Scars of War - On Adding Mod Support

Gareth Fouche writes about developing mod support for Scars of War - and the hassles of having put it off previously:

One of the problems with being “indie” and working in a small, informal team is that you can quite easily ignore any sort of good discipline practices. For example, say you have some boring bit of coding, and you really should do it first because it affects everything else, but there are many more interesting things to work on, like dialogue systems and AI…and so you put it off and put it off until eventually that thought niggles it’s way into your brain that you should really consider looking at it now…and you do, and you’re confronted with the obvious reality, that putting it off has made it harder to do because now you have to wedge that sucker in there.

Sigh, I really should have known better.

The code I’m talking about is some of the modder support. Specifically, “game module” management code. A “game module” is, conceptually, like a Neverwinter Nights module. The theory being that a player should be able to drop a module into their game directory and then simply be able to play it by selecting it from a menu.