If you hadn't already heard, the 0.14.0 update for Cosmoteer has a ton of new modding improvements that, unfortunately, will also break almost all existing mods. For the larger mods, updating them by hand to work with 0.14.0 will be a lot of work, a problem to which I am very sympathetic and which could potentially even cause some popular mods to never be updated -- not good!
All these awesome mods, and the Cosmoteer modding community itself, are very important to me. And so I've come up with a solution that I hope will make upgrading mods for 0.14.0 much easier: The Cosmoteer Mod Upgrader. This is a little program that you can download and run and it will try its best to upgrade a mod from 0.13.9 to 0.14.0. It's not perfect -- there are some situations in which it won't be able to upgrade something, will produce the wrong result, or perhaps even crash -- but for most mods I think it should do about 95% of the work required to upgrade a mod for 0.14.0.
I haven't been able to test the program on nearly every single mod, but I did test it on SW:ACW, Abh, Bloodcult, Bubbet's Placeholder, and Drones++. With the exception of a conflicting part ID in Bubbet's, I didn't see any obvious issues, though I did not exhaustively test every feature of every mod, so it's likely there are still some issues. (Note: Although I did test these mods, I will not be distributing the actual upgraded mod files -- I will leave that to the mod authors.)
If you would like to use the Mod Upgrader on your mod, follow these steps:
Backup your mod! The Mod Upgrader makes its own copy of a mod when upgrading it in case something goes wrong, but you can never be too safe, so I highly advise you backup your mod before using the upgrader.
Download and install the 0.14.0 version of Cosmoteer.
Download CosmoteerModUpgrader_0.14.0_v7.zip and extract it to somewhere on your computer. (It is no longer necessary to extract to your Cosmoteer install folder.)
Run the CosmoteerModUpgrader.exe
program! You will first be asked to enter the path of Cosmoteer's installation folder. (That's usually C:\Program Files\Cosmoteer
.) You can either type in the path manually, or (tip!) you can simply click-and-drag the folder straight into the command window to copy the folder path to it. Press enter to confirm the path.
You will next be asked to enter the path of the mod you want to upgrade. (Again, you can simply click-and-drag the folder into the command window.)
The upgrader will then make a copy of your mod by adding a _upgraded
after its folder name. (So if your mod's folder is MyAwesomeMod
, the upgrader will make a copy of it in a folder right next to it called MyAwesomeMod_upgraded
) WARNING: If there is already a folder of that name, it will be deleted and replaced with a new copy!
You will then be asked to enter an "author ID". This should be something that uniquely identifies you as the author of the mod, so that if anyone else creates a mod with the same ID as your mod, or (more likely) a part with the same ID as one of your parts, it won't cause a conflict. You should pick something that no one else is likely to accidentally pick. For example, if i were creating a mod, I would probably pick waltdestler
as my author ID.
You will then be asked to enter an ID for your mod itself. You should pick a different ID for each of your mods, but otherwise it doesn't matter much. (Assuming you chose a unique author ID above, someone else choosing the same mod ID as your mod won't cause any conflicts.)
The mod upgrader will now attempt to upgrade the mod! Depending on the size of your mod, this will take between a few seconds to a few minutes, and you should see a bunch of text whizzing by as it upgrades. With any luck, it will finish without crashing.
If the upgrade completes successfully, you should now test your mod to make sure it loads and works properly in 0.14.0. Move it into your Mods
folder (if it's not already there), turn it on, and restart the game. (You may want to also temporarily remove the old version of the mod, just to be 100% sure that you're testing the upgraded version.) Test your mod for any crashes during loading or gameplay or other issues. If something isn't working, please post here describing the problem and providing a link to download your mod so that I can look into fixing the upgrader.
You may have some additional things you need to fix by hand, but hopefully not too many if the upgrader has done its job. Note that the upgrader sometimes produces code that, while it might work just fine, can be pretty ugly and non-ideal, which you may want to clean up. (You may want to use a tool like WinMerge to see what was changed.)
Hopefully this tool will make upgrading existing mods for 0.14.0 much easier. Again, if something's not working right or it screws up an upgrade, please let me know! (And post a link to your mod.)