The Greed Mod Manager

A mod loader for Sins of a Solar Empire II

GitHub	Forum	Discord

Table of Contents

• The Greed Mod Manager
  • Table of Contents
  • Why Use Greed?
  • User Guide
    • Greed Setup
      • Greed Installation
      • Greed Configuration
    • Basic Use
      • Install a Mod
        • Online Catalog (Recommended)
        • Drag-and-Drop
        • Manual Install
      • Activate a Mod
    • Left Pane - Mods
    • Center Pane - Details & Execution
    • Right Pane - Difference
    • Global Scalars
      • Scalar Schema
      • Edit Location Schema
  • Greedy Mod Development
    • Why Develop Greedy Mods?
    • Merge Types
      • Greed Merge Extensions
      • Null Removal
    • Greedy File Object Schema
      • GFOS Example
    • Greed.json Configuration
  • Contributing to Greed
    • Bug Reports
    • Greed Development Environment
  • Contributing Mods

Why Use Greed?

• No More Manual Deconfliction: File deconfliction happens automatically for you.
• Automated Installation: You can automatically install mods and their dependencies from an online catalog.
• Drag-and-Drop Installation: If you find a mod from some other source, you can drag-and-drop it into Greed to install it.
• Conflict Detection: You are warned if you try to enable mods with a known conflict between them.
• Dependency Management: You are warned if you attempt to enable a mod without its dependencies active.
• Mod Packs: Easily create bundles of your favorite mods that you can quickly enable together.
• C Drive Offloading: keep your inactive mods away from your limited-space C drive
• Self Updating: Greed is able to keep itself up to date with just a few clicks from you.
• Global Scalars: Greed possesses several game-changing global scalars

User Guide

Greed Setup

Greed Installation

1. Download the Greed.X.Y.Z.zip from the latest github release
2. Extract the file wherever you please on your machine.
3. Run Greed.exe

Greed Configuration

Set the directories on the Settings tab. They will autosave if the paths exist.

• Sins Directory: the location of Sins II's exe.
  • typically C:\Program Files\Epic Games\SinsII
• Mods Directory: where on your machine you wish to save your horde of mods, including the inactive ones.
  • typically C:\Users\YOUR_USER\AppData\Local\sins2\mods
• Export Directory: regardless of where you choose to store your horde of mods, Sins II expects active mods to be in a particular folder
  • nearly always C:\Users\YOUR_USER\AppData\Local\sins2\mods.
• Downloads Directory: the location where Greed is free to download mods to temporarily before extracting them to your mods directory.
  • nearly always C:\Users\YOUR_USER\Downloads
• Check for Updates: Checks with the LGM to see if there is a new version of Greed. If so, you will be prompted to begin the update process, which will complete in a matter of seconds.

Basic Use

Install a Mod

Online Catalog (Recommended)

1. In the Greedy Mods tab, press the [☁️] button to view the online catalog (shown above).
2. Right click on whatever mod you want to install.
3. Install the version of your choice.

Drag-and-Drop

Drag.and.Drop.Rar.mp4

Manual Install

1. Download the mod from GitHub, ModDB, or wherever else.
   1. If needed, unzip it.
2. Deposit it in C:\Users\YOUR_USER\AppData\Local\sins2\mods (change the path to use your Windows username).
   1. If the mod's name is example-mod, you should be able to find greed.json at C:\Users\YOUR_USER\AppData\Local\sins2\mods\example-mod\greed.json
3. Press the Refresh button to see the new mod appear in the list.

Activate a Mod

1. In the left pane, double click any desired installed mods to activate them.
2. In the center pane, press [Export Greedy Mods] to export the selected mods.
   1. After export completes, you will be prompted to start the game.

Left Pane - Mods

The left pane shows the list of mods and allows you to modify how they are loaded.

1. Select an existing mod pack to activate.
2. Save the current list of active mods as a mod pack.
3. Delete the current mod pack.
4. Copy the configuration of the active mod pack to the clipboard.
5. Open the online mod catalog.
6. Refresh the list of mods from disk. (F5)
7. Import a mod pack configuration from the clipboard and install any missing mods.
8. Search field to filter installed mods.
9. Toggle all mods.
10. Filter to active mods
11. List of mods. Drag and drop to change load order.
    1. Double-click to toggle a mod.
    2. Right-click to install alternate versions or uninstall a mod.
12. The installed version of the mod. If the online catalog contains an update, it will be denoted here.
13. The minimum required version of Greed to use this mod. If your Greed version is insufficient or if Greed is not backwards compatible with the mod, it will be marked here.
14. The minimum required verison of Sins to use this mod. If a mod requires a newer version of Sins than you have, it will be marked here.

