Modding Battlescape

[Lomsor]

I was allowed to move this thread to the public now that the game is available to a bigger audience.
This thread contains information and past endevours of the community members about how the game is modifiable until the “real” modding support, provided by I-Novae, comes into effect. This modding support may make most of this obsolete. This is at least a year away though, according to Flavien.

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Some aspects of Infinity: Battlescape can and have been modded in the past.
There were quite a few changes since then and some of the mods you can find in here may not work anymore.

Getting Started. First off, there isn’t much special knowledge out there. Take your time and try to fiddle. You’ll soon come as far as we came over the years with just a few hours of messing about.

File locations:
There are two significant file location.
One is the the I-Novae folder under Documents:

C:\Users\<Your User>\Documents\I-Novae Studios\Infinity Battlescape\

In here are mostly “client” configuration like graphical settings and such. Most things configurable trough the game. There are still a few things though that can’t be changed ingame. Take a look.

The other significant location is the actual game directory. There are several places in here where you can try to adjust things. Especially in the “config” folder.

Keep in mind that in Infinity: Battlescape, the server is authoritative. So if you change your simulation on your side when it comes to movement and physics, you will experience how the server will error correct you constantly.

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Music and Sound

Battlescape uses FMOD and its containers. There are configuration files that point to FMOD containers. You can edit those files and / or edit the FMOD container files and swap out different sounds or music pieces.

With an update I-Novae added the option to have a FMOD update life. The exact meaning of this I have not tried yet, I guess it means that if you change the FMOD container files they will be updated on the fly, while the game is still running. See here: Patch and Updates Notes

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Try stuff and post your achievements here. If you have any questions, the people who tried it a bit may be able to share some knowledge too. Please share how you made it work.

[SentinelGundam]

Clouds are a go :).

[Pendrokar]

Monospaced Numbers Font Mod (Just for the default font for English)

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[edit] OBSOLETE! Now a core part of v0.6.5.1+

Patch and Updates Notes

HUD

• Updated font for monospaced numbers ( courtesy of Pendrokar )

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Modified the main font’s numbers to be monospaced using FontForge so that they don’t jump around as they get constantly updated ingame.

FjallaOne-Regular-MonoNum.ttf

place the file in \Dev\Client\GUI\Fonts\

The first two lines have to be changed within this file in order for the game to load the new font.

\Dev\Localization\en\Strings.csv

UI_Font_Main_Name,“Fjalla One MonoNum”
UI_Font_Main_Path,"$Dev/Client/GUI/Fonts/FjallaOne-Regular-MonoNum.ttf"

will have to be done every time a game patch modifies the file. The font file itself is unlikely to be affected.

@INovaeFlavien is free to include this in the core game if he believes the current copyright allows it. Though there is probably a GUI programming solution so that certain GUI text is simply monospaced and then this would work for any font without requiring modifications.

[Lomsor]

Awesome! I just yesterday thought about this after stumbling across another Spacegame video.

Thanks so much for doing this. Looking forward to try it myself.

[Pendrokar]

Might as well do it for the font used for Chinese as it takes less of my time than it would for @Freeman. Please see if this font broke anything as FontForge gave quite a few warnings and errors. Got the arabic numbers to be monospaced there too.

MicrosoftYaHeiLightMonoNum.ttf

“UI_Font_Main_Name”,“Microsoft YaHei Light MonoNum”
“UI_Font_Main_Path”,“MicrosoftYaHeiLightMonoNum.ttf”

[Freeman]

Working fine!

[Pendrokar]

@INovaeFlavien under "Documents\I-Novae Studios\Infinity Battlescape" there is an empty Mods folder. Does it currently work? Do XML files with the same path and names within it override the original ones?

[INovaeFlavien]

It’s currently placeholder, but you got the idea right. Once we implement modding, there’s probably going to be sub-directories for each mod, and then under it, it’ll replicate the game data file’s directory, in which you can put your modded .xml files.

[Pendrokar]

Continuing the discussion from Patch and Updates Notes:

@INovaeFlavien

Modding

We do not have any plans to support modding before our 1.0 release, however in this update we made some preparations for future modding (mostly code architecture changes). We’ve added support for a C# .NetCore plugin system as well as a C# SDK. In the future we plan on supporting config files (XML) modding, assets modding (through our engine editor/cooker) and audio modding (already partially supported with FMOD).

Both the client and the server can be modded and we’d like the mod system to automatically download missing client mods when connecting to a modded server. This is a lot of work so keep in mind that the extent of our modding support will largely depend on the success and popularity of the game after our 1.0 launch.

Scarce details on scripts. But maybe a whole game can be made with just constantly dumping entity coordinates to a file. Like @cybercritic wanted.
[edit2] It is now possible.

[edit]
Once all of that is done, we'll be moving on to the remaining features of the game (+polish), which includes the single-player sandbox mode as well as the mission editor. They're not our priority _right now_, but they will be once we enter the final phase of development, as they're required for us to implement our tutorials, which we need for 1.0 (by that I mean that we want to build our tutorials with the mission editor). - Flavien on Steam
Oh… I guess the mission editor could be just an XML editor.

[Pendrokar]

We can mod now. No external server attached.

[Edit] Just an internal server…

- YouTube

[Pendrokar]

Playable Kickstarter Low Poly Ships

• Hades
• Armormite
• Skybear

Bah can only upload RAR archives to Discourse forums, check the Discord for the mod:
https://discord.com/channels/102894093335535616/109142241418678272/1247647890600362074

@Wargrim sadly your camera positions were outdated

- YouTube

Did not show off Skybear because it had no thruster particles, it still doesn’t… but here is where I tried to make it into a hovercraft with forward thrust:

- YouTube

Megastructures

I created true to scale MegaStructures. (Physics disabled due to no optimization for the server)

Space Elevator & a Planetary Ring Station with inital segments made up of stripped-Skycrane stations. On orbit of Sarake as I figured the asteroid ring would provide the material needed for such a megastructure and magic-future tech could have tractor beams that push away asteroids. Feasible, @The_Sane ?

Elevator height minus counterweight* = 4200 km

Ring radius = 10’000 km

* Perhaps there is not point to having a counterweight if there is a ring station.

Screenshot by @Lomsor

Screenshot by @Pendrokar