Attentional all Cosmoteer modders!
There's good news and bad news regarding the upcoming 0.14.0 update, and I swear this is NOT an April Fools:
The good news is that there's going to be some pretty sweet new modding features for you to use in your mods, like a buff system, some new triggers, toggled component existence, and a bunch of other stuff.
The bad news is that, because of these many improvements, virtually all existing mods will be incompatible with 0.14.0. 🙁 I realize this sucks.. a lot... and there's no sugar-coating that. I personally believe this overhaul will be worth it in the long-run, and I certainly hope to never again have an update with as many breaking changes as 0.14.0 will have. Many of these changes I was actually originally planning to make in later updates as I needed them, but I decided to do as many of them in 0.14.0 as I could, because I think it's better to break things once than to break things over-and-over again, and that it's also better to break things sooner rather than later. (Of course, I can't promise to never break mods again, that's just unrealistic, but this overhaul should hopefully reduce the frequency at which that happens in the future.)
There are basically three big reasons why these changes have been made:
To make modding more powerful and flexible. This includes new features like the buff system, toggled component existence, and new triggers.
To make the vanilla game data easier to work with and maintain. The whole game data folder has been reorganized and many files/folders have been renamed. This should make it easier for new modders to learn how the game data is structured, and it will also make it easier for me to maintain the game data and to add new parts/features in the future.
To simplify the C# game code. This includes things like turning blueprint sprites into proper part components. This doesn't really make modding easier or more powerful, but it does make it easier for me to write code for Cosmoteer in the future and add new modding features.
If you want to get a head-start updating your mod for 0.14.0, you can download this 0.14.0_preview4 build, which contains all of the modding changes but none of the actual new parts that are planned for 0.14.0 (except for a half-finished Engine Room included to demonstrate the buff system).
Since I know that upgrading your mods for 0.14.0 is going to take a lot of work, I've written a rather lengthy upgrade guide detailing many of the changes and new features. Hopefully it will make the upgrade process a bit easier and also give you a head-start on using the new modding features that are being added in 0.14.0 but that won't yet be used by vanilla Cosmoteer.
NEW!!! I have also created a little "Mod Upgrader" tool that can automate much of the work of upgrading a mod to 0.14.0. Check it out!
If you have any questions/concerns/feedback about the changes, please reply to this thread. Thanks, and happy modding!