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Mod Specs

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Sheep-y edited this page Jan 16, 2021 · 26 revisions

Modnix mods, regardless of types, must follow a few rules to be recognised.

Table of Contents

Placement

Mods must be placed in Documents\My Games\Phoenix Point\Mods\, either at the root or in a subfolder.

By moving mods to My Documents, they will not be affected by file operations on the game, such as Verify Files, and Modnix will not require admin rights to manage them. This lesson is learned from BattleTech's official modding support.

Single File Mods

A single-file mod should be a single .dll placed in the mod folder.

For example, a DLL with embedded mod information may be placed at root mod folder, or in a series of subfolder that matches the DLL name.

e.g. For the mod HelloWorldMod.dll, it may be placed in these locations:

  • Mods\HelloWorldMod.dll
  • Mods\HelloWorldMod\HelloWorldMod.dll
  • Mods\HelloWorld-0-1\HelloWorld\HelloWorldMod.dll

The name heuristic may be adjusted from version to version. To be safe, please make sure the folder has the same name as the mod.

Multi File Mods

Multi-file mods should be placed in a subfolder, one folder for each mod.

Modnix will first try to find mod_info.js. If found, it will be parsed for mod information, such as which dll to load and in what order. All other files and folders will be ignored.

If not found, each .js whose name matches the containing folder will be parsed. Upon any success, other files and folders will be ignored. Otherwise, .dll files (whose name matches) will be parsed. If no mod found, all subfolders whose name matches the current folder will be scanned.

When a dll is parsed and it contains any mod initialisers, its file version info will be used as mod info. Further more, if the dll contains an embedded mod_info, this mod_info will override version info. (Except that mod_info's dll entry points will be ignored, since they have already been scanned.)

When a stand-alone mod_info specifies dll(s) to load, it will be trusted and the dlls will not be tested or parsed. When the mod_info does not specify any dll, all dlls whose name match the containing folder will be scanned for mod initialisers.

Mod Packages

Mod may be zipped, 7-zipped, or x-zipped. The extension must be .zip, .7z, or .xz. (rar/gz/bz2 are not currently supported.)

The name of the zip, and its top folder (if any), must match the name of the mod file. e.g. SkipIntro.7z should contain SkipIntro.dll or SkipIntro/SkipIntro.dll

Putting mod files at the root will result in a flatter folder structure, but is not required.

The exception is PPDefModifier extensions, which must be packed in a "PPDefModifier" top-level folder. When Modnix sees it, the package will be extracted at mod root.

.cs, .csproj, and .sln files will not be extracted because they are source code.

The naming rules does not apply to the sub-mobs in a Mod Pack (a type of mod), because they must be manually listed. (To avoid leftovers after unclean updates.)

Config Files

Since Modnix 2, a mod_info may declare a ConfigType in mod_info, that points to a type in its DLL as the config class.

Users may create and edit such a mod's config. The config file has the same name and path as the mod, but with a .conf extension. The file will be created in strict json format, without comment.

When a mod initialiser takes a config or settings parameter, this config file will be read, or the default config will be used.

Modnix 1 would ignore .conf files in a mod package, in fear of overriding user changes on upgrade or reinstall. They are accepted since 2.0 to allow pre-configured mods.

Supporting Documents

Supporting documents are supported since Modnix 2.0.

A mod may embed or packed with three type of files as support document. Here is the list of the docs and detected filenames, in order:

Readme
readme.rtf, readme.txt, readme.md, read.me, readme, note, notes
History
changelog.rtf, changelog.txt, changelog.md
history.rtf, history.txt, history.md
changelog, change.log
License
license.rtf, license.txt, license.md, license, unlicense
copyright.rtf, copyright.txt, copyright.md, copyright

File names are case-insensitive.

When a doc is detected, a tab will show up in the mod info panel in the mod manager. This makes it easy for users to discover and read these docs.

mod_info

Quick Example: 

    ({
       Id : "mod.id.case.insensitive",
       Version: "1.2",
       Name : "Name of Mod",
       Description : "Description of Mod",
       Author: "Somebody",
       Copyright: "Public Domain",
       Url: {
         "GitHub" : "https://github.com/Sheep-y/Modnix",
         "NexusMods" : "https://nexusmods.com/phoenixpoint/mods/43",
       },
    })

See Mod_Info Specs for details.

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