Center Pane - Details & Execution

The center pane contains details about a mod selected in the left pane, as well as execution tools.

1. The mod name, version, and required Sins version.
2. Author
3. The repository location for the mod.
4. A short description of the mod.
5. Greed automatically parses the README.md file of any mod you have and displays it here.
6. Exports the list of active mods for execution. (F6)
7. Run the game.

Right Pane - Difference

The right pane shows the json file details of the selected mod, so you can see exactly what the mod does. This is mostly for developers.

1. Whether a mod is new or changed.
2. The folder of the modified file (eg entities or uniforms).
3. The name of the file.
4. View a comparison between what this file's contents and the original Sins version. You can also double click on a file to see its diff.

Global Scalars

In addition to loading other mods, Greed can also function as an ad-hoc mod by itself. On the Settings tab, you can see a list of game-modifying scalars. The changes made with these scalars apply after all other mods have been merged during Greed's export process.

Greed ships with a handful of scalars, but you can edit Greed's Config.json file's groups[i] field if you want to change which are available to you.

Scalar Schema

Field	Type	Description	Default Value
name*	string	The name of the scalar.
folder*	string	Where you can find the files that you want to scale. This will usually be entities or uniforms.
type*	string enum	This will either be INT or DOUBLE, depending on whether the target field is a floating point or integer.
extension*	string	The file extension to filter on, eg .player.
locations*	EditLocation[]	The list of edit locations to edit the files. Typically, there will only be one, but you may want to move several in lockstep.
value*	double	The current value of the scalar.

Edit Location Schema

See Resolvable Mutations for more details.

Field	Type	Description	Default Value
path*	string	The Action Path to the field you wish to edit.
condition	Resolvable	If provided, this condition must be met to make an edit.	""

Greedy Mod Development

Why Develop Greedy Mods?

• Advanced Patch Merging: Intelligent merging of files, allowing automated merge even within the same file.
  • Selective Inclusion: Your mod only needs to include what you changed about a particular source file (eg add a new property, delete a property, or add an array element), drastically reducing the risk of collisions between mods.
  • Inheritance: You can use one file as a base for another.
  • Export Order Control & Aliasing: You can set up multiple mod files to each do discrete patches on a single game file.
  • Conditional Export: You can configure your mod to export the same file multiple ways depending on which mods are installed.
  • Resolvable Mutations: You can reshape nearly anything about a file, from its data to its structure.
• Dependency Autoinstall: Users can automatically install your mod's dependencies.
• Automated Updates: Users can update to the latest version of your mod automatically.
• Comments: You can add C-style comments to your source files.
• Reduced Boilerplate: Fractional files and inheritance reduces the effort required to make small mods
• File Diff: Greed ships with a diff tool specifically for Sins II data files, allowing you to readily see exactly what you've done.
• Improved Exposure: Greed comes with a catalog of online mods that can be automatically installed, and it includes a tool to help set up your own.
• MIT License: Greed is released under the permissive MIT License, so if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, someone else can maintain it.

Merge Types

The ultimate goal of Greed is to allow multiple mods to gracefully integrate together so that we can release smaller, more targeted mods, rather than these massive bundles that nobody really knows what's inside them. To facilitate this, Greed acts as an arbiter, compiling greedy mods into a single "mod" in the mods directory which is then listed as active for Sins II to read from.

Ideally, a mod should change as little as it can to have its desired effect so that multiple mods could even modify the same file.

Greed Merge Extensions

To that end, Greed introduces several json file extensions that allow targeted edits within a given file. For example, if you want to edit the Kol, you might name your file trader_battle_capital_ship.unit.gmr.

• .gmr (Greed Merge Replace): for each element in the the mod file's arrays, it replaces the greed file's corresponding element at that index, per Newtonsoft's MergeArrayHandling.Replace.
  • eg [1, 2, 3] + [4, 5] = [4, 5, 3]
  • Example removing an element from an array
• .gmc (Greed Merge Concatenate): for each element in the mod's array, it concatenates them onto the original array, per Newtonsoft's MergeArrayHandling.Concat.
  • eg [1, 2] + [2, 3] = [1, 2, 2, 3]
  • Example of adding elements to an entity_manifest
• .gmu (Greed Merge Union): for each element in the mod's array that does not already exist in the original array, add it to the end of the array, per Newtonsoft's MergeArrayHandling.Union.
  • eg [1, 2] + [2, 3] = [1, 2, 3]
  • Example of adding autocast

In all of these cases, if you leave an object's field undefined, it will not be edited. So, if you wanted to edit just one of the many arrays in a .player file to add a new ship type, you'd only declare the one array you want to edit, and you'd probably do it in a .gmu file so you can add what you want to what's already there without redeclaring everything or worrying about another mod colliding with yours.

