Looking for possible opinions about (ultra-basic) mods support for Reflection Keen

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NY00123
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Looking for possible opinions about (ultra-basic) mods support for Reflection Keen

Post by NY00123 »

So I've considered adding (really) basic mods support to Reflection Keen, covering the supported games of Keen Dreams, Catacomb 3-D and the later Catacombs.

What kind of mods to support, you might be wondering? Well, I'm aiming at mods which can also be run with the original DOS EXEs, possibly using not more than a limited set of patches.

Think about the lots of add-ons for the Classic Doom games, compatible with Vanilla Doom EXEs as well as Chocolate Doom (using not much more than WADs and DEHACKED patches).

There are some concerns when it comes to Reflection Keen, though:
- It looks like (almost) every Keen Dreams mod around there seems to depend on KDRPATCH. Unfortunately, I don't think I can reliably support all patches compatible with KDRPATCH (or any other CKPATCH variant), since this will essentially require me to embed an x86 emulator; And covering just a small subset of all possible patches is probably not a great idea, either.
- I'm not currently aware of any user modification of Catacomb 3-D or later.
- If CKPATCH is not used, then good chances are source modding is, which also can't really be covered by (unmodified) Reflection Keen as-is.
- I think I lack the interest in introducing a new scripting language for Reflection Keen. It'll also be problematic to run mods with custom scripts using any original DOS EXE (without going through major changes).
- Finally, I suspect that at this point, almost any new modification will either be based on patching, or on source modding (or both).

Thus, I suspect that all that I'll let you do for Reflection Keen is replacing game data files (e.g., having custom levels).

What do you think, though? Is there maybe some weird, random interest for a DEHACKED-like format? (I'm actually not that sure I'll be motivated to maintain any, heh. So I suspect I already know the answer.)

P.S. Right now, due to internal integrity checks of game data, you simply *cannot* run Reflection Keen with modified game data (unless you use some hidden cfg hack, currently mentioned somewhere in the README).
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