How do I get a local mod to work

from Sins2 Forums

I tried to make a little, purely cosmetic mod, that was supposed to switch a weapon effect for another, but that didn't work. So I thought I'll build from the ground up and solely tried to change the colour and width of the advent capitalship beam.... but no matter what I try, it doesn't show up.

Here's what I did.

  • I edited the settings.json and set allow_not_compatible_mods to true
  • In appdata\local\sins2\mods  I created a folder with the modname.
  • In that mod folder, I created the effects folder
  • I copied advent_battle_capital_ship_beam_weapon_beam.beam_effect from the game's effects directory, into my mod's effects folder.
  • I edited said file to change the width from 30 to 60 and the colour "ffffe1cc" to "ffffffff"
  • Ingame, I activated my mod under local mods and then hit apply under manage
  • for good measure I tried this with and without hitting the "only compatible mods" under the mod.io tab

And lo and behold... nothing changes about the beams ingame. What am I missing?

sins ii modding
14,005 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Sins2 Forums Top

Seeing something similar with the colors. I've been successful in adding a ship with some altered weapons and abilities. Also successfully modified some existing items, but the colors don't seem to be picked up, though I'm not getting an error during game launch.

Looking at the textures however suggests that the texture is the source of color for a beam and the colors in the effects may only be for particle/lighting effects and not the color of the beam itself.

 

Edit: Color shifted some of the textures in GIMP and indeed the texture controls the color.

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Reply #2 from Sins2 Forums Top

Fiddling with the damage or penetration definitely shows up ingame, so at least I now know that my changes are read by the game.

Too bad that beam-width doesn't seem to do anything at all either, like the three colour lines.

And I finally had a breakthrough for my original attempt. Since this had be stumped for near enough an hour, I might as well share to safe other people the headache: If you want to use any effect on a unit, that wasn't made for that unit specifically (like for exmaple using the psi_carrier's beams on the psi_battleship) you have to add this effect to the .unit_skin file of the unit, or you'll get a missing definition error.

Thanks for the help.

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