Modding WW for iOS

[clomaka]

It CAN be done! That said, it was a super pain in the arse. I'm going to post all that needs to be done here a) for myself should I decide to do more to my mod, and b) for anyone else out there wanting to give it a try for themselves.

To start, you need to have jailbroken your iPad. Don't ask about that here, I won't reply. Understand what you're getting into, and Google is a good friend.

Next, buy WW (duh). Plain vanilla is fun enough. Then use something like iExplorer to BACK UP THE DEFAULT DIRECTORY onto your hard drive. I also made sequential backups of my mod as I got more and more working. Just like modding the PC version, if you go and add everything in at once and it crashes, you'll never be able to figure out what thing(s) did it.

OK, before we get into the nitty gritty, I found one particular item I could NOT mod. All the background images are converted to .pvr and the only program that will save pvr in a format that WW will like is TexturePacker. I can't justify $20 for a license for just doing this. If you do have a license, I would like to talk to you...

GENERIC NOTES

• spaces in file names will cause crashes
• upper-case letters in filenames are different than lower-case letters. The PC might not care about cases, but iOS does.

AUDIO

• Nothing to worry about here. OGGs and WAVs, just like the PC.

QUESTS, ITEMS, HULLS, and everything else in the 'gamedata' folder

• everything's formatted the same here, so that's good news. HOWEVER, most things in here reference graphics, and that IS where things get tricky.

GRAPHICS

• the BIG note here is that TGAs are not allowed. Every TGA is converted into a PNG. Except for the couple that were made into JPGs. This hurts because it means that every item, quest, hull, race, planet you made in your mod needs to be combed over for graphic references. Does it point to a default graphic? gotta hunt it down and make sure it exists in the right format. Something new? hunt it down... And don't forget all those .INI files in there too that point to masking images; most of mine pointed to a TGA that had a space in the filename.
• Did you notice that none of the ships have their glowy lights anymore? That's because they did a quick job converting the TGAs to PNGs. There's no alpha info for the glow, so it got wiped. I did a quick photoshop action that helped me extract it out of the default images so I could add them back in. I'll probably post a pack of those images bundled up so one can 'upgrade' all the default ships to have glows again. Anyone who's tried boarding a live hulk know just how important those lights can be. I'm also tempted to send it to Astraware and ask them to patch it up.
• Double-check that all your images are a power of 2 in size (64, 128, 256, etc). Most everything should be fine on this, I just ran into one ship that I got sloppy on.

GENERIC MODDING ADVICE

• With the exception of filename spaces and invalid image formats, the game doesn't much care what all you chuck into the directories UNTIL it gets added into the GAME.INI.
• Start with the items/lifeforms. Get your feet wet with 1-5 additions to get into the groove of remembering to copy over everything you need.
• avoid adding any new fighterbays until you add the ships. Too many dependencies (the ship it puts out has graphics, a hull file, gets defined in the race file, and might have new weapons)
• Once you're into it, then add the systems/weapons, etc. You'll be use to tracking everything down, like particle files...
• Ships get tricky. Start with an add-on ship for an existing race. Add ONE ship at a time in the race file until you get use to it. LEAVE all the fleet info at the bottom alone until you're done.
• TIP: when adding ships, you can check them out quickly in the simulator
• When closing WW after checking your work, be sure it's not lurking as a background task (double press the main button to get the list of currently running apps)

It's a pain, but I've done it. Too much work for me to do any mod other than my own, but I hope this helps you fellow modders out in getting your mods running on iOS.