Documentation and the extent of the API...

[cavitycreep]

Hey everyone! :laugh:

So I'm well aware of the multiple AMA threads that are going over on various communities on Reddit, but I wanted to bring my conversation over here to the Paradox forums to help in the centralization of the C:S community.

Now, with that being said, I wanted to see if we could maybe get the people who are genuinely interested in building mods, such as developers, animators, designers, etc., into one place to talk about the modding capabilities of the game, and possibly explore what our biggest desires are for the game.

Personally, I've been brainstorming over a mod that gives the player the ability to create their own corporation, drop it's "HQ" onto the map as a ploppable, and then have it randomly expand or detract throughout the city, depending on various factors (TBD).

At any rate, I thought it would also be a good idea to get out there to the CO team what we the modding community are planning, what we think we might need as far as API and modding tools go, and what features we might need to accomplish what we have in mind.

I look forward to working with all of you in the future!

 

[unmerged(364093)]

Hey cavitycreep,

I have been thinking about doing an Australian Mod Circa: 1850-2020
I already have the Satellite data for all of Australia so the mapping side of things are already in place.
First maps will be Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart.
The first set of buildings will be early Georgian and Victorian {5 sets are allowed} that will change over time.

cheers all and happy modding.

 

[nobrainer]

Now, with that being said, I wanted to see if we could maybe get the people who are genuinely interested in building mods, such as developers, animators, designers, etc., into one place to talk about the modding capabilities of the game, and possibly explore what our biggest desires are for the game.

Well, I've been looking to the C# interfaces that are explained in the wiki and there are a few things that caught my atention.

First of all, in the "IEconomy" interface there is a data type defined as an enumeration, or a set of specific values for those who aren't familiar with computer science stuff. This data type is called "EconomyResource" and I'm guessing that the current values of this enumeration are "Ore", "Oil", "Forest" and "FertileLand". Assuming this I think it should be possible to add new natural resources to the game, as long as there's also a way to "paint" them on the terrain in the Map Editor.

The second thing that came to my mind is mainly an expectation that a new interface may be exposed to modders after release. This would be the "IPolicy" interface to allow the creation of new policies for the districts.

Finally the "ILevelUp" interface caught my atention because it seems that it will allow modders to create "more levels" for RCI buildings. And also because there are a couple of data types that appear in this interface, which are the "Service" and "SubService", that give me the impression that it may be possible to define more services for buildings, for example "Hotel", "Entertainment", "Casino" ans so on.
But I still can't fully understand what is the complete functionality of this interface. It seems to be related to leveling up RCI buildings but it appears to also by related to service buildings in some way. And I guess this levels are related to the "tiers" we've seen in many videos. But I'm still not sure if the functions exposed in this interface are for modders to "force" a building to "upgrade" once some conditions are met, but that's what it seems.

Anyway, I was hoping for some information on the API that would clarify me if the 4x4 size limit on buildings was hardcoded or not, for the reasons I refered in http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...gestion-about-modding-amp-building-size-limit. , but didn't find anything. So that doubt remains in my mind.

 

[Watford]

I'd love to see a GitHub repository from CO with the interfaces up there. This repo could then become the central location for API expansion requests and examples/documentation.

Also the C# "2.5" version identifier seemed a bit odd, wondering if this is a typo (C# 2.0? C# 3.0?) or if Unity just uses a different standard.

 

[eis_os]

Unity uses a now quite old mono runtime (modified) across Windows/Linux/Mac... So yes, you miss some new Runtime Features.

 

[Watford]

Well in terms of the "runtime" that's not quite the same as the C# language version (especially if we can create mod DLL's outside of the included C:S interface).

 

[eis_os]

You need to target the same CLR Version to load a DLL into the same App Domain, mixing isn't possible. Yes you can happily compile stuff, it will throw an error when loading the dll

The base classes misses some functionality, example:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.string.isnullorwhitespace

 

[Watford]

Perhaps you're missing what exactly I'm referring to when I ask for the "version": the C# language version. Not the CLR version.

For example, C# 3.0 can target versions 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 of the .Net Framework (although not all of 2.0). You can play with these sort of settings from Visual Studio under Project Properties -> Build -> Advanced Build Settings -> Language Version. If you're in mono you can use the -langversion argument when calling mcs (or gmcs/dmcs).