Early Modding Support

[knapaxe]

Just a quick query to Mark and Chris as to your support or willingness to look the other way when someone fiddles around with the guts of PA.

[gsuberland]

I've already been digging around in the DAT files

Fingers crossed we'll end up with full modding support, like every other game IV have made.

[knapaxe]

I fiddled around and added a couple grants. That seems to be a simple interface there. Just 2 files to keep track of. With a bit more work, we could add a scenario or two before PA goes gold. Seeing as the grants are handled in LUA I wonder what else we can uncover and manipulate with some LUA code.

My main concern was if Chris is all that concerned with us going a bit further with "testing".

[tradami]

What editor are you using?

[knapaxe]

notepad++

[tradami]

knapaxe. Where are the files that you are editting? If it's the .dat files, how do you open them properly?

[Mas Tnega]

They're just RAR files with .dat instead of .rar.

[tradami]

Got it! Thanks!

[RabidZombie]

I fiddled around and added a couple grants. That seems to be a simple interface there. Just 2 files to keep track of. With a bit more work, we could add a scenario or two before PA goes gold. Seeing as the grants are handled in LUA I wonder what else we can uncover and manipulate with some LUA code.

My main concern was if Chris is all that concerned with us going a bit further with "testing".

The campaigns are lua, but they're nothing more than a sequence of hard coded events by my rubbish first glancing look.

Will start messing around with it once I've gotten my first prison off the ground.

[Illanair]

The dat files are just plain old .zip files. Just open them with Winzip or Winrar and pack them back together as a .zip and rename the files.

[RabidZombie]

The dat files are just plain old .zip files. Just open them with Winzip or Winrar and pack them back together as a .zip and rename the files.

Nope. They be rars.

[Mas Tnega]

And you don't actually need to repack them afterwards. The game is quite content to look at the /data folder

[Illanair]

The dat files are just plain old .zip files. Just open them with Winzip or Winrar and pack them back together as a .zip and rename the files.

Nope. They be rars.

Oh they switched it from the Uplink? I didn't notice, heh. Then again I use WinRAR and I only unpacked the file, never tried repacking it.

[knapaxe]

The campaigns are lua, but they're nothing more than a sequence of hard coded events by my rubbish first glancing look.

Will start messing around with it once I've gotten my first prison off the ground.

It looks like a combination of the save file coding and lua for the cut scene parts.

For the lua bits that I've seen thus far, we have an objective class and a game class. I'll peruse some more after work.

[Nicotin]

There is also a Trigger class which takes objectives and runs a function upon it's completion.

Sadly you can't use the Trigger in the Grants.lua for unlockable grants.