General/Ini of Gothic Mods

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The INI-file of a GothicMOD

Contents:

• The INFO section
• The FILES section
• The SETTINGS section
• The OPTIONS section

To the index

Each GothicMOD will be represented by an INI-file "modname.ini". This INI-file resides in system-directory of Gothic (or TNotR)! That way, it is possible to install multiple Gothic MODs over the same Gothic installation. The GothicStarter uses these INI-files to show a list of all installed GothicMODs.
The simplest way is to copy one of the INI-files provided in MDK and adapt it. But it is important that you adapt the VDF entry in new INI-file immediately, to avoid problems (see below).

The INFO section

The INFO section contains general informations about each game (MOD). Here you can enter title, description, autors, version number and maybe a website.
In G1 all entries contain small letters only, while these in G2 also contain CAPITAL letters. Except in the description, backslash should not be used!

[INFO]

GothicStarter will show the title of the Mod in the list.


Description of the modification for G1-Mods can be only one line of text. In G2 additionally here can be richtext (line begins with {\rtf1 ) or a link to an external file (format: !filename).


Author(s) of the MOD


Version of the MOD


An icon, which appears before the name of the MOD in GothicStarter. In G1 this can be a positive number (from 1 to 28) of an icon from a predetermined list. In G2 it can be an executable file (.exe), a dynamic-link library (.dll) or an icon file (.ico). The path must be relative to the system-directory of Gothic II. Optionally here can be specified the index of a symbol (Standard = 0). If the index N is positive (beginning with 0), then Gothic will use the N-th symbol from the file. If the index is negative, then Gothic will use the resource with the corresponding ID.


Web page of the MOD project.

The FILES section

The FILES section contains the most important data. Especially important is the VDF entry. The entry for "vdf" must list all MOD-files (VDF-files with the extension .MOD), that will eventually be used with VDF-files of GOTHIC.
(But we recommend using only one VDF-file, for this see also "How do I create a GothicMOD?".)

[FILES]

A list of all .mod-files, used in the MOD. When there are more than one, list them separated with spaces (FunnyMod1.mod FunnyMod2.mod ...). At the start of a mod the GothicStarter first copies all *.mod-files from .../Data/ to .../Data/modvdf/ and then it copies all given files (of the selected MOD) from .../Data/modvdf/ to .../Data. The entry "VDF" must exist (even if it is empty), so that the GothicStarter accepts the INI-file. In G2 a special value "!<invalid>" can explicitly deactivate the use of this parameter in the GothicStarter. During the development a VDF list makes most sense. With G2 it is especially important not to put GothicGame.mod in the value! This would lead to ignoring all changes in the scripts.


In G1 all parameter names are written in small letters (game, fightai etc.). Here are listed all those script-files in the directory [GOTHIC]/_work/data/scripts, which could possibly be changed. All paths are given relative to that script directory. It is important not to use the file-extensions (.DAT or .SRC) here! These will be added automatically by the program.
The first candidate for changing is the value for "game". This file contains almost all scripts from the content-directory. With it Gothic automatically recognizes whether it must use the file system/gothic.src (??? perhaps content/gothic.src ?) (and for this compile it anew), or already present (compiled) gothic.dat in the directory "_compiled".
The next candidate is the value for "outputunits". These are in our case both of the files "ou.bin" and "ou.csl".

The SETTINGS section

[SETTINGS]

The parameter "world" specifies a level to load when the "NEW GAME" starts (relative to directory _work/data/worlds/).


The variable "player" points to a NPC-instance, which will serve as the player-character (PC). In this case he is our well-known "PC_HERO". Diego for example would be PC_THIEF, the Ricelord would be BAU_900_RICELORD. This way you can also specify a player-character made by you, or maybe even Mud?! :-) In practice you should use only PC_HERO here, because otherwise the scripts do not permit the player to sleep and do (some) other things.

The OPTIONS section

The last section contains various other options:

[OPTIONS]

"force_parameters" contains command-line parameters, which will be used at start of Gothic automatically, without being explicitly specified. For example, maybe you do not want to play the music ("force_parameters=-znomusic").


"force_subtitles" should be self-explaining. When the value is set to 1, the setting in the game menu will be overwritten (ignored), so there will be subtitles in every case. Makes sense when a MOD does not contain speech voices.


"show_info" shows title (and version number in G1) in the game menu, when it is set to 1. When set to 0, this is deactivated. In G2 you can adjust the position by means of show_InfoX and show_InfoY.



Translated to English from a German text based on the G1MDK documentation (Copyright © [Piranha Bytes])
IN NO EVENT SHALL PIRANHA BYTES BE LIABLE FOR ANY FAULT IN THE TRANSLATION OF THIS DOCUMENT INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, ACCURACY AND COMPLETENESS.

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Document last modified Tue, 16 Aug 2005 21:07:55