As a reminder, this requires modloader version 0.10.0 [Click for Modloader]



Hello, and welcome to my tutorial. We'll be going over some of the basics of XML and modding in this tutorial and I'll begin by saying welcome to the wonderful journey known as Space Haven modding. There's a ton that isn't moddable as of alpha 14.1 but there is quite a bit that is and we'll focus on the parts that we can change. This includes projectile based weapons. As long as we're fine with a few hardcoded features such as muzzles (more on this later) then we'll be okay.

Most of the games data is stored in XML (eXtensible Markup Language), as this makes translations easier and its a simple text based data format to make things moddable. The rest of the game is written in Java (the source code is accessible with JDGui, open the spacehaven.jar file for more info) and theres a fair bit that's 'hardcoded' which is to say that it's inaccessible for modding. But that's not the purpose of this tutorial, rather we should focus on what we can mod. Most of what we can mod involves changing XML content, and keeping the tags consistent with the games data structures. This is easy enough with stable versioning, but as a warning, tags may change between versions but this is only with major overhauls. It doesn't make sense to constantly change XML tags as this creates unneccessary work for the devs.

<data>content</data> is a set of XML tags, with content being the content enclosed (numeric values, strings, etc)

We'll be looking in part two at setting up files for your mod, as well as the mod file structure, and how to find out more about the game's XML and texture structure.



Cheers.

---

[link to Part 2 of tutorial]