A few FA questions

To add custom builders (just to keep things organized) would I just have to create a new lua file (say SorianAirAttackBuilders.lua) in the lua\AI\AIBuilders folder? I know I can just add them to the existing files, but I like to keep things more organized.



Has mod shadowing been added to FA?



If shadowing hasn't been added is at least possible to do a mod manager compatible AI mod now?|||You can just create a new file lua file in that directory. The engine imports every lua file in the three AI sub-directories.



As long as those files exist people can use any builder, base, or builder group that has been imported.



Should be a lot easier to manage AIs and multi-person AI work.|||Unfortunately proper shadowing is not implemented through the mod manager.|||DFS|||This may seam like a stupid question but here goes... If Shadowing were avalible what could you do with it? (Only asking because I dont know)|||Shadowing replaces a data file in its entirety. The mod manager only supports hooking, which concatenates your file to an existing script file. Shadowing can be done, but only by providing files in a mounted directory, not by the mod manager.



The reason is that our current file system isn't restartable, so the shadowed files need to be loaded during engine initialization. We'd long planned to virtualize the file system, but unfortunately we haven't been able to get any time to do it (it's a pretty complex task, and because it's so low level a change, it requires a lot of testing.)



It's #1 on my wish list though.|||So with shadowing you'd be able to adjust the stats of a given unit on the fly without having to restart the game to see the result... Dam that would be awesome!



I lost count of all the times I've had to restart SC to check the status of a new bit of script or the outcome of a blueprint change.|||Resin_Smoker|||Speaking of.. heh, I just posted in the other thread about this. Summarily, it's VERY possible to make a mod-manager capable AI. Just takes a bit of a workaround.|||Sorry, I wasn't trying to say you couldn't do an AI mod with the mod manager. The AI system was restructured to make it more possible. The biggest issue I can see is that there is no good way through the mod manager to get different AI types to show up in the skirmish screen.|||Couldn't you make it more dynamic like the aitypes.lua where it pulls the info from the main AI lua files?|||Well, I actually set up the skirmish screen to be easily modable, the problem is, the mod manager doesn't support front end UI mods (for many of the same reasons it doesn't support shadow files.) So, yes, it's easy to extend the list, but you'd have to provide a hook for the list without going through the mod manager (ie shadowing the schook directory)|||So, in realty there is no way I could release an AI mod with new AIs that would be Mod Manager compatible and Vault compatible. That is kind of disappointing, but oh well.|||Well, the only limitation is the fact that it won't show up in the lobby.



There's nothing stopping us from loading the AI on the fly in the game - all you need is to whip up a little window that pops up when the game starts, and lets the user pick the AI they want to play with...|||Pawz makes a decent point. In fact, check out SimDialogue.lua... it's specifically designed to allow you to show a dialog from the sim, and create a callback to get info from the dialog back to the sim.