Nathan Mates's .plan Archives Plan Archives from February 2000.

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Login name: nathan    			In real life: Nathan Mates
Directory: /home/nathan             	Shell: /bin/tcsh
Plan:

2/9/00: Our discussion boards are down again, this time apparently as we've finally got the time to copy everything to a new box. No idea when this process will be complete.

2/6/00: Now that the game's out and people are starting to make updates, new units, maps, etc for it, I think it's a good time to review some guidlines for how and where files should be placed:

Put every new file, or updated file, in the addon directory under the BZ2 folder.

Got it? Real simple. Here's why: our file loader is blind to subdirectories. If there are two files called 'MyCoolMap.bzn' under the data directory, it'll randomly pick one to load. The 'data.pak' file (and everything within that) is considered to be in the data directory as well, so if you put a file with the same name as an official asset in the data directory, it'll pick one of them, though probably almost always the one in the data.pak.

This is where the addon directory comes in: it is searched FIRST for any file to be loaded. Thus, you can guarantee that Addon/MyCoolMap.bzn will be loaded instead of Data/MyCoolMap.bzn. You can still place subfolders under addon, and you'll have to watch out for duplicated filenames within there.

If you're making any multiplayer maps, install them to Addon/Missions/Multiplayer/ (or a subdirectory under there). That directory is automatically scanned for any .bzn files in it, so you can drop a map in on every machine, and then pick it from the list. The in-game session list will not let you join a remote session with a .bzn you do not have locally; that server message field is a great way to tell people where the map can be downloaded from.