Hi there. I thought I'd better write a tutorial, seeing as this is my site ;)

Considering I haven't done too much tribes coding yet, I thought i'd start with something really simple. And also one of the most frequent questions: "How do I start?"


How Do I Start?
First of all, you have to buy Tribes 2. But I'll assume you have already done that.
Second of all, it should be patched to the latest version. I'll asssume you've already done THAT too...

What you really want to know is "how the heck do I start coding?", right? 
Well... You need some things:

Winzip (or similar) so you can unzip the script volumes. 
A text editor (I started using notepad, but may I suggest Tribal IDE. Very good!). 
An open mind (Initially, T2 code looks stupid). 
Lots of coffee (I prefer beer) because you could be coding late nights. 
Now what do you do with those?

First of all, you'll want to create your mod directory. The way that I do it, is create a folder like "tribes2\mymod". 
Then I have some batch files which copy my scripts to the right place, which is "tribes2\gamedata\mymod". 
But you can just create your mod directory in "tribes2\gamedata\mymod". Anyway, that's up to you.

In your "tribes2\gamedata\base" directory, you should find a file called "scripts.vl2". 
This is basically a zip file of all of the scripts. Unzip that file to your mod directory. 
Now in your mod directory you should have 2 folders: GUI & Scripts.

Go into the Scripts folder, and you will see all of the scripts... duh... And, if you go into the GUI folder, you will see all of the GUI files.

"Enough with your stupidity, WTF is a Script?"

Yeah. Fair enough. Sorry.

A "Script" is a file which contains code. Or "script" ;) 
If you open any of the .cs files(.cs's are the scripts), you will see all of that fabulous code. But restrain yourself and dont touch that yet!
Gui files are pretty simple. I wouldn't really call them code. They define the way various Windows/Controls/Widgets(They all mean the same 
thing to me) are placed, look, and act. But gui files are out of the scope of this tutorial. There intuitive anyway...

"Can I test this already?"

Ok. Lets test it. I'm assuming that you have put your scripts in you mod directory like so:

tribes2->
gamedata->
mymod->
gui
scripts
(ignoring the rest of the crap)

Good. Now, in order to run your "mod"(technically not a "mod" yet ;) you run tribes2 with some extra parameters:

I test it in lan mode, so I made a shortcut which runs tribes like so:

"tribes2.exe -nologin -mod mymod"

And that's all there is to it.

"Are you done yet?"

Almost! If you go and look in your mymod/scripts directory, you'll notice (hopefully) a bunch of .dso files. These are compiled versions of your scripts(.cs's). The dso's are needed so that tribes2 runs the code faster. It is also useful for you to distribute your mod, if you dont want to show everyone your code. I understand that, so maybe you can post some tutorials here to give some of your knowledge back to the community ;)

"Can I go now?"

Yes. If you dont want to read the afternotes. Happy coding!


Afternotes:
Whenever you change your scripts, you should delete all of the .dso files. Otherwise, tribes might not recompile your scripts, so you wont notice any changes!!

There has been some confusion about .vl2 files. ".vl2" ("vee elle two", not "vee one two") is the extension that dynamix gave their 2nd version volume files. Confusion arises because the engine that Garage Games are releasing is called v12("vee one two"). I think.

Every time that dynamix release a patch, the scripts.vl2 is changed. This is good for everyone, because it means the game is getting better. It isn't good for us, because it means that the scripts that we are working from have just become obsolete. We can do several things:

Ignore the new scripts and keep going. But this could be bad because there may be an important bug fix, or some other thing important (like the move of the CD check from the scripts to the engine a few patches ago) 
Spend a while and copy all of your old code to the new scripts. (Boring) 
Start over 
Well, #3 is what i've been doing. Then again, the best code i've done so far is a couple of stupid weapons, and some fixes on the shrike ;D (I been too busy on this page). So, I guess the best we can do is #2. What would be really great is if Dynamix released a "coders" changelog, which detailed exactly what the changes were, where, and show us the code too. Then we can decide if a change is relevant to our mods or not. But I guess that's a bit of extra work on behalf of Dynamix, and we cant have that, can we ;)

Anyway. There we go. My first tutorial. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. But then again, maybe it is?