# of mods enabled

One mod at a time

If you can only run one mod at a time, what's going to happen to the "true space" mod that is currently being worked on? The person who is making it said that it would work with the "Sins Plus" mod.

Its not technically a mod. More of a way to designing maps.

What do you mean, will it be something you download (like a mod)?

The features of different mods and addons can be easily merged. Well... may require some knoweledge about how to use Wordpad/Notepad, but i think that's not a problem at all.

this would explain why i cant get more than my one mod to work....... sheesh i thought it was me doing something wrong... gooooood to know thanks

hmm weird even after moving the mods out of the mod folder and replacing the files back to the original files, and trying to use the "bigger hangar" mod, it's still not working...

You can merge mods though. It's a bit tedious, but it works.

If a mod isn't working, you may have the files in the wrong place and/or the wrong structure.


Most of the mods I've grabbed all have the same core files (window files, textures, gameinfo folder), so you can just use one as a base and edit the files you want in the rest of it.

That's all I did.

I've got about 5 mods combined at the moment.

Which Mods did you combine foodro? How long did it take?
I am asking because the peeps doing the Mods are interested in making their own better not spending time combining others. So I better learn how... any advice is appreciated

Thanks

There's really no trick to it.

I just unzip each mod I'm interested in, then compare the date of each file in each folder, picking the newest ones and throwing them into a combined folder.

Not all mods change the same files, so it's just a matter of putting the most recently modified files together into one folder.

I've got a couple of Uzii's mods, skyboxes, new textures, to name a few.


If two mods do change the same file(s), you just have to decide which one you want to use.

After you look at a couple folders' content, you can easily identify which files were changed (by their date) for that particular mod.

The how really depends on the mod. Since pretty much every object and ability in Sins has its own entity file, the mods that just change existing values or add their own files generally aren't very difficult. For example, if you have a mod that makes pirate raids happen every hour instead of whatever it is now, that mod modifies the gameplay.constants entity only. You can easily combine it with any other mod that doesn't do anything with gameplay.constants - say if a mod made all ships have 2x everything (damage, hp, whatever). All you'd have to do is copy the pirate modified gameplay.constants over the ship mod's, and you just combined 2 mods.

In reality, few mods will be this simple. A lot of mods will end up modifying the same files, and often the same things in the same files. In such cases, assuming the mod release will be converted back to binary, there's nothing you can do. If one mod modifies Terran planets to have 2x the tactical, and another to have 2x the logistic points, and both are in binary, the modders themselves would need to merge the two. If they weren't in binary and you were handy with modding yourself, you could just add the additional modifications into one of the files.

Now, on top of that we have the Strings file. Anything new that gets added will often also have added strings in English.str to describe and name the new research/ships/abilities/etc. Since there's only one English.str, you'd need to manually pull out the strings unique to one mod, and put them in the English.str file of the other along with combining the GameInfo files..

As you can see, combining "simple" mods can be easy. Combining complex ones/total conversions won't be, and it will be up to the modders to try and make theirs as easy to combine as possible

Hope that helps!

Easiest way I've found so far is to place all of one's changes at the bottom of each change's respective section. Therefore, I place all of The Mars Effect's string changes at the bottom of the Strings list, as did Uzii with his Sins Plus; doing it this way, it's very easy to combine our mods (making sure to change stringcount of course).

Yeah, I'm doing that with the ST mod too. But here's a pickle for your consideration

Infocard states, weapon names, "Good against: " messages, etc are in the strings file also. In our ST mod, for example, it wouldn't make sense for torpedoes to show up as "Missile damage: " in the info card, so we'd have to change it in the strings file to say "Torpedo damage: ". Or Cloaking to show up as "Phased Out". Now, just changing the value but not the id would still leave a functional mod when merged with another string file, it might just say weird things based on whatever the original strings were.

To avoid that, I'll have to create new strings for the new states/weapon names and figure out how those are referenced to begin with, which would most likely involve changed to some files in Window, which in turn might create more conflicts depending on what it's being merged with..

In short: Meep Not that I mind the extra work, I'll try to make it as clean as I can, but I doubt it will end up being as simple as merge extra strings from one into the other

I think it's just going to (unfortunately) be down to the end user having to make a decision of one mod (for the major/conversions).

X3 is similar with a couple of the major mod packages, you basically have to pick one or the other.

The big difference between the two games, Sins isn't as necessaily as long term (per game, Sins games can range from a couple to several hours, X3 can range up to weeks). So with Sins, you could play one mod one time and another some other time, switching between them freely as you saw fit.


Variety.

Besides, you can't really expect the creators of inevitable future big mods to take the time to make theirs compatible with someone else's. While it would be nice, it's not very realistic. They have their own interests and time invested in it, it shouldn't be on their shoulders to make everybody happy. I'm not saying none of them will, or all of them will, more than you really couldn't expect them to.

I know if I spent weeks (or months) on something, I'd be too burned out to try (or even give a shit) to mix someone else's work with mine. I rarely get that bored, or drunk.

In your case, it'd be far easier to just change the default descriptions, and doing so would still make the mods mergeable; in fact, it'd probably be a bit easier, or at least cleaner (count wise). The reasoning I have, anyways, is that if I want to merge your extra...technology lets say, with my mod, but don't want torpedo's in the infocards, I would use my mod's files as the base, and tack on the appropriate files from yours (thus I'll still have my (default) infocards in place).

The second method works, but it's not really necessary due to what I just mentioned, as well as it will leave much higher counts/more strings/etc.

Meh, it's a toughie ^.^

I wish they enable multi Mods like SupCom