A quick question that i am sure has been asked before - is it possible to mod the mod to remove all the retarded anime titties from ufopaedia?
Yep and im making a "mod for the mod" myself just for a different purpose. Mine just sorta restores the balance towards earlier versions and also tweaks a bunch of other things to provide a different and slightly more easy game experience (indeed a few things the player would normally benefit from are nerfed, or some things are more difficult). Ill eventually release it on 4chan in the /vr (retro games) forum as a revolving post.
The easy way to mod graphics is just to put new graphics in the appropriate subfolder of Your Mod. And that may be all that you're wanting to do...
One key thing you've got to be careful about is resource management between mods. If you're wanting to replace an item in the game (research, manufacturing, crafts, whatever) anything that involves Sprites or Sounds pretty much has to be left as-is unless you're going to provide a new ID for something. Like for example if you wanted to change some pistol to look like a different pistol thats already in the game, you would either have to do a switcheroo on the graphic file names in the resources folder... or you would have to create a new ID for the sprite, establish it in the ExtraSprites section, and either link it to the appropriate file or provide a new file/name.
(the only exception is if its something that was already in the vanilla game, like sound ids up to #53 I believe, also new IDs cant just be the same id that the other mod is already using... I set mine really high for example starting at 5500+ for graphics and 550 for sounds).
But for example if I wanted to nix an existing item in order to truncate its lists (compatable ammo, techs required, items produced or required to produce, etc) then I would have to also provide new IDs for all of the sprites that the item was going to use. I had to "-delete:" the UAC Rifle Clip because I wanted to remove its "Shotgun Pellets" dynamic, I have no idea if setting shotgunpellets: 0 would cause a game crash and since the game takes almost a Minute to load for me im unwilling to take chances when it comes to debugging.
I gave it a single visible projectile that does alot of damage but grants x3 armor. But in doing so that meant I had to provide custom IDs for the sprites it used for the inventory (I was already providing a new sound for it so I already had to provide a new custom ID for the sound effect).
Its very iffy if you take something that introduces a new dynamic and just set its value to 0 (I learned this the hard way with Manufacturing Items). The only dynamic I know of you can do it do and get away with is the Fire Mode stats, like setting accuracy and TUs to 0 for a fire mode will remove its option from the list even if it was already defined.
The reason I go into a long winded post about it is if you're wanting to change the Ufopaedia graphics and just insert some "blank background" for them it might be tempting to just go down the list of graphics in the .rul file, copy and paste them in your mod and set all of them to your blank file. However... if past experience serves me correct all this is going to do is give you segmentation errors because your mod will not be allowed to overwrite those IDs.
(So what you would probably have to do is, for each and every anime picture you want to replace, you will have to save a copy of the file you're replacing it with using its exact name... all the hundreds of them)
Either this or take all the entries in the piratez.rul file that you want to modify (which means taking notes on which ones have anime pics you dont want to keep) and then creating a single new graphic ID in (extraSprites?) and setting each and every one of them to that.
// The main reason you want to create a new Mod of your own that is loaded in tandem with piratez is because any time a new version of piratez comes out you dont want to go back in and modify the new piratez.rul file each time, I did that the first time a new version came out and it was Not Fun to do, especially because in Notepad++ it handles memory funky for files its parsing and piratez.rul has over 93 thousand lines of code all by itself... making the program slow to scroll around the file or switch between file tabs.
// This way any changes you make will be preserved in drag and drop fashion and the only errors that might come up is if one or two peculiar things changed inbetween versions.
Screenshot is an example of how modding for a mod works in openxcom, you don't have to copy or preserve all of the information that the object already had defined. All you have to do is provide or retain the information that will be modified. Whether or not it actually provides a different value, in most cases it will override what was there before and add new things you've listed. In fact it is necessary to remove information since all of the spritesIDs have to be truncated unless you are specifically going to change any of them.
