Adding, removing and reordering countries

[Blade]

My thoughts would be that since a new rulesmd.ini is going to be provided, it should be based on the UMP .ini rather than standard YR since it fixes many bugs.

[pd]

The UMP features that don't alter gameplay and as long as it doesn't make the patch lots of MBs big (there were some fixed SHPs in it, the weather storm for instance, which I think should be included), I'm generally with this.

The problem is that is would drastically increase the amount of required changes if a non-UMP user changes to RP2 with an existing mod.
A possible solution for that is some kind of a "RP2 Setup" program, which allows installtion of single RP2 INI changes...
That would be several UMP options for one, but it would also allow for an automatic installation of the new countries system, which would go through the [Countries] section, find the countries' data and add tags with default values to it.

There are quite some possibilities.

But we should consider Bobing's concerns, it would really suck ass if one would have to update a mod everytime a new RP2 version gets released.
This makes me consider having default values... will be a damn pain to implement though... >.<

[Marshall]

I'm actually in the process of writing a small tool to automatically add the UMP changes to a mod's existing rules and art.

Given that RP2 isn't going to be a mod in itself, there shouldn't be a requirement for mod's built on RP2 to include the UMP - but they can if they want to using my new tool.

I plan to release the UMP DevPack on Launch Base soon. This will include the new tool as well as a new bug fix.

For simplicity, the UMP and RP2 should be separate and a UMP mod for RP2 should be released.


I don't think default values for the new countries system are neccessary - as long as RP2 doesn't make a habit of changing things that require mod rewrites then I think we can live with it!

[pd]

The thing is that I don't know how many of these major changes will be made.
For now it's clear: countries and sides, maybe some mouse cursors (more info later in another thread).
Right now I cannot think of any logics being revamped totally, but that might change over the time.

Well, RP2 mods could/should contain the specific RP2 version they need, but that would be a lot of installing/uninstalling which would be very annoying.

[gordon-creAtive]

No it won't. LaunchBase is a really fine thing - It install automatically the necessary version!

[Marshall]

Indeed, a facility that gordon-creAtive requested was an option for Launch Base to detect and install/uninstall the required version of the RockPatch when a user launches a mod.

Launch Base and the latest version of RP-Gen (which I sent pd recently) will also allow the RP to specify how far backwards-compatible a version of RP2 is to previous versions, in case a version of RP2 does break compatibility.

I think the easiest thing would be for pd not to worry about breaking compatibility - any mod author releasing an RP2 mod should be keeping an eye on developments and updating as neccessary, something which Launch Base can help with.
And if a mod author releases an RP2 mod and then stops updating, the users will be expected to use an earlier version of RP2. As long as there are enough legacy versions of RP2 kept available to cover backwards-compatibility then there's no problem.