Modding has NEVER BEEN EASIER
NickC Please Sticky this PLEASE!
If you haven't seen my other posts, F:UR has an amazing new feature that makes modding easier than ever before and almost completely eliminates the need for modmanager unless doing sound/gui mods. Droping anything into the FUR/REALMS/ folder makes it recognizable to the game; nothing needs to be changed, nothing overwriten, nothing modded, PERIOD!

#1
Item Mod: Modname/ITEMS/en-US/items.dat
Moster Mod: Modname/MONSTERS/en-US/monsters.dat
Spell Mod: Modname/SPELLS/en-US/spells.dat
Particle Mod: Modname/PARTICLES/particles.dat
Realm Mod: Realmname/REALM/en-US/realms.dat

#2 Drop the folder "modname" into the FUR/REALMS/ folder and THAT IS IT! the game will recognize it and your items will appear in the game JUST LIKE THAT.

#3 Monsters can be added only to a specific realm using :# tag; if modding an actual Realm you can add a custom town as well as all of the above in your realm using :# tag and the # you asigned to your Realm in the REALM/realms.dat

Example I want to add my SwordPack:

1) Make folder "SwordPack" in FUR/REALMS/ (or take my current mod and drop it in there)

2) Make an "ITEMS" folder

3) Inside SwordPack/ITEMS make "en-US" folder

4) Inside SwordPack/ITEMS/en-US make items.dat (or if using a mod from Fate, make en-US folder and move the items.dat into it)

5) In SwordPack make "ICONS" folder

6) Associate all icons with REALMS/SWORDPACK/ICONS in items.dat (or reassociate the current mod in seconds by doing find and replace. Find: MODS/SwordPack/ Replace: REALMS/SWORDPACK/ )

7) In SwordPack make "PARTICLES" folder

8) In SwordPack/PARTICLES/ make particles.dat (not en-US/particles.dat - guess they forgot that one but it works)

This process takes a few minutes and is perfect. The swords will appear in every shop just like that.

Note that it should be possible to put :# in the items.dat (you'll notice it in REALMS/Goldshare/ITEMS/en-US/items.dat but it has no effect, I imagine this is a bug that will be fixed in the first patch) to make items realm specific but it works with monsters anyway for now

Note Realm Mods if you don't already know are accessed using the cheat console, type: "realm #"

If we adopt this new way of modding, we only need to include the following instructions:

1) Unzip mod contents to Fate Undiscovered Realms\REALMS\

2) PLAY! ENJOY :wink:

Great find, Maestro! I'd like to talk this over with F:UR's lead developer, and see if we want to switch to doing mods this way. If so, my work on ModMan 2.0 just got a bit easier :wink:

Hardcore issue - if you do this, you can't play in Hardcore mode.

Since this method spawns the new items in any realm, the CRC values change.

... and... because these files are processed when the game loads, the ModMan 2.0 fix that restored the game back to being able to play in Hardcore is unable to restore you back.

lol, I know after the pm Nick just sent me I realized I want to redesign several things and see if we can get the dummy point name and properties that makes a realm portal to the temple. It just keeps changing.

The only issue I'm wondering about is, it seems fine now that I added 3 realms but what if you add 60 mods like I usually do. Will the game totally lag when finding all those dats? That is the only issue I didn't really think about till now. In that case modman may be a better solution

If you intend to find the dat files, it means you intend to mod... if you intend to mod, you had better start learning to do simple things for yourself. For example - do you know how to use your operating system to do a search for files of a particular type, or with a particular file extension? If not, then you had better learn... you'll be needing that.

Do you have your operating system set so that you can see file extensions? set so that you can see hidden files and folders? If not, use the search function of these forums, and find that information.

I'm not at my own computer, but a question popped into my mind: Do the same rules apply for the PLAYER folder? For mods like Surdin's Elven Armor or 'Choice' attire?

I'm just curious if it would read the Mod's animations or use the standard ones (or instantly incinerate the user's computer)?

the player folder doesn't have a crc folder. but putting things in the player folder is useless if you don't have changes in the items.dat that point to it. and if you change things there it will only change the look not the content so it doesn't matter.

Elven armor doesn't just have things in the player folder it changes the items.dat to make new armor. So changing the player folder content doesn't matter but that content will not even show up if the items.dat is not changed.

