Making my own Full Conversion

[Rikki Tikki Tavi 0]

I remember a post by Sanctuary on making your own full conversion mod and I was wondering if anybody could link that, or tell me how to do that myself.

[gandalf the white 0]

The easiest way would be to print out a Ffur / Y2K3 config and read it again, and again, untill you understand what mr. pappy / thunderbird has done.

[-)rStrangelove 0]

Hey Rikki, read thru this thread 'ere: <this thead here>

Should help a bit, but be advised that rewriting a config takes more than a weekend.

[Rikki Tikki Tavi 0]

Hehe, yeah I figured I might be on it for a while. Mainly I was thinking of just going through the Ecp config and replacing units. I appreciate the help guys, I'm on it now.

[echo1 0]

Theres a very easy way to do it - just pick your favourite mod and then go through the config and edit what you want. The other way involves a shitload of work, as Im sure any of the modmakers can tell you.

[Rikki Tikki Tavi 0]

I've tried it a bit now and found it's pretty time consuming - Ill go ch_123's way, thanks for all the help guys.  

[DBR_ONIX 0]

Basicly you just change the config.bin to config.cpp to new model paths, and change the values to the same as the original config... Then do that several hundered times..

Fun.. Theres better guides, both mods have info on changing their own configs, basicly just do that, but with an original config

- Ben

[shinRaiden 0]

It's actually fairly easy to do.

[sarcasm]

1) Don't use BIS's commented configs. They're much too basic. Make sure you go and grab one already reworked. They're rather odd though so don't worry about ripping all the changes out to fit your vision. ECP's dev versions aren't out, and WGL's are tricky, but neither should be much trouble for you to rip if you don't have any concerns about other people's personal content and IP. This is 'your' project after all...

2) CAVS and JAM and BIS configs are for people that like to dumb down their configs, you the TC developer knows exactly how they're all screwed up so you can completely redo all the armor and ammo values to what you know to be appropiate. While you're at it, you better lock things up to prevent sabatoging of your work. The best way is to leave the class names as is so when the poor users try to drop in their own addons it will crap all up.

3) Some annoying mod makers used creative means to 'lock' their pbo's. You can find lots of info about how to get around that at places not linkable on these forums. You of course aren't 'exploiting' their work, you're only fixing all the stuff they screwed up and enhancing the rest. But make sure you lock it up yourself. You wouldn't want someone lifting your hard work for their project.

4) Unit replacements are not enough pimpage to pwn the other TC's and become the king mod. You're going to have to get some scripts and snazzy effects in there too. The key thing is to throw as much into it as possible. If the system starts lagging, then it's the end user's poor fault for not having an AMD FX-57 and 4GB of DDR-3500 overclocked with a 1TB UW2SCSI-320 RAID and SLI'd Quadro 4400's. Blame the end user and insist they 'get with the times' since otherwise they can't compete on BF2, Doom3, or Zoldner on max quality settings. Boom, headshot.

Scripting can be rather complicated, so it's best to stick to sqs's and avoid the more complicated sqf functions. The easist way is to make each function, like damage handlers, environmental effects, dust, controls, etc all looping scripts that exec on init for each vehicle and refresh every ~.01 to get as quick and accurate response as possible.

5) The easiest way to put the whole thing together is just dump it all into one big massive archive. The boss doesn't care if you spend all day downloading files that won't fit on a CD at work, he's probably downloading tons of dirty movies. If you're on the school network, even better. You're helping to do research on internet stability. Everyone else is downloading at work or at school too, so you don't need to worry about sorting things out for differential patching. Actually don't worry about patching at all, since you're going to get it right the first time. Also, there's lots of people with huge servers and tons of bandwidth sitting idle waiting to host your content for free. Just pack up your 800mb file and email it off to them to put on their server.

6) Sit back and relax in the glow of community applause as the new Mod God. Enjoy.

[/sarcasm]

Now what's really needed in terms of solutions is several items :

[practical]

1) Community Torrent tracker

This needs to be administered by lead site admins to avoid any inappropiate content going up on the tracker. But in light of the historical problems with content distribution, and the asynchronous nature of ADSL, it makes more sense to use bittorrent. You can get better aggregate bandwidth, significantly reduced server load, then after ~two weeks or so the torrents can be purged and future downloads directed to direct server downloads.

2) Addon patchability design

Case in point is the recent OWP MI-8. An excellent addon, but distributed as a single pbo. If the pbo were instead distributed as seperate pbo's for configs and data, the configs pbo could easily be exchanged in TC projects without significant problems of IP control for the mod makers. In fact, tools could be created to automaticly merge addons into dynamic mods, which would be 6mb instead of 600mb.

[/practical]

[-)rStrangelove 0]

Just replacing model paths doesn't always work. I had great problems getting the sebnamII M3A1 submg to run - the shots simply didn't go where the crosshair appeared on screen.

Other problems are replacing vehicle models. I'm not an cpp expert but it seems if the animations & crew positions are different it's not enough to replace the model.

So - yeah, cpp editing is the sparetime destroyer #1.  

[eestikas88 0]

say goodbye to social life

[BraTTy 0]

lol too funny shinRaiden

don't forget that also by changing config,mp games get modified config message

So it has to be a job well done,that for everyone to use and servers to host to give the message also

Something innovative

full conversion to me is ... new config,models,islands,sounds etc...

ex: inv44

[Thunderbird 0]

Quote[/b] ]full conversion

There are several sorts of 'Total conversion packs', there are conversion mods that are only and mainly focused on converting the whole game (Gameplay, realism, models, sounds, islands...etc) without too much of extra additions (FFUR, Y2K3 & EECP).

There are conversion mods that only replace models and sounds and which are especially intended to people with low computers (DMA/ AKD enhanced DMA).

There are conversion packs that only replace effects and change gameplay elements (ECP & Flashfx).

There are mods that convert a part (25% - 75%) of the game by adding a lot of units and vehicles (WGL, FDF, Liberation 1944, CSLA, ROCMod, SwissMod...).

But all of them are somehow interesting and quite useful, it depends on what people would like to do with'em.

Quote[/b] ]In fact, tools could be created to automaticly merge addons into dynamic mods

What a dream.

Best Regards

Thunderbird84