OK, I tried searching the forum and wiki for answers and it's really not clear how you start making a mod.
From what I have understood so far:
A- You place your modified XML files in the various folders of your elemental user folder or create a mod sub-folder and place everything there.
B- You activate the "use mod" option on the config screen.
C- You delete the data.zip file or use a command line parameter option to force the XML compilation and it should include the XML files of your mod folder.
Now the problem is that this is only useful if you want to add a few stuff to the main game. But what if:
A- I want to completely recreate the game. I do not want any of the core rule XML files to be included in my game. I want to replace them all. How to I exclude them?
B- I want multiple independent mods on the same computer: If all XML are included, I will not be able to install multiple mods on the same machine. Else, how I do this, do I subfolder the mod folder? If yes, how does player select which mod they want to play. Is there a command line parameter that force to use the XML files in folder X? Is there a dialog screen that allow me to chose a mod.
C- I do not want game update to screw up my mod: If the XML structure of the files gets changed during an update version, does that mean that the mod will stop working and the the files will need to be modified?
D- I want to change other things, like pictures/sound/music, I know that these files will be linked from the XML but I imagine that these files must be in the corresponding sub-folder of elemental (ex: music in "layered music" folder). Updating will not harm these files since they will be unknown to elemental.
Right now the only way I see that I can create a new game with the same elemental interface is to install the game a 2nd time and edit the core files directly then never update.
Personally, I think that people will want to play different mods with the same installation. The easiest way to do this would be to copy all the mod files in a certain directory and make a launch icon that is going to pass in parameter the location of the XML files. That could be the solution that would demand the less work to implement. Else if you really want the fancy way, there should be a screen where you could actually select the mod you want to play with.
You want to make sure that the installation of mods is very easy to the user. If we could make use and installation program to place all the files at the right place and make a shortcut that will make the game start the mod, it would be very user friendly. They will have one icon for elemental and one icon for the MOD. Uninstallation will also keep track of the installed file and will only remove the added files. We could also prefix file names MODNAME_ so that the user could easily identify which file are not from the core game.
