Modding Beyond All Reason covers three separate problem areas that come up regularly. Building chain reactions need explosion control. Disabling air units while keeping specific exceptions requires handling of spawned units. The player list mascot offers simple image customization.
Tags: beyond all reason, chain reaction explosions, explodeas, selfdestructas, Legion drones, leghive, tweakdef air disable, player list mascot
Players want to disable chain reaction explosions for most buildings while keeping them for critical structures like fusion reactors and T2 energy converters. The engine handles this through two parameters.
The explodeas field defines what explosion plays when another unit kills a building. The selfdestructas field defines the explosion when you manually self-destruct a unit. Replace these with alternative explosion types to change the effect.
Setting chain reactions to harmless for standard buildings while preserving the dramatic ones for fusion prevents matches from devolving into uncontrolled firewalls.
A tweakdef that disables all air units can accidentally remove spawned units like Legion drones from the Hive and Rampart. The solution: find the spawned unit definition under the parent building's weapon definition customparams.
For example, the Legion Hive references legdrone in its weapon def customparams. Locate this by reading the building's Lua file under the units directory. The translation file at language/en/units.json also maps unit names to display names.
The player list mascot uses three images: two heads and one body. Default images live in the luaui/images/advplayerslist_mascot directory in the BAR repository. Custom mascot images appear in community modding channels.
Nearly every modding question traces back to reading the right file in the official repository. The GitHub structure is consistent across unit types. Understanding the layout gets you answers faster than asking every time.
[Crd] I love being able to communicate with my team, getting and sharing tips and constructive feedback on gameplay, and having a good spirited community.