Creating Modifications - Place to Post?

[Kesseleth]

Hi. I'm Kesseleth, or just Kessel - a while ago I did the AAR War of the Dark Spire. I don't recall if I mentioned it there, but I hoped and still do hope to create a mod or even official content for AI War II as a programming exercise. Today, though, I finally got started. So far, my only contribution is a bit of XML for a few new types of Instigator Bases, as requested by Badger and Puffin, but I hope to add more soon. Other things I'm interested in including are the rest of the code for said instigators, new trains, the Exodian Blade (the new fleet style made an idea for the Blade click in my head), and eventually, a minor faction.

Still, I don't expect my work to go very quickly. The reason it took as long as it did for me to get started is that I'm extremely busy with college, and even during this summer I have so many other things to do that it's hard to find time to work on this. Still, I hope to one day be able to stand by Puffin, Badger, and Quinn as contributors to the game! (Provided I can figure out how to work with such a large code base, at least)

I do wonder, though. Since I don't have access to the SVN code base, is there a way to send my changes to Chris or someone else to get them posted if the bases etc are good enough? I don't want to request code access but I do hope that my stuff can be more than just a mod floating around on the forums, y'know? 

-Kesseleth

[Draco18s]

You can always try Mantis.

[x4000]

You've been around long enough and posting enough that I'm not worried about sharing svn access with you.  If you PM me the email address that you'd like to have associated with that, I can get you set up and have some emails with how to download things, etc.  Are you on windows?  It's fine if not, but it's more complicated and requires a bit more from you in terms of custom setup to pull stuff.

Given the nature of svn, it's not like you can break anything permanently, so the main thing that we ask is trying to stick to code conventions as much as possible, but even I've messed up whitespace a fair bit from time to time because of some visual studio settings getting reset and me not noticing, etc.  So stuff happens, it's no big thing.  And especially if you're just in the xml at the moment, that's the easiest part to change and really is less of a big deal.

But my goal is generally to make it so that folks have as few barriers as possible to being able to contribute even if it's just a bit of stuff; I agree that as a player, having to search around for mods tends to just Not Happen most of the time, and if someone wants to run off with the source code they can pretty much just decompile it anyway.  So it's not something that should create a sense of obligation for you, where you then NEED to contribute a certain amount or something just because you have access, I want to make clear.  I totally get that you're busy and have a lot else going on.

I'm quite grateful for the enthusiasm in the first place!

Cheers,
Chris