Updating an old War of Magic mod for Elemental: Reforged

I do not remember ImpInc's one specifically, though a Doctor Who mod is exactly the sort of thing the War of Magic scene produced and then lost track of.

The thing worth sorting before you start is which half of that mod you are actually porting. A lot of what an old content mod holds is description: a race, its units, the names and text and numbers attached to them. Description tends to survive a move, because it is telling the game what a thing is. The parts that reach into how the old game did something are where you will lose your evenings, and you will not know which is which until you open it.

My honest advice, and I am not a modder, is to not start with the mod you care about. You are proposing to learn an unfamiliar format and debug somebody else's undocumented work from back then at the same time, and when it breaks you will not know which of the two broke it. Get one trivial thing of your own loading first, something you would not mind throwing away. Then bring ImpInc's work in, and every failure after that has one likely cause instead of two.

If you do get it running, say so somewhere public. A fair amount of what that scene made is only still around because somebody mentioned they still had a copy.

I would not send him off to build a throwaway first. On a port nobody else is waiting for, the thing in shortest supply is the wish to do it at all, and a fortnight spent proving you can load something you do not care about is how that runs out. Open the one you came for, look at what is actually inside it, and if it turns out to be beyond you then you have lost an evening rather than a month.

What I would think about before starting is not technical at all. That mod was written to sit against War of Magic, and a good deal of what made those conversions work was how they read next to the game around them. Reforged does not present its world the way War of Magic did. Names and lines that landed as a joke in one can sit strangely in the other, and you will not know which until it is in front of you and running.

Which is an argument for a small version of it first, though not the one Freia made. Not a throwaway. A slice of the real thing, one or two units out of it, in a game you are actually playing, and then decide whether you still want the rest of it.