I’m playing around with the dev kit and was able to modify a few things, but can’t get anything to cook or to upload to Steam. I may be missing a few basic things; such as how I’m editing what and how to get the dev tools to recognize that there’s anything to cook at all. What tutorials do you recommend (for reading or youtube)?
These guys are by far the best at actually showing you what you should do for the most basic of setting up mods that I’ve seen.
Some corrections on both of the video series to avoid confusion:
In wookies tutorial when he sets up the basic mod files, he creates childs instead of copies for the primalgamedata and testgamemode. Don’t do that, your mod will crash on load. Create copies of all three files.
In the second tutorial series he is recreating the original folder structure, there is no need to do that. You can just dump everything in your mod folder and/or use your own folder structure. Another critical error he makes is adding the new engram in the “engram blueprint classes” array. This will work but your mod users won’t be able to use content from base game updates. You want to add your mod engrams to the “additional engram blueprint classes” array instead.
Yes thank you for pointing out these corrections. I never had mine “crash” but it didn’t work properly until after I recreated the 3 main files as copies.
And as to the second series this is also true, and i suspect this is why the devs have not seemed to update the actual number array very often as many modders still use the engrams blueprint classes method which is not compatible for later versions or between multiple mods that use this method.
Once you get how to make a basic mod work for ARK I would lso recommend using the official unreal youtube channel ( https://www.youtube.com/user/UnrealDevelopmentKit ). Granted everything you see there is for the unreal editor and not the Ark dev kit which is derived from the unreal editor, but many if not most of the tutorials can be applied to the ark dev kit creations without too many hitches.
Cool, thanks for all the help. I managed to cook up something and get it uploaded to Steam… (still catching various mistakes with what I’m doing). I’m wanting to change some default values (namely XP, since its quick to get to and easy to test if I was successful), but on the ‘upload to steam’ screen, the button for cooking mods is unavailable, but the button for cooking a total conversion is. I’m trying to figure out what I’m missing.