Weird Worlds Mod FAQ

Important

Please be sure to visit the Weird Worlds Mod Surgery forum. In these early days that will be a far more current source of information than this FAQ will.

To get us started, a quick overview from Fingers:

Well, here's the basic concept of how the mod system works...

Any mod must reside in its own folder under the WW installation (like the "superpirate" example mod), and each mod must have a gamedata folder with a game.ini within it. The game.ini is what makes the mod show up in the launcher menu and determines which files are loaded when you run your mod. You can initially copy this file from the default folder, and change the TITLE line to your mod's name. This is all you need to do to be able to run a mod (although at this point the "mod" will act just like the default game).

In order to remove a star type/race/item/etc you just remove the corresponding line from the game.ini. Similarly, when you add a file you have to add it to the game.ini so it'll be loaded.

The files are pretty self-contained, but there are some cross-references that can cause trouble. For instance if a race's ini file defines their homeworld's star is yellow then removing the yellow star would cause problems; or if you remove a weapon that's used by a ship.

Some of the major advantages and improvements over SAIS modding are as follows:

Weird Worlds is much more flexible than the original SAIS when it comes to modding. It was something that was in our plans from the beginning of the project, as opposed to adding the feature to a finished game like we did with SAIS v1.2.

The main advantages:

• Game data is in separate files, so to add an item or a race or a starship hull you just make a new file for it. No need to modify existing files or include them in your download. It's much cleaner this way.
• All the graphics and sound file names are defined by the data .ini files, so you can again make your own rather than modify or overwrite the existing stuff.
• The "quest" system is fairly flexible and lets you do basic conditional events. For example, the whole Kawangi encounter is set up in a script (blowing up stars, emergency messages, gameover and all) rather than hardcoded like it was in SAIS.
• There's no strings.ini - all race-specific text is in the race's own .ini file, quest-specific text is in the quest's file and so on.
• A "master file" controls which items/races/quests are available in the game or mod. This allows you to "remove" existing items as well as add your new stuff. Want to play without the pesky Zorg? Now you can.

The player flotilla size is limited to five ships for interface reasons. More than five would probably get tedious to manage in combat anyway. (If you want a cloud of fighters, give the player a carrier)

IMPORTANT

Your mod's game.ini must reference a LOCAL banner image (or else explicitly reference one elsewhere in the directory tree) or else the game will crash when selecting the mod

You can edit the game.ini file as follows to explicitly reference the default banner:

BANNER ../../default/graphics/launcher/banner.bmp

You can make basic scripts with conditions and user-defined variables... It's not a full programming language type affair so there are certain limits to what you can do.

For example, it's possible to have an event (meeting someone) set a flag that another event checks as one of its conditions to determine what happens when you go to a location. But the scripting system doesn't have a way to look at the contents of a random planet.

The late return penalty can't be "turned off", but it's easy to make a mod with a much longer time limit if you really want to.