Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: dostillevi

Tampa, do you consider these to be complete shadows mods, or are they effectively incomplete, i.e. would the user notice an out of place sound file or graphic that was added by shadows and not touched by your mod? I don't want to put them in the missing functionality column just because you're planning to update them further at some point.

Edit: A community mod sounds interesting. I'd have to give it some consideration.. I've made my own "community mod" of sorts that combines the best of what I can find here on the forums, and I imagine a number of you have done the same. I would argue that a precursor to a good community mod is better mod support, specifically in the form of a mod editing tool with the following capabilities:

-Mod Manager: Allows the integration of multiple mods, easily switching between active mods, determining priority when mods conflict, and allows annealing to take only the desired parts of separate mods. The mod manager would make appropriate backups of default files, effectively eliminating the need to put some files in the customization folder and others in the main game folder.
-Race manager: Each race stands alone. With all races set up for the mod tool, the user would be able to turn races on and off with a check box, and the mod editor would handle all file movement and editing of text files automatically. The race manager would allow easy access to all relevant race and profile stats and allow comparisons between multiple races. It would also allow modification of shipsets and race images within the program.

Ideally the program would be able to pull all information from existing mod files, but in the case where two mods are adding races, they won't have bias settings for each other. The mod tool would be able to load a "master biases file" maintained by the community for all released races, or would make a guess based on relations between existing races of the same race type.

Frankly DW is so simple to mod that writing such a program is almost trivial. I sat down to give it a go a few months ago but my programming skills are very rusty. Its still on my list of projects though, someday.. someday..

quote:

ORIGINAL: dostillevi

Tampa, do you consider these to be complete shadows mods, or are they effectively incomplete, i.e. would the user notice an out of place sound file or graphic that was added by shadows and not touched by your mod? I don't want to put them in the missing functionality column just because you're planning to update them further at some point.

Edit: A community mod sounds interesting. I'd have to give it some consideration.. I've made my own "community mod" of sorts that combines the best of what I can find here on the forums, and I imagine a number of you have done the same. I would argue that a precursor to a good community mod is better mod support, specifically in the form of a mod editing tool with the following capabilities:

-Mod Manager: Allows the integration of multiple mods, easily switching between active mods, determining priority when mods conflict, and allows annealing to take only the desired parts of separate mods. The mod manager would make appropriate backups of default files, effectively eliminating the need to put some files in the customization folder and others in the main game folder.
-Race manager: Each race stands alone. With all races set up for the mod tool, the user would be able to turn races on and off with a check box, and the mod editor would handle all file movement and editing of text files automatically. The race manager would allow easy access to all relevant race and profile stats and allow comparisons between multiple races. It would also allow modification of shipsets and race images within the program.

Ideally the program would be able to pull all information from existing mod files, but in the case where two mods are adding races, they won't have bias settings for each other. The mod tool would be able to load a "master biases file" maintained by the community for all released races, or would make a guess based on relations between existing races of the same race type.

Frankly DW is so simple to mod that writing such a program is almost trivial. I sat down to give it a go a few months ago but my programming skills are very rusty. Its still on my list of projects though, someday.. someday..

quote:

ORIGINAL: dostillevi

Tampa, do you consider these to be complete shadows mods, or are they effectively incomplete, i.e. would the user notice an out of place sound file or graphic that was added by shadows and not touched by your mod? I don't want to put them in the missing functionality column just because you're planning to update them further at some point.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Darkspire

I think you are slightly misunderstanding the community mod. It is a mod with all new graphics for ships and races, everything in a 'comod' is new and done from scratch, yes we have all done the 'chop a bit here and add a bit here' themes but this would be entirely new content, almost like an expansion pack without the features. The NWN's one I mentioned is a good example, I can not remember the exact amount but there were at least 10+ new tilesets added along with new buildings, NPC's etc. As I said it takes a dedicated and talented set of individuals to undertake such a project.

Darkspire

quote:

ORIGINAL: necaradan666

He's not wrong about the community mod though, I played NWN 1 and 2 for a lot of years what I saw there was many individual projects being made compatible, no file conflicts, then all packaged together. There were tons of tilesets but you could download them all separately from their respective authors. The good thing about community mods was that having it all together provided a stable base of good content that module makers and persistent world builders could make use of with a good chance that everyone would have the package already

There were votes and stuff on what to include. I don't remember the NWN2 community mod ever being complete enough to really bother with though.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Hannable
I have a ship name mod that some might like with at least 10,000 names. Essentially it encompasses every ship name from the present on back to the age of sail and every nation is included. Thus for a human civilization that is global in scope, you'll get names from all the world's navies (at least the navies that actually had larger ships worthy of a name).
...
The only "bug" is that I didn't randomize the names of escorts so you're going to end up with the names of all the small combat ships of the Norwegian fleet first, then all small ships from the next country, and so forth. Fixing this would be a lesson in tedium, a lesson I already learned when I compiled all of these names.

Feel free to add, delete, mix, and match to this list as you see fit. I really don't care about being credited and I certainly can't claim copyrights. I just hope the massive diversity in ship names will lend a bit of flavor to the game.