Galactic conquest curiosity

[darthhalv]

Just out of curiosity...I am wondering if it is possible to modify the stock galactic conquest? I have no intention of doing it (lack both the skills and knowledge) I am just a bit curious.

[Firefang]

You can modify it. But as to not replace the entire shell.lvl, it would be better to copy the era you want, change whatever, and load it as an addon custom galactic conquest. Like the kotor galactic conquest for the conversion pack.

[darthhalv]

I am well aware that you could add a custom GC. Stil curious if the stock GC could be edited, I doubt it but would be fun to know.

[THEWULFMAN]

Effectively speaking, creating a new custom GC is not any different from editing the stock GC, it's what you start with. It's way better to just do your edits to it and load it under a new name than trying to overwrite the stock ones.

[darthhalv]

Noted, but is it possible to override the stock GC?

[THEWULFMAN]

Technically yes. The very first Galactic Conquest mod made by Zerted did that.

I highly recommend that you don't though, there's no reason to do so. Not when Zerted allowed us to add new ones thanks to his patch.

[darthhalv]

Okej, no I don't have that in mind, I was just curious. Besides my knowledge of modding this game lack the qualification for doing something like that

[[RDH]Zerted]

You can modify anything included in the mod tools. The stock GC is part of the shell, which is included in the mod tools, thus you can change it. v1.3 made a few tweaks to it to allow custom GCs.

If someone wanted to override it without changing the shell.lvl, they'd need to load their scripts and inject their code before the related GC ifscreens are created. The best point to do it is after the data tables are created, but before they're loaded as an ifscreen. Basically override that add/creation function and watch for the GC screen names. When you see the one you want to change, inject your changes into the table than forward it to the original creation function. That process lets you inject code into almost every Lua section of the game. The problem is when multiple people try to inject code into the same location. They might mess with each other's changes and cause extremely difficult bugs to understand and fix, assuming both parties don't release the code to their changes.

It takes time and lots of reading to learn how to mod SWBF2 (or anything else). The shell code isn't too complex once you read through it all (may require also reading the Lua language tutorials) and play around with it by changing things and seeing what happens in game. No one has added units fighting in the GC background. You could be the first to do that. The planet selection screen is a map... I started by printing and reading all the mod tool documents on a flight home from school, before I touched any of the code. Then I made the elevator proof of concept map and moved on from there.

[darthhalv]

Interesting, thank you for the info