(Minidumps are usually caused by an extra space in the code, or a misspelled word, or by adding lines of code creatively before getting used to the format of the files)...

After getting used to the code, freely mess with anything, and brace for possible minidumps (sometimes the biggest breakthroughs will happen when it should have minidumped)

lastly, look for extra or missing spaces (and make the delcared number of things match the actual number of things in a list)... ...and be mindful of the number of spaces, which is important enough to mention more than once...

hmm before starting a mod

1.know what you wanna make

2.know if it's not beyond the modding limits, their are many thing's you can't alter or chance with a mod

3.if you not planing on Mesh modding you can most likely get all work done alone or you need to be a artist with lot of time on your hands

 

Ask for advice if you are stuck.  We are always willing to help a new mod.  As long as you don't make us do anything, like work on it.

*needs advice on where to start*

although i do need a modeller, all the ones i know are busy and im horrible at it.

Exiles wrath is really just adding a new race, which is sort of similar to the advent (will reuse some of their tech, like the beam and plasma trees) and some of the abilities already used (IE, all exile ships will get cloaks.....). the exiles (due to being relatively few in number..) will be similar to the vasari in that their ships will be very powerful, but very expensive (IE: their capitals will cost twice as much as those of the other races, but will be more heavily armed (not armored, just to balance it out a bit), again most of their abilities will be those of other races.

 

anyway if anyone knows a modller or is one and has time, could you please tell me, i could really use the help.

 

oh yeah, where are the .txt files?

i can only find one (package 2) and its a jumble of symbols

to get the text files you have to download the sins mod package from the downloads section here

the text files are the reference data files and you can edit those with notepad

thanks

 

a slight update on the mod: im more or less finished with the ships and abilities, working on the tech and other aspects of the Exiled.

 

now all i need are models and can finish with the ships and put out an alpha release for testing