User:DienesToo

Before we start talking about mods here's something very important. = DON'T REPORT MODS PROBLEMS AS BUGS! = If you break something with a mod don't post a bug report about it. The devs have a ton on their plate right now and while they have been really helpful to me with figuring things out don't make their life harder. Please think of assistance with mods/understanding files as an unexpected bonus. Its possible you may discover a bug while making a mod but at this point it would be best to assume the engine is working as intended as your mod is at fault.

BEFORE YOU GET STARTED BACKUP YOUR FILES
Clockwork Empires has been updating often and Steam will happily delete your hard work. On the other hand if you break something you don't want to wait for Steam validate everything for you. I copied everything I was going to mess with into a CE backup folder in another directory.

Additionally I do all my mod work in another CE mods folder in another directory and then copy them to the main folder when I want to use them in game. If you edit the files in the \Clockwork Empires\ directory when you update any changes will be overwritten by the new files and you will lose your hard work.

The basics of Clockwork Empires modding
A tremendous amount of CE is in very accessible files. In Steam\SteamApps\common\Clockwork Empires you will find \Game \Scripts these hold the information about how stuff works in game. There are also \ui textures\ sfx\ models\ music\ and shaders\ which control how things look and sound. I don't do that kind of stuff but it should also be pretty easy to change.

In game\ everything is a .xml file. They have mostly descriptive names but not all of them are actually used. These can be modified in a text editor. Most interesting for modding right now are \game\events\events.xml and the ones in \game\jobs\ Personally I use Notepad++ since its powerful but not intrusive and will do syntax highlighting plus a lot of other useful things.

In scripts\ there are more kinds of files: .lua .edb .go and .fsm. However they are all actually plain text LUA files. Again I use Notepad++ to mess with them and associated it as the default program to open them with. If you open them in Notepad++ you can turn on syntax highlighting from the language menu > L > Lua which makes them quite a bit easier to read.

I didn't know any Lua when I started this but its a pretty easy language to use and you have lots of examples at hand. The Lua.org will tell you more than you ever wanted to know but I found the Lua-users.org tutorials very helpful. Clockwork Empires expands on Lua with a lot of specific tools to do game stuff but the basics are the same.