Null Removal

• If a field within your mod is null (not undefined, but actually null), it will delete that field from the greed file under construction.
  • This applies regardless of whether you are using a .gm* file type or not.
• If inside an array in a *.gmr, it will delete the element at that original index from an array.
  • For example, in the array [ 1, 2, 3, 4 ], if you want to remove the middle two elements, your mod would have [ 1, null, null ], which would result in [ 1, 4 ].

Example removing a field from an item

Note: be very careful when removing elements by index that you know exactly what is there already.

Greedy File Object Schema

Inside json source files, you can have a top-level object to define additional rules, as seen here or in these files.

Field	Type	Description	Default Value
parent	string	The file name of the file you wish to inherit from. A file with a parent will prefer to initialize from the parent file instead of from its own the gold file (if one even exists). The parent can be a gold file, a file created by your mod, or a file created by another mod. It must be in the same directory with the same type. For example, the above was in a .player file in the entities/ directory, so the parent file should be as well.	null
alias	string	By default, a greedy file will export with its own name (eg a.buff.gmr produces a.buff), but if alias is specified, it allows you to control what the output filename will be.	<filename>
exportOrder	int	Files are exported by the following hierarchical ascending sort: Mod Export Order Folder Export Name File Export Order Lexicographically	0
prerequisites	string[]	Only export this file if the provided mods are all installed and active.	[]
mode	string	Allows in-file specification of the greed merge type, eg gmr.	<extension>
mutations	Mutation[]	See the dedicated document.	[]

GFOS Example

{
    "greed": {
        "parent": "my_parent_file",
        "alias": "actual_export_file",
        "exportOrder": 2,
        "prerequisites": ["other-mod"],
        "mode": "gmr",
        "mutations": []
    }
}

Greed.json Configuration

To make a mod compatible with Greed, you need only add a greed.json file to your mod's folder, as seen below.

{
    "name": "Your Mod",
    "author": "Your Name",
    "url": "https://github.com/YourName/your-mod",
    "description": "Blurb goes here.",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "sinsVersion": "1.15.1.0",
    "greedVersion": "1.7.2",
    "dependencies": [
        {
            "id": "other-mod",
            "version": "1.0.0"
        }
    ],
    "predecessors": [
        "pred-mod"
    ]
    "conflicts": ["conflicting-mod"],
    "isTotalConversion": false
}

While I recommend you take advantage of Greed's more powerful features like merge file extensions or Resolvable Mutations, merely adding the above will make any mod interactible for Greed.

Field	Type	Description
name*	string	The human-readable name of your mod
author*	string	Who you are.
description*	string	A brief summary of your mod. Save details for the readme.
url*	url	The URL to your thread or repo where you give greater details about your mod. Details beyond what is covered in the description should be covered here, as well as the means to contact you with bugs.
version*	version	The version of the mod itself. If contributing to the catalog, this MUST match the version there.
sinsVersion*	version	The minimum compatible Sins version.
greedVersion*	version	The minimum compatible Greed version.
dependencies*	dependency[]	An array of dependencies that are REQUIRED for this mod to function.
predecessors*	string[]	An array of mods that if this is co-active with SHOULD be loaded first.
conflicts*	string[]	An array of mod ids with which this mod is incompatible.
isTotalConversion	bool	Whether or not the mod should presume conflicts in the absence of dependencies. (default false)

Contributing to Greed

I welcome contributions. Just open a pull request.

If at some point in the future, I can no longer maintain Greed, it's MIT licensed.

Bug Reports

In the event of an error, consult the log (viewable both in the textbox at the bottom of the frame and also in log.txt, found in whatever directory you've got Greed in).

• If the error appears to be one with Greed itself, please create a GitHub issue.
  • Be sure to use an appropriate label and include the log when submitting so I can hunt down the error easier.
• Otherwise, contact the appropriate mod developer.

Greed Development Environment

1. Clone the repository and open it in Visual Studio 2022
2. Build Greed.Autoupload
3. Publish Greed.Autoupload
4. Build Greed
5. Run unit tests

Contributing Mods

To contribute a mod to the online catalog, follow the instructions here.