Moddability

[Xerberus]

hey, game looks interesting, one thing interesting me is how moddable is this game? for example if you wanna add new races with new ship graphics, how hard / easy would that be? are the race & ship graphics stored as graphic files?

thx in advance

[Xellzul]

Part of FAQ from Beta testing forum, not sure if you can access it:

Q: Will there be modder support?

Most of SiS is written in Lua 5.2, and it's designed to be fairly modder friendly...

The graphics is stored in .png and .table where .table looks like to contain additional information to the png (in lua?)

[sven]

The graphics is stored in .png and .table where .table looks like to contain additional information to the png (in lua?)

The .table files are also lua -- though, by convention, they just define a single table worth of data, usually data that's been generated procedurally. So, for example, when the starship assets are exported from Photoshop, information on the layering, structure, etc is stored in .table files, while the images themselves are saved a pngs. And those tables and images, plus some callback functions defined in .lua files, are what make up a starship asset. Starship definitions live in Lua State/Drawers/Ships.

When the component images are put back together to make a ship with a particular color scheme, yet more .table files are generated, these storing the settings used to render the ship. That let's the game avoid endlessly re-rending ships with the same settings. The cached ship renderings, and the associated table files, are stored in /ArtCache.