How do I make a mod like this?

shihku7

My mod idea would change the game to be slower paced. Aliens and marines would have more health and/or do less damage with their weapons.
I don't think it would need to be drastically slowed down though.

All alien life forms would be available for zero cost, except the Onos perhaps. Of course, the various abilities/stats of these now free lifeforms would need to be seriously re-balanced.

The idea is that this would add more gameplay variety to the game, and players would have access to that variety right away.
The Fade would be the primary Alien unit, and would be the default Alien spawn class. Skulks would be good for recon and structure destruction, but they would not be used for main fighting. The Lerk would be for ranged fire and support.

For Marines, I think shotguns and flamethrowers would be available right away too.

Resources would still be important. For the Marines they still need them to get tech upgrades and such. For Aliens, upgrades would not be linked to Hives at all. Instead, you would just purchase upgrades with your own individual resources. The upgrades would now be expensive though.

So this mod would not have any new abilities, weapons or units or anything like that. It would just reconfigure the stats of existing units and weapons. Would it be relatively easy to create such a mod? Is all this data found in a specific set of files in the game?

Thanks

lwf

Go play with Balance.lua for starters. Just make a backup of it, edit the values start a local server to try it out.

shihku7

Thanks! I edited the balance.lua like you said. If I create a server with this, can people just join in and play with the new changes without downloading anything?

I was able to create a server by myself and see that the Fade, Gorge and Lerk now cost 0 resources like I wanted it to, but my friend wasn't able to join the server. It did not show up on the server list and he kept getting "server not responding" messages on Steam. Could be a weird firewall issue though.

Do you know where the stats are that determine Marine movement speed and other such things?

shihku7

Does the Create a Server button create an online server or just a LAN server? o_O

sinkingmist

Take a look at:
http://wiki.unknownworlds.com/index.php/Modding


Also, marine movement speed is defined in Marine.lua
Marine.kWalkMaxSpeed = 5 // Four miles an hour = 6,437 meters/hour = 1.8 meters/second (increase for FPS tastes)
Marine.kRunMaxSpeed = 6.0 // 10 miles an hour = 16,093 meters/hour = 4.4 meters/second (increase for FPS tastes)
Marine.kRunInfestationMaxSpeed = 5.2 // 10 miles an hour = 16,093 meters/hour = 4.4 meters/second (increase for FPS tastes)

shihku7

That was very helpful, thank you.

Is there a way for me to host this mod and have people play alongside me? The "Create a server" button appears to create a LAN-only server. Do I have to create a dedicated server?

shihku7

Well I've uploaded the mod to Steam Workshop and called it "BattleStrat"

I then setup the SteamCMD Dedicated server, and made a shortcut for its server.exe so that it will attempt to load my mod. I used server.exe -mods 132658056 as the command line. But I can't get the mod to load. Can someone help?

It says "Error: mod 132658056 doesn't contain a valid title"

here is the Workshop URL for my mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=132658056

Did I type in the wrong mod ID?? It's a public mod too

edit: hmmm might be 7e83388 ... i'l try that now

shihku7

now I got the server to load the mod, but I can't join my own server. Authentication failed message. Wtfff

Aaaand my server browser no longer shows any servers ..... ugh