Since there's been a lot of modding talk lately, I figured I'd post about this feature here first, since it's still experimental and you guys are probably best fit to try it out and let me know how it works before I let it out into the wild.
You can use the
Git Builds (and eventually 0.4.5) to try it out.
Anyways, one of the first stepping stones in the big road to full moddability are "modular rulesets". What does this mean? Well currently, if you wanna make your own mod for OpenXcom, you have to make your own modded version of the fuckin' huge Xcom1Ruleset to distribute with it. Then you have to bitch everytime it changes and you have to update your mod, bitch everytime you wanna change your mod and find yourself editing a fuckin' huge file, and gawd forbid you wanna use
multiple mods because you'll have to merge them all yourself into some new frakenstein version of Xcom1Ruleset (and bitch a lot).
Well in 0.4.5, modular rulesets put an end to all that! The principle is that each mod ruleset should only contain what it mods, not the whole picture. For example, taking
this example, you could make a XcomutilInterceptor.rul with just this:
crafts:
- type: STR_INTERCEPTOR
soldiers: 6
vehicles: 1
battlescapeTerrainData:
name: INTERC
mapDataSets:
- BLANKS
- PLANE
mapBlocks:
- name: INTERC
width: 10
length: 10That's it! No more need to lug around the entire Xcom1Ruleset around! Any updates won't affect your mod, and you have a much more manageable file to take care of. But wait, how do I put it into OpenXcom? Well there's a new "rulesets" section in your options.cfg, you just have to add it there:
rulesets:
- Xcom1Ruleset
- XcomutilInterceptorAnd voilá! Your mod is now in effect. No muss, no fuss. OpenXcom will load all the rulesets specified one by one, combining them all in runtime for you, so in the end you get the all the mods running together.
Note that order matters! Xcom1Ruleset must come first as it's the "base ruleset", otherwise it'll end up overriding any rulesets that come before it.
