This project automates most of the conversion work required to convert the legacy (old) Cortex Command mods into Cortex Command Community Project compatible mods.
If you have CCCP pre3 or an even newer version of it then you don't need to install anything. Just go to where you have CCCP installed, go into the _Mod Converter folder and put your legacy mods in the Input folder. Run the Legacy Mod Converter.exe program, hit the Convert button and you can now close the converter. The resulting converted mods are now placed in the CCCP folder next to the other .rte folders (like Coalition.rte). You can now test out your converted mod!
If you don't have the exe in your CCCP directory for whatever reason you can download the latest version of Legacy.Mod.Converter.exe by pressing the Releases button on the right side of this page. Create a new folder and put your legacy mods that you want to convert in that folder. Run the Legacy.Mod.Converter.exe, browse to the folder you put your legacy mods in and you can then use the converter like explained under the Getting started header.
If you get a "Microsoft Defender SmartScreen prevented an unrecognized app from starting. Running this app might put your PC at risk." popup message when trying to run the program you should press More info and then Run anyway.
This program will do most of the conversion work for you, but even though this converter will already automatically apply more than 500 mod changes that have been made between Cortex Command and CCCP there are always more changes out there that haven't been added to the converter yet.
It's for this reason that it's almost guaranteed that CCCP will still crash with a crash message or with errors in the console after conversion, but the point of this converter is to do 99% of the work for you, 100% is only realistic for some tiny mods. You'll want to manually fix these issues using the instructions in the next section.
Conversion rules are a way of informing the program of the changes that have been made between Cortex Command and CCCP and how it can fix them. These conversion rules are stored in JSON files in the ConversionRules folder. You absolutely don't need to have any programming experience to start adding conversion rules to any of the JSON files.
Take for example this line from ConversionRules/Misc.json:
"Round M16": "Round Ronin M16",
What this line of JSON says is that whenever the thing on the left is encountered in a mod, it should be replaced with whatever is on the right of it. So, this conversion rule says that whenever Round M16 is encountered in a mod that's being converted it should be changed to Round Ronin M16 by the converter.
Open any of the JSON files in the ConversionRules folder and add the line "": "", in a similar manner to how the other lines are placed. You can then start putting stuff between the quotation marks on the left and right side like in the example in the section above. The converter will now know how to apply one more conversion rule.
If you put the right things between the quotes that CCCP was complaining about then you can start the converter once more and you'll see that the crash/error should have disappeared. Repeat this process until the mod is fully converted and playable with no console errors (to check for console errors press the ` key in CCCP).
You don’t need all of these programs to get started and feel free to use alternative programs:
- Download “Everything” - Like File Explorer on Windows. Very accurate and fast.
- Download “SourceTree” - Like GitHub Desktop. Allows searching for specific words across all commits, which is super useful when for example you want to figure out what
Nanoriflegot changed to when that's crashing CCCP. - Download “Notepad++” - Like Notepad. Allows mass replacing across thousands of files at once. You can also use an IDE like VS Code for this purpose.
Feel free to submit Pull Requests or Issues on this GitHub project for any additional cases that you'd like to have supported.
If you need help with anything you can contact the creator of this repository directly (#MyNameIsTrez1585 on Discord), or you can ask the friendly regulars in the CCCP Discord server in #modding-discussion for help. It helps us if you mention where you've gotten stuck while reading this tutorial, so please do that! :)