Angusm3's Guide to modifying Command and Conquer

Information and discussion for custom maps and mods.
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Angusm3
Posts: 33
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 2:00 am

Angusm3's Guide to modifying Command and Conquer

Post by Angusm3 »

Question 1: What can I do with modding?

You can make the game into anything you can imagine. From simply making minigunners do 5 million damage, to creating an entire new faction, the only limit is (not your imagination) your coding and scripting skills, which I hope to provide you with an ample supply of by the end of this tutorial.


Question 2: How do I/should I start?

Angusm3: First of all, you should start by getting some programs depending on what you want to do. If you just want to change some settings, you'll want Notepad ++, if you want to add custom units, you'll want OS SHP Builder, and if you want to add your own faction, you'll want Paint.Net for editing the chrome png. But that's getting ahead of myself, let's just start with Notepad ++. Navigate to your mods folder in OpenRA then to the cnc folder, then open the mod.yaml, now create a new folder in the mods folder called "mymod" or whatever you want to call your mod, something short with no spaces or capital letters. Now create, within your "mymod" folder a folder called "rules" Then save the mod.yaml to your new folder.

Now, in the mod.yaml go to the language menu, and select "YAML" then press alt + 1, now your mod.yaml is organized, expand the Rules heading and copy the line: mods/cnc/rules/infantry.yaml (for this tutorial I'm assuming you are modifying cnc) then paste it underneath the group of similar lines and change it to: mods/mymod/rules/infantry.yaml

Now you’ll probably want to edit the metadata, change the Title to something other than the mod you’ve copied from. Otherwise it is difficult to tell them apart in the mod selector ingame.
Metadata:
Title: mymod
Description: mymod description
Version: 0.01
Author: you


Next, copy the infantry.yaml from the cnc/rules folder to the mymod/rules folder, now you have a mod that does nothing. So open the infantry.yaml in your mymod/rules folder in Notepad ++, do the same thing you did to the mod.yaml file (language yaml and alt + 1) and expand the E1 Heading. Change the value Cost: 100 to Cost: 10, now your mod makes minigunners cost only 10 dollars.

Play around with the traits to see what you can do for a while, then come back for the next stage of modding.


I'll update this with more advanced stuff later on, but for now I figured I'd post the basics

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