Mod manager

[JM]

The mod manager in the game is inadequate. If I have a total of 5-10 mods, it suits. When there are fifty, it's complicated. And the need to restart the game after any change is annoying.

That's why I made a little program about it. Not much, allowing you to turn modes on and off, and simply change their order with the mouse by dragging them to another position. You can also save the current mods configuration to a file and restore it later.

The program changes these values in the registry:
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Shining Rock Software LLC\Banished\ModIndex_XXX" and "ModEnabled_XXX"
and does not change anything else.

Made using Dephi-7, tested on WinXP-32bit and Win10.


When you first run it, you need to set the path to the Banished executable (usually Application-32.exe or Application-64.exe). It can be changed at any time later.

Do not use ModMan when the game is running because your changes will be lost, the game will override these values.

So, if anyone wants to try ...

// edit: latest version is here: http://worldofbanished.com/index.php?topic=2602.msg54035#msg54035

[embx61]

Nice work. 


Delphi 7.0, The RAD Developing tool 


Version 7 is an oldie and I use to do programming as hobby in Delphi some years ago.
Object Pascal is a nice language and it was not hard to roll into and I never did any programming before Delphi 1.0 came out in the nineties.

[embx61]

It seem to work all right.


It writes to the registry, read from the registry and players can even save the settings to a ini file and then load that file and save to the game.
Not tested it for a long time but it seem to do what it suppose to do


Great Job

[brads3]

is there a way to complete yuour program so that it wll allow players to control the mod order?turning them on and off may work if you only have 4 or 5. when you deal with 100+ mods at once,it does take a lot of time to redo the mod order. 

[embx61]

The program does that.

You can click and drag with the mouse any order in the interface of the program.
Then press Save to game (Game must not be running as it will rewrite as JM said) and voila.

With saving the Mod list to several ini files players can make a whole library of mod list's.

Just give those ini files some good names so you know for what kind of game you have that order.
Then when it is time, load Mod Manager, load from that file and you see the modlist as is in the file.
Write to game and that's it. Start banished and the modlist should be as in the list and interface.

I did a test and wrote my modlist to a ini file. Then I cleared my registry.
Loaded that saved ini file and pressed Save to game.

Loaded Banished and it was like the ini file

[brads3]

looks good.sign this guy up . now we need 1 so we can crack into the game deeper. 1 that will add all start lines together so mods don't override each other.if we use 2 start mods the game should add items of both to start maps.or climate from 1 mod and terrain from another. i'll keep dreaming and go sit in a corner now.

seriously thanks. this mod should save lots of time between games.

what they say is impossable just hasn't been tried by the right pople yet.

[RedKetchup]

what they say is impossable just hasn't been tried by the right pople yet.

^^ moddling and programming is totally 2 different things, Brads

[Gatherer]

This is awesome @JM !!! Thank you very much. This will greatly reduce time to arrange mod load order.


I think this should be made a sticky topic.

[RedKetchup]

I think this should be made a sticky topic.

done as you wished

[zak4862]

Greetings to you JM!
I have downloaded and tried it. It works like a charm.
So thanks to you there will be no more long hours adding all those mods to a new game start.
Extremely impressive work. Thank you very much for sharing it.
   Regards  zak4862   

[Kristahfer]

I can not thank you enough for this fantastic tool.

To add a new mod you will have to place it in the WinData folder and start the game, exit and then run ModMan. You will have to correct your saved INI files to include the new mod.
I am a Mod Hog and have 268 Mods in the WinData folder, (No I do not use all at the same time), this tool saves so much time enabling, disabling and moving it is unbelievable.

Again thanks so very much.

[embx61]

I am pleased to see this Mod gets the good remarks it deserves.
It will save the players which changing out mods many times over a lot of time.

Just leave all your mods in the windata folder (My registry had the same mods like 8 or 9 times in the registry (the registry had about 700 mod entrees) and never had any issues) and use this GEM to enable/disable and/or reorder them.
Write to a ini file for save keeping and write to game so the mods are written to the registry and that all there is to it.

Players can make complete libraries of ini files with certain load orders and which mods are enabled/disabled.

Maybe a small suggestion to JM. Maybe add a text edit box in the Interface so players can write some notes about that load order what also get stored in the ini file, but of course that part not get written to the registry unless you want to add a key to the Banished registry, so pulled up when loading the ini file? Things like "This mod order is to play with Tom Sawyer's the North - Created September 16 2018, and so fort

For players who will make libraries of ini files it will be very helpful I think.

[embx61]

what they say is impossable just hasn't been tried by the right pople yet.

^^ moddling and programming is totally 2 different things, Brads

In this game it is because there is no SDK (Software Development Kit)
Civilization had a SDK so some stuff could be programmed to change game behaviors. You have to know some C++ though and need a compiler.
Microsoft gave a away for free a stripped version of Visual Studio which is good enough (I used it many years ago when doing some modding for Civ 4) for this purpose.


But Red is right, JM cannot access the source code unless he knows, if even possible, to reverse engineer the Banished code.
All JM does is using some registry keys of Banished and his program not touch the Banished code at all.


Banished itself reads and writes from/to the registry when loading and shutting down.
This program makes the process of enabling and reordering Mods very fast and simple without the need of having Banished run to do it all.

[galensgranny]

@JM This is great!  Thank you so very much for making this!  I had been wanting a way to inactivate/activate mods and change mod order in a faster, easier way, and here it is it! 

[Tom Sawyer]

That's a nice idea and a great little tool. Especially for the people who like to play different scenarios.. CC, North and so on. I support the idea from EB about a title or description of the profiles. Or at least the profiles file name to see in the app window. Also, you can initially try to get the path from C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Banished\Application-steam-x64.exe. It will work in 90% and not everyone knows this path to set it manually.

I have some more ideas but want to test it a bit for this CC/North profile switching case. Again, nice work!