#25
8th Jul 2009 at 5:26 PM
Last edited by shannong : 8th Jul 2009 at
6:13 PM.
Posts: 27
Thanks: 299 in 3 Posts
Answering some questions
This tool is designed to perform "XML Tuning" modifications. It is working with the Electronic Arts\The Sims 3\Game\Bin\GamePlay\GameplayData.package file, which is where all the relatively safe tuning parameters for the game live.
With that preamble:
- The mods you make with this tool are *not* core mods, so they won't conflict with core mods such as AwesomeMod
- The mods you make with this tool *might indeed* conflict with other mods that have been posted here on ModTheSims! It all depends on which specific resource you have modded.
The upside to this program (its ease of use) is also its downside. It hides the actual resource ID, showing you only the resource *name*. The resource IDs look like this: 0xdfd048952e802db0.
If you inspect various mods using a tool like S3PE, you'll see that they contain only the resource IDs. It's easy to figure out whether a given mod you just downloaded will conflict with any of the mods you already use by opening them all in
S3PE and noting the resource IDs for each resource in the mod. If any two mods you want to use have the same resource ID in them, you will have a conflict between them. In this case you either have to pick which one you prefer or figure out what each mod does in the conflicting resource, and then make your own mod that incorporates the things that both of the mods do to that resource.
Another potential downside is that this app might be displaying the various "deprecated tunings" in each resource but not highlighting them in any way. So you might think you're changing a current tuning when in fact you're changing a deprecated tuning. (Maybe the app author is just outright hiding the deprecated tuning values, but I can't tell from the supplied screenshot.) If you rely on a change to a deprecated tuning, one of two things will happen: A) nothing at all, or B) in some future patch your mod will stop working correctly because the underlying logic that uses the deprecated value was finally changed/removed. BTW "deprecated" in the programming sense means "do not use this value any more--it might work for now but we're planning on removing it eventually".
-------
A tool that would be incredibly useful to the *user* community would be one that can trawl every subdirectory in your Mods\Packages folder, open each .package file and write the resource IDs used in each package file to a text file output (or screen output/report/etc). Even better if the program can automatically highlight any conflicting resources that it finds in all the mod files that it opens and tell you exactly with .package files have the conflicting resources.
Such a tool would make it very easy for all users to tell whether that shiny new mod they'd like to download and install will bork their game or not. Right now, only the folks who are actually comfortable using
S3PE (namely, the modders) can suss out potential mod conflicts.