Idea: ODF Structure

posted on February 22nd, 2008, 11:07 pm

Evenin' all,

Ok, well as we know from digging through the ODF folder in A2, it has a set-up folder structure
/commands
/other
/ships
/special_weapons
/stations
/weapons/phasers
/weapons/photons
/weapons/pulse

Now I know full well that it doesnt actually matter which odf files go in which folder. Ships can be in the Stations folder, Special Weapons could be in the Pulse folder, it makes no difference.

But you can't use the /weapons folder itself, nor can you use your own folder names...

So my suggestion is to allow people to create their own folders and use them. An example of how it could be used would be to create a /units folder, move all the stuff out of /ships and /stations, and then delete the old folders. Doesn't have a huge impact on modding itself, but it makes life a lot easier for us modders ;-)

Perhaps keeping a limit on the tree to two, perhaps three layers, but just to open it up a bit more. The game treats every file like they are in the same folder anyway (there's no referencing strings between them)...

posted on February 22nd, 2008, 11:36 pm

It sounds like a good way to switch some mods around too.

posted on February 24th, 2008, 12:25 am

about switching mods could it b possible to make mods to be moduals (like in dawn of war)

posted on February 24th, 2008, 12:34 am

Hmm, maybe, but there's files in other folders (techtree, sod, textures/rgb, sprites, etc). But yeah, it could be used to modularise the odfs at least.

posted on March 8th, 2008, 12:10 pm

You can already do that if you setup a folder that the game will ignore. Ok it works like this in your A2 directory you add follder named mods. now you can put anything you want in it even another copy of A2 the game will pretend its not even there. now if you want to have things in a modular fashion you have to set them up manualy and make sure you have your backups for uninstalling but once thats done changing things out becomes a mater of copy/paste. Also if you know how to setup auto enstallers you can use one of them tsave time in the setup. then you only need to backup the tech tree and sprite files.

posted on March 8th, 2008, 1:36 pm

True, but that's not what I wanted. What I'm after is for any file or folder within the /odf folder to be useable. If I add folders /odf/weapons/laser and /odf/weapons/particle, I want the game to use it, not ignore it.

posted on March 8th, 2008, 9:17 pm

that would be nice so like be able to add more folders so like you have A2 dir/odf/units/federation/station and what ever stations you would like I would like that idea just make the folders easier to use I think it would be easy to do just have the game look in odf for all its stuff and just like search and it should ignore folders.

posted on March 8th, 2008, 10:45 pm

Ok yea that is different that would be cool too.