I saw IdolNinja mention not too long ago that he heard in a Volition dev chat room that you managed to get mods to load from external packfiles in SRTT. I assume that's the plan for Saints Row IV as well. (Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.) What I'm wondering is how exactly it will work. For instance, will xtbl entry limits no longer be an issue?
How exactly will separate mod packfiles work?
- Thread starter JokeJujitsu
- Start date
![[V] Knobby](/forum/data/avatars/m/44/44150.jpg?1371153262){kind=avatar}
[V] Knobby
Volition Staff
The idea is that it will remove the limits, but only for mod stuff. I don't want to actually change everything to be unlimited all the time because of the amount of work involved, but doing it just for mods is what I'm aiming for now. I have items working and I'm working on weapons. Currently, you make an items3d.xtbl file with just your items and include the asm/str2 files for your items and pack it up into a packfile and drop it in the mods folder and the game loads those items in addition to the game's items. Mod items will be limited by memory available on the machine more than anything else. I also have support for loading a peg named always_loaded when the mod loads as well(main menu).
Lots of questions with this like coop and how to handle different mods between users. I'm thinking initially it will be like DLC where it will only enable what you both share, but I'd like it to be "better". First step is getting coop to actually work though.
When working with weapons we use an 8-bit number to reference the weapon for game saves, internally and to tell the coop player what weapon you have. This works well for us since we know what weapon 17 is, but doesn't work so well for arbitrarily large numbers of weapons. The current system will only support 255 weapons and that has to change. I then have to worry about the complexity of having two ways to identify weapons or combine them into a larger one and write code to read the old save game format and adjust it to the new format along with an increase in network bandwidth required for coop. I'm not sure I can really mess with the bandwidth requirements for the game if you aren't playing with mods.
So, it is quite the rabbit hole I'm traversing, but initially things are looking pretty good.
Lots of questions with this like coop and how to handle different mods between users. I'm thinking initially it will be like DLC where it will only enable what you both share, but I'd like it to be "better". First step is getting coop to actually work though.
When working with weapons we use an 8-bit number to reference the weapon for game saves, internally and to tell the coop player what weapon you have. This works well for us since we know what weapon 17 is, but doesn't work so well for arbitrarily large numbers of weapons. The current system will only support 255 weapons and that has to change. I then have to worry about the complexity of having two ways to identify weapons or combine them into a larger one and write code to read the old save game format and adjust it to the new format along with an increase in network bandwidth required for coop. I'm not sure I can really mess with the bandwidth requirements for the game if you aren't playing with mods.So, it is quite the rabbit hole I'm traversing, but initially things are looking pretty good.
[V] Knobby
Volition Staff
Currently the plan is that this is only for additions, not for changing existing things. A later change would be to add changing existing items and then we would need some sort of load order like Skyrim. I really, really hope we don't end up with as tedious of a process for installing mods as Skyrim. I tried to get SkyrimHD going the other day and spent all of my gaming time trying to get all the mods and patches because of other mods I had. I know why it works like that, but I still hope that somehow we can figure out a clever way to make it better.