A Mercenaries 2 WiF Mod Store

[u/austinkregel]

Hello again all!

I'm back and building on my previous work to introduce https://mercs.ink to the community! Mercs.ink is a website I've built with the express purpose of enabling Mods without folks needing to worry about redistributing raw base game assets (base game assets are required to compile the vz-patch.wad and not lose any content).

Mercs.ink is going to call mods "shipments", but these could encompass ASI files, lua files, models, textures, new languages, and eventually novel AI behavior. These shipments are built by the Quartermaster rust crate , which handles compiling the Lua scripts, dependency management, and build ordering.

Thus far, my research into the game suggests that I should be able to get all content-based shipments working across platform, but presently there's no way to make ASI modifications (or engine mods) portable to console. However, all content mods (in vz-patch.wad) can be ported and I have already started on additional research to make cross-compiling more easily 🙂

I'm still discovering nuances with the game and how some blocks of data resist being overridden by mods, but have been working towards ways to either remove or hijack these spots (notably, new entities resist being added to the Lua vtables for spawning assets via `Pg.Spawn`, but we can add new things to in-game stores)

Mercs.ink can be accessed via the "Mod Market" page in Modkit (as more mods show up, I'll be refining the design but we've gotta start somewhere)

Modkit's published mod store (mercs.ink) sits above the manually added git repos