What is Valheim?
A beautiful survival RPG with social elements featuring a diverse world, and procedurally generated landscapes, proving itself as one of the most creative enterprises the Survival Genre has seen.
Valheim, where to start? From lovely handcrafted models, to the wonderful artistic direction, this game has something for everyone. Whether you are a seasoned veteran of the electronic entertainment format, or you simply enjoy looking at pretty flashing colors, this experience really shows you that it doesn't take all that much to provide the imagination with what it needs to build what can only be described as a Legacy. With other games, which might be called similar, we are often limited in some aspects very greatly, but due to the development team's foresight, the entire thing is quite accessible to new players, and furthermore, for modders who look to make more out of the game for themselves or others. This is an amazing thing because it is something that must be maintained, and in this day and age of gaming, we often find ourselves (modders) locked out or restricted by the availability of code. In the end, you have a game which also classifies as a framework for so much more. Below you will find the work I've done for this game exposed as their modules, showing what it is and how it works to help streamline workflow in Valheim:
ValheimExpanded: An API and Core Server Manager
Valheim, written in Unity's powerful engine, is a perfect place to explore modding game projects for many reasons. First, injection modifications run on various codebases, meaning you might know one of many languages, and still find considerable ease in accessing features of the game's code. I utilize C# (.NET Framework 4.0), compiling my .dll files with Visual Studio 2017, but you might use another IDE for this. This project was done this way to explore the power of injection modding and to provide a context for making new content in Valheim through a reasonably simple interface. The entire point of this mod is to provide others with an infrastructure for making simple content additions to the game with little to no experience. With this in mind, I will detail how the API functions, and how the Core functions, and how they interact with eachother to provide the new functionality of the mod.
Features
ValheimExpanded, or ValEx, is cut into 3 distinct module types, each meant to organize the management of resources for the modder. Below are over-views of how teach module works:
The API
The API, defined as `ValEx.API`, constitutes all methods which shorten or provide constructors for the creation or management of Unity Objects, and defines how the Core utilizes any additional Modules.
The Core
The Core aspect keeps records of instances, and serializes objects after they've been constructed by the API. Here is also where the API gets it's base Instance, and derives it's Scene.
Addon Modules
The last part of the framework is the Addon Modules, which operate as Content containers, and is the prime method for new modders to take full advantage of the API. All new scripts are acknowledged by the Core, and utilize the API to work in Valheim's unique code environment with general ease.