PSA & Request for PA INC: Effects mods break in PTE, and a fix for the future

For normal players: More Pew Pew, and perhaps some other effect mods (and also, in the future, perhaps certain unit selection mods) will cause one to see the current balance numbers (like Slammers costing 450 metal) even when on PTE, despite the Slammers actually costing 500 metal in PTE. If you're in PTE and using More Pew Pew or other client mods, and you notice that a displayed value is not what you expect from the PTE, it is probably the fault of a client mod.


For anyone interested in the details of why this is: Right now, base Planetary Annihilation does not specify unique projectile effects for every unit, but instead has many units that share the same projectile effect file.

I'm unsure about other effect mods, but More Pew Pew works by creating a new file for every unit that doesn't have a unique projectile effect, and shadows the unit's ammo .json file to now use that new unit-specific file as a reference. Legion (and now my subfaction mod, too) also do something similar in order to maintain compatibility with More Pew Pew, which means that Legion (and my subfaction mod) contain dummy effect files which inherit everything from their current parent.

More Pew Pew also sometimes shadows the unit's .json file itself in order to allow for unit-specific fire animations. This is why the Slammer's cost appears as 450 for people using More Pew Pew in PTE.

This means that the author of More Pew Pew must update the mod every time a patch hits. This is suboptimal, but Dom has a script to do this already. However, Effect mods with the same scale as More Pew Pew could be made future-proof, via the following:

For PA Inc.: Please consider making a bunch of dummy files in the base game for each unit firing effects and for each unit's ammo effects. These dummy files could inherit all properties from the current shared files. This way, effect mods like More Pew Pew will no longer have to shadow any .json files.

This would then lead to:
1. normal players will not notice anything
2. More Pew Pew, and similar effects mods, will be future-proof
3. Legion (and my subfactions mod) will no longer require a large amount of dummy files.

Ideally, this would be done with the same naming convention that More Pew Pew follows (which is in line with the base game already), so that More Pew Pew and Legion would still function the same after the redundant files are deleted.