SFMF Development Notes

Table of Contents

• Data Source
• Separating All Mods vs. Installed Mods
• Reinstalling SFMF on Installed Mod Changes
• Mod Settings as a CSV

• Unity Controller Key Codes

Data Source

Although I would love to have the mods and their data stored in a database, I decided to keep it simple with a JSON file in the SFMF repository describing each mod and some other data about SFMF.

• It's free to store files in GitHub if they're open source.
• C# has a really solid utility for JSON serialization/deserialization.

Separating All Mods vs. Installed Mods

At first, it worked great to keep an installed boolean on each mod in the manifest.json file, but that started to cause problems with the addition of local mods.

The Problem:

Mods would be loaded if they were in the installedMods directory. This required the actual .dll to be in the Superflight directory, which doesn’t work for a local mod.

The Solution:

Maintain a file (installedMods.txt) that contains a list of absolute paths to all installed mods. With this, mods can be stored anywhere on a machine and loaded from that location.

The Caveat:

Now there are two files that are used to keep track of mods: manifest.json keeps track of all mods and their data, installedMods.txt keeps the path of installed mods. So there’s a small amount of duplicated data and a little bit of extra work that has to happen to keep both files in sync, but it works quite well.

Reinstalling SFMF on Installed Mod Changes

To prevent potential exploits, SFMF will reinstall itself any time the status of disableScoreReporting changes. That way players can’t install SFMF then install a mod that disables score reporting.

Although this approach may slow down installing some mods, it keeps things fair no matter which mods are installed.

Mod Settings as a CSV

It would’ve been awesome to store mod settings and controls as a JSON file, but it turns out Unity’s built in JSON utilities aren’t as complete as I expected. More specifically, Unity was unable to deserialize complex objects inside of an array.

At the end of the day I ended up storing settings and controls as a CSV file since it provides very easy parsing.

Here’s an example settings CSV file:

Setting,Name,Value
Control,Name,Keyboard Key,Controller Button

Unity Controller Key Codes