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That Time I Almost Created a New Mod Format for RoN

Depending on how you classify things, there are three or four different forms for RoN mods:

  • Workshop mods
  • Local mods
  • Direct mods
  • Dropdown mods (which can be Workshop or Local mods, but not Direct mods)

While pursuing improvements for CBP Alpha 7, I’ve explored many ideas to improve the usability of the mod. In doing so, I got this close to creating another mod format that would’ve combined the stability advantages of Direct mods with the file separation that Local mods have, and the distribution and ease-of-use benefits that Workshop mods have.1 Here’s what went wrong.

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MW5: Possible Fix for Mouse Bug in Co-op

The issue

When playing Co-op in Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, if you get a mission that starts from a dropship (rather than just spawning directly onto the map), you sometimes lose mouse control when it’s time to exit the dropship. You can still fire, and the mouse will work on the game menu, but you can no longer aim using the mouse.

What worked for me

As an Nvidia GPU user, pull up the Ansel overlay using ALT+F2, then close it again. Mouse control returns.

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Fall of Nations: Dev Blog #00

Now that nearly 100 people have subscribed to Fall of Nations, it seems like I should go into more detail about what exactly I want to accomplish with it. I’m also starting to run into the character limit of a Workshop mod’s description – and even if I wasn’t it’s still becoming pretty unwieldy.

Let’s start with the broadest strokes and work our way down from there.

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The Next 8 Months (Content Schedule)

I have a lot of stuff I’m working on right now. Some are large projects (e.g. Olaf guide, Fall of Nations), some are smaller (like individual articles), and there are a few that are sort of in between (e.g. B5 giffing). If my study schedule goes as expected then I have ~8 months of less than a full-time study workload. After the 8 months is over I don’t jarringly stop all content, but I can’t realistically study full-time and do content full-time simultaneously – time just doesn’t work like that.

Over the past couple weeks or so I’ve spent quite a bit of time figuring out what and how I want to work on things over this coming 8 month window, and how long I expect each project to take.

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Jhin “4 image description”

A few weeks ago /r/leagueoflegends ran a contest for reaching 4 million subscribers to the subreddit. There were four categories, and four winners in each category. With around 2 days left on the submission deadline, I submitted a Loss parody for the category of “4 image description” and ended up getting first place, winning myself 1848 RP.

Here are some notes about the submission I made.1

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My Workaround for the Limitations of the RoN Mod Manager

In the course of my RoN modding adventures, I decided to make a broad-scope “tech demo” style mod, showcasing some of the moddable aspects of RoN that I felt were being underutilisied – and hopefully learning a few things in the process.

After trying to mod a few things that I feel have been vastly undermodded, I ran into.. some problems. After much frustrating troubleshooting and testing, I realised this was due a limitation of RoN’s mod manager.

I then got to work on how to get around it.

The first process I mapped out while exploring how to solve the issue.

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How to Add a Thumbnail to a RoN Mod on the Steam Workshop

If you’ve ever tried to browse the Steam Workshop for Rise of Nations, you may have been frustrated at how none of the entries appear to have thumbnails. I looked into this and it appears that this is because the native mod uploader does not support thumbnails.

Nonetheless, by using a workaround, last night I became probably the first person to ever have a thumbnail for my RoN mod on the Steam Workshop. Here’s how I did it.

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