Oops, meant to sticky this earlier! I've currently put ModMan 2.0 partially on hold until I've got some more information about how this works, or if we can do something similar, but in a dedicated "MODS" folder. Stay tuned!

I'm sorry, I'm a bit confused...
Just so I'm clear: If I throw the Elven Armor into the REALMS folder, change all the references inside the items.dat to REALMS/Elven Armor/ICONS and REALMS/Elven Armor/PLAYER, and put the items.dat into a REALMS/Elven Armor/ITEMS/en-US... it ought to use the Elven Armor's PLAYER folder?

I just want to make sure that the PLAYER folder is used like the rest, as in maestro's original post.

Thanks again for your time!

oh yes you are correct. any folder is used just like it is in the fate root. just so long as you point your references to it, you treat your REALMS/modname/ folder as if it were the root directory into which you can put any folder that is in the fate root or any custom folder as long as your file paths point to it. and anything with a dat in the folder/en-US/ format will show in game.

So correct to use any current mod that isn't a gui sound transformation, you drop it into the realms folder and then in every folder with a dat you move the dat into an en-US/ folder except for particles.dat which is in the particles/ folder. then you just do a search for mods/modname/ and replace with realms/modname/ and it will work regardless of what folders are there. as long as something points to them the game doesn't care what they are named.

Hey tinkerers have any of you tried this method for dungeons. If you have say an old mod like Maguro woods by apricot and dropped it in a folder without giving the manifest.dat a realm id, would the dungeon show up anywhere? I haven't felt like testing, but I wonder if this might be a huge hole.

In fact I can't see any way that you COULD add dungeons without manual modding. The dungeons are all realm specific as far as I can tell and the dungeons from the main TEMPLATES/ folder don't even get used in the vanilla FUR game. So even modman couldn't add new dungeons unless you specify what realm to add them to or packaged them as two separate mods one to add to druantia and one to typhon. That is unless :ALL is valid or multiple realm id's can be used ie:
:1
:2

Or what is up with the :-1 id for Kaos? So many many questions, but basically I'm wondering what will be the easiest way to add new dungeons or are they going to have to be manual?

well i managed to do custom dungeon by adding a tilesets/templates/TILETEXTURES into my realm folder. then edit the manifest.dat and add whatever templates inside it. seems to work so far. we might not even need mod man for fur. if you want to play HARDCORE, remove all the folders manually..ouch

ex:

But then you have to go to that realm correct? I'm talking about adding people's dungeon mods and getting them to show up in the game. I don't think they will since everything uses realm id's right?
I mean you can get it to show up if you give it a specific realm id but then you limit it to only one realm's dungeons.

ok i see what you mean. have you try the GOLDSHARE dir? perhaps adding these folders;

tilesets
templates
tiletextures

could work ..

Yeah, it's worth a shot...I was just being lazy and didn't want to test it myself! :blush:

However, I every so happy to report that I have 42 mods in the REALMS folder and they all work perfectly and there is NO INCREASE IN LOAD TIME!! How the heck does it do that???!!! This new engine is way better than the old one, whatever the bugs may be! I agree with you I can see no need for the modman at this point.

I also found an interesting thing about using the : tag in the items.dat. While the merchants all carry the stuff from any realm, using the : tag in the items.dat makes those items only appear in that realms dungeon. I guess that is kinda cool.

yes, if you omit that realm tag then its for all realms. im trying to play aorund with that feature so a unique creature can drop a special item. this engine is way better than the previous since the randomness has reduced.

I'm loving this new system. It makes things so much easier. The only problem I'm having is that the Faberge Eggs from the Deep Delver mod don't seem to work. They appear in the game, but they won't go into the spellbook. Anyone got any ideas?

Yes, I have an idea... the modder who converted deepdelver to FUR is a totally careless, fool... oh wait that would be me... I didn't put the spells.dat in the en-US folder so all the spells for deepdelver were not there. Download the latest update of Deep Delver from the conversion thread or just go into REALMS/DeepDelver V0.91/SPELLS/ and create a folder "en-US" and move the spells.dat into there.

When you load your character next time, the faberge eggs will have spell descriptions and will write to your spell book. I'm sorry if you saved and lost eggs because of this, I know how hard it is to find those little buggers.