Mod Categories

[Skylon]

I was cleaning up my mods and deleting things I didn't need, and I was wondering if

a) you could add 'categories' in the game data section for mods and

b) if you could change the name of a mod folder

[Gaarst]

AFAIK you could nest a mod folder inside 20 folders named "fnjkhghvinhekv" and it will still work.

KSP just browse through all folders and subfolders it finds in GameData; as long as you don't touch anything inside the mod folder itself (ie: renaming textures/models folders...) your mod should work fine as long as it doesn't have dependencies.

If it does (eg: a planet mod and Kopernicus) I guess it depends on how the mod is written. If the mod is written such as to wait until all Kopernicus stuff is loaded it should be fine, but if it has to get the Kopernicus files it needs manually, you might have problems if you move your mods around. I'm not a modder so I don't really know how dependencies are handled.

I'm an idiot again, see below for actual answers.

Edited April 24, 2017 by Gaarst

[Red Iron Crown]

Tread carefully. Some mods are dependent on things being in a particular folder. I would not mess with their folder structure at all.

[Snark]

On 4/22/2017 at 0:44 PM, Red Iron Crown said:

Tread carefully. Some mods are dependent on things being in a particular folder. I would not mess with their folder structure at all.

^ @Skylon, heed this warning.  I'd even amend "some" to "most".  Lots of things go wrong if a folder's not in the expected place, or has an unexpected name.

Among other things, it screws up cross-mod compatibility for ModuleManager patches.  It also can break part mods, which often have a model whose path is specified relative to GameData in the .cfg file.

So, basically, the answer to your question is "no."

Technically, yes, you could likely do it for at least some mods... but not for a lot of them.  And when it breaks, it may break in a bizarre, un-obvious way.  (As in, the game appears to start up just fine, but then it acts weird and you have no idea why or what's causing it.  "Hey, how come all my antennas are at one-quarter strength?", that sort of thing.)

Bottom line:  install mods where they want to be installed.  And when you uninstall them, remove them completely (i.e. delete their folder, don't even leave an empty one sitting around behind.)

On 4/22/2017 at 6:49 AM, Gaarst said:

AFAIK you could nest a mod folder inside 20 folders named "fnjkhghvinhekv" and it will still work.

KSP just browse through all folders and subfolders it finds in GameData; as long as you don't touch anything inside the mod folder itself (ie: renaming textures/models folders...) your mod should work fine as long as it doesn't have dependencies.

Per the above explanation, this is very much not true, for a lot of mods.  To take just one example, look at this config file for the JX2 antenna, from this mod.

That's a pretty basic config file, in a fairly standard format.  Notice this line:

model = JX2Antenna/jx2LargeAntenna

...the path to the model is relative to GameData.  If you installed this to any folder under GameData other than "JX2Antenna", it wouldn't work and you'd have a part with no model.

[Gaarst]

32 minutes ago, Snark said:

Per the above explanation, this is very much not true, for a lot of mods.  To take just one example, look at this config file for the JX2 antenna, from this mod.

That's a pretty basic config file, in a fairly standard format.  Notice this line:

model = JX2Antenna/jx2LargeAntenna

...the path to the model is relative to GameData.  If you installed this to any folder under GameData other than "JX2Antenna", it wouldn't work and you'd have a part with no model.

OK, I didn't know that. Though I don't see the point of using an absolute path (with GameData as root) over a relative path starting from the config (or mod folder) inside a mod. I can see why it would be needed for dependencies but not for a single folder.

[Snark]

7 hours ago, Gaarst said:

Though I don't see the point of using an absolute path (with GameData as root) over a relative path starting from the config (or mod folder) inside a mod.

Yeah, I don't see the point either, but you'll need to take it up with Squad, since they're the ones who set up the .cfg syntax.