I think it's Ironclad's "in-place" execution that complicated it for the more uncomplicated amongst us. Sometimes people install in a different directory or modders might have alternate directories, etc.
You mod utility pack is indispensable and has features no one else has--period and all of your utilities work flawlessly (to my own experience). Good coding and highly recommended.
But I can feel the pain of new people and some times we forget some of these questions might come from someone who is young and never tried anything like modding before.
I gave up on modding for about six months after I began because of several frustrating factors:
- Dated instruction/examples on the forums that were broken.
- Incorrect examples/advice on the forums.
- Game file corruption from bad mod installs/downloads.
- Undocumented syntax conditions for various files.
- Incomplete directions.
- Broken user made utilities.
I have a business, kids, a dog and a wife and trade sleep for fun usually--with occasional down-time where I might have a few days straight to dig a little. So I can relate to wanting the "quick and easy" answer...and in Sins, sometimes you need that because the path to correctness can be so multi-layered that it isn't immediately obvious and a mistake in one area can break all your efforts in several areas. You may have 9 out of 10 right and that one mistake can make all ten not work. So it can be very frustrating. I asked about editing a particular file for about three months and got all sorts of advice and finally when someone answered it, all that was required was editing one value--a single number. Some people ask their questions at the breaking point and if they get one more "you need to learn to do this" it can be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
I started out in the days of command lines but I hate command lines. I script HTML and flash action script but I hate scripting. Give me a gui with buttons any day.
The modding advice on the forums now is extremely helpful and much more current and accurate than a lot of older posts.
What would help a lot of people is an "Idiot's Guide to all things Sin's"--with lots of step by step pictures and line by line examples.
...and I want a real space pony still.
Harpo's utilities are not hard to use and you will have to use them when you start getting fancy in your modding. Well worth the effort--but I still think he stole all that karma when no one was looking.