mod_town_pack/docs/en.md

Town Pack — town, home and bar backgrounds with bar ambience

Town Pack is ready-made scenery for a story set in a small town. It supplies three painted backgrounds — a street corner at the town entrance, the vestibule of a house and an evening bar — and the bar's ambient sound loop. It contains no story, scenes or characters: a game decides where the pictures appear.

Two built-in games already share it. Cthangover uses the town entrance and the vestibule; the My Novel template uses all three backgrounds and the bar ambience. Because both games take the same files from this mod, a fix or an improved picture in Town Pack reaches both.

What is inside

The town entrance, town/town_entry: a cobbled street corner with striped shop awnings.

The home vestibule, home/vestibule: a hall with a staircase, an armchair and a painting.

The bar, bar/bar: tables with lanterns, a counter and shelves of bottles.

The bar ambience, bar/bar_ambient: an Ogg Vorbis loop of bar atmosphere for the Ambience sound channel.

All three pictures are 1920 × 1024. Each has a grey companion file with the same name and a _depth suffix:

You never see a depth picture directly. When a background is shown, the game also loads <name>_depth and passes it to the lighting system, which uses it for lights placed over the scene. A background without a depth companion still displays normally.

Where you see it

• Cthangover: the town_entry scene (the town entrance) and the home_vestibule scene.
• My Novel template: my_novel_town, my_novel_home and my_novel_bar. The bar scene also plays bar/bar_ambient.

The same town entrance in the My Novel template, where it opens the game with a line of narration:

And in Cthangover, where a different story offers its own choices over the same picture:

Town Pack is part of both games' collections, so it is loaded with them. Installing it does not add these places to an unrelated game: a game has to use the backgrounds in its own scenes.

Use the backgrounds in your game

1. Add town_pack>=1 to your content mod's depends list.
2. Add town_pack>=1 to your game's collection, as the My Novel template does in its Assets block.
3. Refer to the resources by their names below. Names are relative to backgrounds/ and sounds/ and have no file extension.

// mods/my_game/manifest.json — add to the existing list
"depends": ["town_pack>=1"]

A scene that shows the bar and plays its ambience, taken from the template's my_novel_bar scene:

{
  "name": "my_bar",
  "defaultBackground": "bar/bar",
  "defaultAmbient": "bar/bar_ambient"
}

A scenario can also change the picture during a dialogue:

background town/town_entry
text "The street is empty at this hour."

The available names are:

town/town_entry     backgrounds/town/town_entry.png
home/vestibule      backgrounds/home/vestibule.png
bar/bar             backgrounds/bar/bar.png
bar/bar_ambient     sounds/bar/bar_ambient.ogg

Replace a picture for your game

To change a picture without editing Town Pack, ship a file with the same relative name, for example backgrounds/bar/bar.png, in your own mod and declare town_pack>=1 in its depends. The mod that depends on the owner is loaded later and wins. If you replace a background, also ship a matching _depth file with the same name: otherwise Town Pack's original depth picture is still found, and lights follow the old picture's layout.

Without the dependency, two mods offering the same name have no defined order; the resource map tool reports that as an error.

If something is missing

1. A black or missing background usually means a misspelt name. Names are case-sensitive and use /.
2. Check that Town Pack is included in the game you launched, not only installed.
3. No bar sound: check that the scene's defaultAmbient is bar/bar_ambient and that Ambience is enabled in Settings → Sound. Sound playback is provided by the Audio Engine mod.