Pathing of assets

[yawanats]

I've run into a few threads on various forums that talk about a need to use the vanilla file paths, and associate assets into appropriate areas.

While I can totally see the merit in using the initial directory (Buildings, Particles, Items) I'm curious what the rationale is in continuing to use other vanilla directories such as StormBuildings, Newlands, etc instead of creating your own.

My thought here is that as long as the computer knows the path, it shouldn't matter. However if there's some sort of weighting system I'm not aware of that helps the engine prioritize based off of directory names used.

I've also run into some threads that suggest an "optimized" way of doing this is to reference each file as if it were included in the base game directories, instead of in the mods directory.

What's the rationale there? Is this really necessary, or is it one of those things that is a matter of elegance?

I like to keep all of my assets in one place - things you construct go into buildings. Things you use go into equipment. Things that are present in the world go into items.

In a nutshell, what I'm noticing is that my assets are being loaded into 3 main categories: Characters, GUI, and General. This suggests a category based system is creating some sort of index in the background based off of directory names. If that's the case, what are the index items, and how do I assign them? At first glance the way the files are organized in vanilla is pretty haphazard, but it may simply look that way to a layperson.

I have identified so far some categories which I could make sense out of, however some of these categories are located deeper within directory structures.

• Blood

• Bootstrap

• Characters

• GUI

• General

• foliage

• Icons

• Landscape

• Overlaymaps

• Particles

• SkyX

There may be a bit too much weight put onto the General category causing a problem, but I simply don't know enough to be sure. My hunch is that maybe General is a catchall, lower priority group than say, Characters or Landscape. The system may be using these to decide what to render first.

It looks like this:

15:56:46: Added resource location 'mods/Odyssey\races\dolls\character\meshes\Doll' of type 'FileSystem' to resource group 'General'

If that's causing stability issues, it's easy enough to undo. Just curious.

Ultimately what I'd like to do here is assign all objects the correct categories, while eliminating directory based clutter and redundancy, as as I perceive it. Things are simply easier to manage if there are fewer containers to sift through.

[yawanats]

Answered my own question here.

There does seem to be indexing going on. The categories have a part to play in this, and are somewhat determined by directory although not entirely. General category seems to take in both armor and weapons as well as be a catch-all. There's a category for buildings as well. These seem to be subdivided though, as there's a section for buildings/doors that operates differently (?) from buildings.

Either way, the base game directory structure does have an effect. Many mods are published without regard to this and while they may work independently, when put together in larger mod lists, errors will crop up.