Is there a guide to unpacked game folder structure?

[lynx_]

New to modding in X games. Made a simple mod that changes faction color of the Khaak to something more red, so they do not look like Paranid ships on the map. It was pretty easy to find and do, since I was looking for color definitions, but now I am lost as to where and what to look for. It would be nice if someone could tell me where the unpacked game folder structure is explained and where to look for what in it.

I want to make these things:

1. Add a spherical range indicator to the resource probe deployment command for NPC pilot (just like normal and advanced satellites).

2. I want to figure out how to make a shortcut to give NPC pilot command to drop specific probe under mouse in map mode. Not even sure where to start with this. I know there is shortcut to select object under mouse in map mode and there are commands to deploy specific drones by NPC. I would like figure out if it is possible to make something out of this to do what I want, if it is possible for mod at all.

[euclid]

Welcome

This "invisible" sticky thread explains some of what you are asking.

Cheers Euclid

[lynx_]

Well, I read this post and it explains a lot about how to get things started, thanks to it I managed to do my first simple color mod. But it does not explain where to look for specific things like definitions of keyboard shortcuts or events that can be called by them and stuff like that. You know, something more than a one topic with two posts and an effectively self-referencing link to the X4 manual (which links to this forum). Some games have a modding wiki with some excellent content (e.g. Paradox games), is that not the case here?

Now, as usual, I started looking at other people's mods to find out how they did what they did, and it looks pretty wild to have a mod that loads a lua binary to enable custom shortcuts. And this mod seems to only support the windows platform, which is a problem for me.

[euclid]

On the top left of the forum page you'll find a link to the X4 Wiki which provides further info about modding. Events triggered by keys do not exist although we (modders) asked for that several times in the past years. All XML and MD script commands can be found in the XSD files located in the libraries folder of the unpacked game files.

Cheers Euclid

[lynx_]

Thanks for info. And yeah, I saw that wiki. It is linked as "X4 manual" in your pinned post (you might want to update the link there - https://www.egosoft.com:8444/confluence ... ons+Manual redirects to the main page https://wiki.egosoft.com:1337 instead of the actual manual https://wiki.egosoft.com:1337/X4+Founda ... ns+Manual/). Not much info in the wiki at first glance, thanks to poor navigation. Digging deeper and going through everything that seemed unrelated to what I was looking for, I found h2odragon's experience of dissecting the game. More or less this is what I was looking for. Not much, but better than nothing.

Funny thing is that the wiki part about mods is not searchable from google (it is from bing, but who uses that as a default search engine, I wonder). There is a lot of determination in modder souls to keep doing what they do and fix behavior of this game.

[Observe]

I look forward to seeing the tutorial that hopefully you will write. The wiki is only as good as the contributions to it.