Things wot I have learned...

Will be writing a tutorial on all I've discovered over the past two days. I've learned so much I dont know where to begin.


VPK revelations

Finally worked out why many things I changed in my mod had no effect in the game. It's all about the VPK.
The VPK files in the Swarm directory of the official game are like a big zip file. Each file in the VPK has parts spread over all of them. In order to know where each part of each file is the game refers to the GCF file. The GCF file is like a guide as to how to read the VPK files. It tells the game where to find all the bits of the file have been stored in the various VPK files.

So when you extract a file from the VPK file and place it in your mod the engine gets confused and makes some assumptions. If it finds a file in your mod directory that normally resides in the VPK then it assumes that it doesnt have to look in the VPK at all. As a result your mod will go all funny because its not finding a shed load of the files it needs.

The way around this is to change the name of the reference file the engine has to look for and then save your modded file under that name.

So for example, if I want to mod mainmenu.res I search the code for that name appearing in a particular .cpp file, change the code to look for mainmenu_mymod.res, then compile. Then I extract mainmenu.res from the swarm VPK file, make my changes and save it to my mod directory as mainmenu_mymod.res.
Now the game has no where else to look but my mod directory.

Build vs Rebuild

This is funny. I really didnt understand the difference between the Build option and the Rebuild option in Visual Studio. As a result I was hitting rebuild each time then waiting nearly an hour for my mod to recompile everything. Hit build and it will only compile the files youve changed and takes 2 mins. LOL I am a twat...