I’ve been trying to make a TC mod for weeks now. First I tried doing child classes - that turned out to be a horrible mess for dinos and structures and I quickly abandoned that idea. Then I edited the core files directly - that worked fine, but the updates and constant overwriting of files was a real pain.
Finally, I tried a different approach - grab core files, move them to the mod folder, rename them as I see fit, then edit them. The idea was grand: every reference to any item would automatically be changed and updates would not overwrite my files. I wouldn’t have to link everything up by hand, and while it took much longer for the DevKit to process some classes than it would if I copied them, I only had to worry about what I wanted to do, not the annoying technical aspects.
Except it didn’t do its job properly. It arbitrarily decided that renaming some classes should not update references to said classes so that things keep working. “Luckily”, among the classes it decided to disregard for no gorram reason, were all the resources. Best part? Everything seemed to be working fine, all the references appeared to have properly updated when I was editing it.
But then I had to close the DevKit. Upon returning to it, I find that things are no longer fine. It gave me over 2000 errors because of invalid references. At the very least, what broke is EVERY SINGLE REFERENCE to the resources. As of v215, there are 246 engrams and over 40 auto-craft recipes. That means I have around 300 items that need to be fixed. Also HarvestComponents, some InventoryBPs, some Structures and very likely other stuff I can’t remember right now.
I understand the game and DevKit are in early stages of development. But PLEASE at least have the DevKit tell me there is an error when it appears so I can fix it before it reaches a catastrophic scale. If I had known the ADK failed to rename the resource BPs (for whatever reason), I would have returned to their default names and NOT suffered all their references replaced with “None” upon restarting the DevKit.
TL;DR:
A stupid error that shouldn’t have happened in the first place and that didn’t appear to have happened until it was too late to fix it just cost me many hours of work. This is not acceptable.
EDIT: Also, this sort of thing happens:
“Failed to load /Game/Mods/Rebalance/Additions/Structures/Workbench/SInv_C_Workbench.SInv_C_Workbench_C Referenced by SInv_C_Workbench_C Property /Script/ShooterGame.PrimalInventoryComponent:DefaultInventoryItems”
What does that even mean? An inventory trying to reference itself? And why DefaultInventoryItems? They definitely did not contain references to the resources. Or is this caused by the recipes requiring “none” for crafting?
EDIT #2: Just found out it also lost references to all buildable structures inside their respective items. Even though they got built perfectly fine when I tested before closing the ADK. I wonder what other wonders await me.
EDIT #3: Found a bunch of engrams that lost references to their items. I wish there was at least a method to this madness. But there is literally no way to tell what works and what does not until you restart the DevKit and end up with a s***load of errors.