Hi all, I've playing Cortex Command since build 23 and I just love this game. Lately I've been exploring mods and the idea of making one myself makes me wet.

I read some articles of the wiki, learned a lot but the modding section of this game seems so complex and I don't have any clue about Lua (I discovered it in GMod for the first time and I never get near it.).

I would like to make a little mod from scratch, but I don't know where to start. All the .ini parafernalia seems a bit complex at first but it's understandable.

Could you please guys teach me the basics of the basics, possibly with graphical examples? I know that in this thing is needed to close and open Cortex Command to see yourself the changes of your mod, but I would like to see glimpses of your ideas.

Thanks in advance for your time. By the way, this is my first post. I'm from Spain. Nice to meet you all.

-Break.

You can ignore Lua modding for now, that's for more advanced scripting things, reprogramming the game basically.
If you want to get started, grab a mod from the Minor Mod Dump here and play around with it. Tweak it, overpower it, underpower it, do whatever you like, and just get used to how variables have to be properly capitalized, tabbed, and numbers within tolerances.
When you feel comfortable, add on, make a copy of some weapon in the mod and play around. Eventually, strike out on your own and make something entirely new out of your knowledge. Even if it doesn't work, don't despair, just figure out what went wrong (or ask one of us) and some time in the future you'll find you can mod fluently.

Then if at some point during that time when you feel that you're ready to delve into Lua scripting do the same as you did with the .ini code, look at some examples, mess with them, combine them, then start writing new ones.

Mess with ini variables, learn how to copy weapons and actors into a seperate .rte and make them completely independant from the vanilla content etc.
Helps a lot when you're going to be using your own sprites in the future.

Oh and on the subject of spriting, just slap some guns and gibs together in a way that looks cool, don't use the fill tool and fill a large bit of something with a color and then forget to change the outline and or rest of the shades.

do what I did, start practicing by re-spriting and re-coding the SMG.

The first two things i ever changed on a gun was the goldcost and roundcount. After that i just kept playing with thing to see what they did.

Your going to make some errors that crash the game, write down what the error message says and someone here can help fix it. Also write down the changes you made so you can change things back if you need to.

Good luck and feel free to ask me or anyone else questions

Thanks a lot for the tips. I will mess with the mods .ini files.