Minimal amount of files for an Era

[Sandermatt]

Hi,

I have had an idea for an era for a long time and wanted to start working on it. As far as I know the main challange is the artwork, and as my brother is eager to work with me and he is a propfessional graphic designer I think it might work.

Now to my question. I looked at different factions to try to figure out, what the minimal files are that are needed to have an Era with 1 Faction and 1 unit in this faction. (as well as all folders to add new things later on).

Now what I more or less figured out as structure would be:

dist

BASEDIRS
VERSION
WMLDIRS

Factions

TestFaction.cfg

Images

attacks
Projectiles
Testfaction

Testunit.png

Macros

Sounds

Units

TestFaction
TestUnit.cfg
races.cfg

_info.cfg
_main.cfg
changelog.txt
copying.txt
detect.cfg
mainline-strings.cfg

Which of this files are not needed, and which needed files are missing? I think it would be much easier to start for me if I knew exactly what I minimaly needed to start a faction and could add on new things from there on.

Edit: Sorry, somehow the format got messed up, I will try to differentiate folders from files.

[zookeeper]

Excluding _server.pbl (for uploading to the add-on server) and assuming no binary files (images, sounds, music) are needed, _main.cfg is the only file any add-on needs. If you wanted to, you could always put all the WML code of your add-on into _main.cfg.

[Atz]

Excluding _server.pbl (for uploading to the add-on server) and assuming no binary files (images, sounds, music) are needed, _main.cfg is the only file any add-on needs. If you wanted to, you could always put all the WML code of your add-on into _main.cfg.

That's not generally a good idea, however, because it can make things difficult later on unless your era is going to be super-tiny. Not only is it harder to find things quickly if they're all in one big file, it can make tracking down bugs more difficult. You could probably do it for a single-unit test era, but if you ever plan to expand beyond that I'd get used to using multiple files.

[zookeeper]

Excluding _server.pbl (for uploading to the add-on server) and assuming no binary files (images, sounds, music) are needed, _main.cfg is the only file any add-on needs. If you wanted to, you could always put all the WML code of your add-on into _main.cfg.

That's not generally a good idea, however, because it can make things difficult later on unless your era is going to be super-tiny. Not only is it harder to find things quickly if they're all in one big file, it can make tracking down bugs more difficult. You could probably do it for a single-unit test era, but if you ever plan to expand beyond that I'd get used to using multiple files.

Yes, absolutely. It's good to be aware of it and not think that the game requires any specific layout of .cfg files, but it's something you very rarely want to do.

You should think in terms of what top-level tags a particular kind of add-on needs:

• If you have custom images or sounds, you need a [binary_path].
• If you have MP scenarios you need [multiplayer_scenario]s. EDIT: I mean [multiplayer].
• If you have a SP campaign you need [campaign] and [scenario]s.
• If you have an era you need [era].
• If you have custom terrains you need [terrain]s and [terrain_graphics].
• If you have custom units, movetypes or races, you need to add them to the existing [units] tag by using [+units].

...and that's probably pretty much it. There might be a few more for special purposes, but those are all that add-ons typically require.