Tooling?

[Patupi]

I've followed UFO Afterlight and the modding community for a while now, and I was thinking of replaying again with a few mods of my own ( I tend to vary the existing mods out there for myself a bit) but was wondering. I know there are inconsistencies and some oddities with the files for modding, but most of it is self consistent (barring some of the key techs and timed factors). Has anyone made a program to allow menu (or simple text box) based additions to technologies and equipment? If it didn't allow for graphics to be replaced/added and what was added to equipment and research files was kept limited I would have thought it would be doable. It'd be a big job, but seeing the amount of work some have put into modding itself it should be comparatively simple (if long winded). I'm not suggesting going as far as the subrace folders etc, let alone adding damage types, just basic tech and equipment.

 

I don't think I have the time right now and it's been a year or two since I programmed in anything other than CNC Machining but If no-one has tried I might give it a go in the future. I wouldn't hold out too much as I have a lot on my plate right now but still it's worth looking at. Ages ago I was going to do a simple prog to recognise beginings of blocks in the text files and add markers such as the ID markers already there in some of the files, but I never got around to it. (At the time I was working on a prog to split block files for cnc code into seperate g-code blocks).

 

If anyone has done any work on this already I'd be interested to hear about it.

 

(Edit: nuts, I keep forgetting this topic has a grouped modding forum for all the UFO titles. Could someone move this thread to the modding forum? Thanks)