Modding
Players, modders, and hackers are able to use the game to create new and interesting levels with stories about surveillance, hacking and the Internet of Things or whatever else you are inspired to! Off Grid is heavily moddable, with an exposed Lua API allowing anyone to edit the game. Using their own free copy of the Unity games engine, anyone can build mods with the same tools that the development team use. With this level of control, players can build their own content: levels, hackable devices, apps, hacking tools, and stories - and share them with other players.
The core game logic and systems are written in C#, but we have created an exposed Lua API that all the gameplay is controlled by. Lua is flexible and easy to learn language that the players can use (with the help of this wiki) to create their own levels.
First Steps:
| colspan="2" First Steps | |
|---|---|
| LevelKit GUI | | Asset Creation Pipeline | |
| Getting Started with the LevelKit |
Building your First Level
How to create custom missions using LevelKit
Otherwise... get stuck in to the rest of it here:
Modding Manual
There is a lot you can mod in Off-Grid, so it can be overwhelming to get started! With your help we will pack this wiki full of information and ideas to support and inspire your creations.
| NPC Character Scripting |
|---|
| Character Types and Prefabs - Overview of Characters and how to build them |
| Character Profiles - Scripting Character Personalities and Data Profiles |
| Character Colours - LUTs and changing character colours |
| Agent Definitions - Scripting AI interactions for NPCs |
| AI Gestures - A list of AI gestures you can use to call animations |
| Message Templates - Text Messages that NPCs receive |
| More Options |
|---|
| Creating Apps |
| Debugging Your Mods |
| Game Progress (and linking levels into longer experiences) |
Lua Apis
Here you can find all of the Api documentation for the various calls you have access to for writing mods in Off Grid whether it be writing your own mission scripts, hackable devices, in game apps and tools or anything else for that matter!
A brief overview of how users will make custom missions
- Download Unity and the provided LevelKit project
- Follow the instructions in LevelKit's interface to create a stub mission to build upon
- Using our modular LevelKit pieces, create the geometry and layout to tell your visual story
- Open up the stub mission script generated by LevelKit and fill in the logic for your mission
- Build the Mission via LevelKit and test it in your copy of Off Grid
- Upload to Steam workshop or send to your friends
Now to go into a little more detail about those steps:
Download Unity and the provided LevelKit project
The levelkit will be downloadable as a seperate tool on Steam as well as our website, we'll require the user to use a specific version of Unity in order to avoid any issues
Follow the instructions in LevelKit's interface to create a stub mission to build upon
Our LevelKit tool set will walk users through the process of creating a mission from a template, after filling in a few details about their mission we'll create a stub for them to build off. this will generate the dolfer structure and base file you need to make a mod. It should look something like this:
/Levels/ |-- SomeMod/ | |-- Mission-1/ | | |-- Bundles/ | | |-- Content/ | | | |-- | | |-- level.json | | |-- strings.lua | | |-- missionImage.png | |-- Mission-2 | | |-- Bundles/ | | |-- Content/ | | |-- level.json | | |-- strings.lua | | |-- missionImage.png | |-- mod.json |-- OtherMod/
Using our modular LevelKit pieces, create the geometry and layout to tell your visual story
We've already built up quite a large library of modular mission pieces to work with, these include architecture and props. Users can choose how fine gain they want to design, they can build entire rooms with individual wall and window pieces or use the pre-made rooms provided for them.
Part of making a mission for Off Grid is setting up what we call "MissionObjects" these are simply unity game objects with a pre-made "MissionObject" component, using Unity's editor interface users will set the type of MissionObject. These are
- Interactable
- Trigger
- Spawn
- HackableDevice
- Generic
These objects are can be referenced in mission scripts and be set up with custom logic (see below)
Open up the stub mission script generated by LevelKit and fill in the logic for your mission
Once the user has made a first pass on the geometry of their mission they can start writing the logic, mission scripting in Off Grid is written in Lua. Users lua scripts contain definitions for Characters, Physical Items, Data, Networks, Objectives, Checkpoints and Devices, they also contain code that reacts to the use of MissionObjects.
For example after setting up the MissionObject "PlayerBuildingEnter" as a trigger, the user can set up a lua function that's called when the player enters the trigger volume. Using this simple MissionObject interface that links together Unity and our lua apis modders have an incredible amount of power to create their vision.
Build the Mission via LevelKit and test it in your copy of Off Grid
Using LevelKit's interface users can build their mission into the folder structure the game expects and then point the game towards it in order to test it.
Upload to Steam workshop or send to your friends
Once they've tested your level thoroughly, users can follow the in game interface for uploading their mission to steam workshop. If they're not running the steam version of the game, they can create a zip of their mission to send to friends or post to message boards for others to try out
How to take a look at Off Grid's modding support without the tools
If you've received a copy of Off Grid without LevelKit, you can poke around some of the lua files in the data folder it order to look at the structure of our missions and apis: Some good places to look would be:
The apostle mission script: ( perhaps try changing Joe's name to your own? )
Windows & Linux: OffGrid_Data/StreamingAssets/Levels/NewsPaperOffice/Scripts/theapostle_mission.lua
OSX: OffGrid.app/Contents/Resources/Data/StreamingAssets/Levels/NewsPaperOffice/Scripts/theapostle_mission.lua
The script for the hackable hand dryers in the apostle mission: ( Try adding your name to the "names" lua table, or updating the colors of the ui? )
Windows & Linux: OffGrid_Data/StreamingAssets/Levels/NewsPaperOffice/Scripts/Devices/HandDryer.lua
OSX: OffGrid.app/Contents/Resources/Data/StreamingAssets/Levels/NewsPaperOffice/Scripts/Devices/HandDryer.lua