58 · The Construction Mod

The largest and most consequential server-side Tribes 2 mod. It took a team shooter and turned it into a sandbox building game, and almost every later Construction-family mod is a fork of one of the three versions documented here.

The motivation

Unusually for a twenty-year-old mod, it states it plainly in its own readme.txt [mod-script]:

The BASIC IDEA:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We just like to build stuff.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Up to now mods like ninja mod and warped where used to create the wierdest of structures.
However these mods being combat orientated where limited in their building flexiblity.
Therefor the man with the vision started "the construction mod" (or is it the mod named
"construction"?)

That is the whole thesis, and it is worth unpacking because it explains the mod’s every design decision.

Players were already building. Ninja Mod and Warped were combat mods whose deployable systems were loose enough to be abused for construction. People were stacking deployables into structures the mods never anticipated, fighting the tooling the entire way.

Construction stopped fighting it. Rather than adding building to a combat mod, it inverted the priority — building is the game, and combat is a setting you can switch off. The readme is explicit that this is a deliberate narrowing:

“until that day this mod remains for the one intrested in building and only building. But hey, there’s a builder in everyone.” [mod-script]

So the motivation is a genre pivot executed entirely in script, on an engine with no building support whatsoever. No engine changes were possible — Tribes2.exe cannot be rebuilt — so every part of it is TorqueScript and datablocks layered over a shooter.

That constraint is what makes Construction worth studying. It is the outer limit of what the modding surface documented in sections 02–05 can be pushed to.

What it actually is

Launchers ship as batch files [mod-script]:

cd ..\
start Tribes2.exe -nologin -mod Construction

cd ..\
start ispawn.exe 28000 Tribes2.exe -dedicated -mod Construction

— the same -nologin -mod and ispawn.exe patterns Sierra used for Classic [script]. See Launch options.

The versions

0.69a is the most widely forked, 0.70a next [per the user]. The three are incremental, not rewrites.

New packs 0.68a → 0.70a: AntiNuketurret.cs, Effectpacks.cs, door.cs, doorbu.cs, vehiclepad.cs.

Three DSO deleters

0.68a and 0.69a ship three separate batch files for the same job [mod-script]:

Constructs-DSO-Remover-2.1.bat
Constructs-DSO-deleter-1.2.bat
JTLdelDSO.bat

consolidated to one DSO Remover.bat by 0.70a. That is the stale-.dso problem — documented in this handbook as the single most common cause of “my change did nothing” (Debugging) — visible as an artifact of a real mod’s support burden. Three different people wrote a fix, independently, and all three shipped.

Lineage

Construction did not appear from nothing. Its signature weapon carries its own provenance [mod-script]:

//--------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Deconstruct Gun / Construction Tool
// Originally from Hammer Mod. Changed and redone for LuCiD MoD.
// Also Changed again and redone for Construction Mod.
// All changes made by LuCiD from LuCiD MoD & Mostlikely or JackTL from Construction Mod.

Hammer Mod → LuCiD Mod → Construction. And the Credits.txt names a maintenance chain — “JackTL: For maintaining mod from v50a” [mod-script] — so the versions here sit late in a long line.

flowchart LR
    NINJA["Ninja Mod<br/>Warped<br/>combat mods abused for building"] -.->|"motivation"| CON
    HAMMER["Hammer Mod"] --> LUCID["LuCiD MoD"]
    LUCID -->|"Construction Tool"| CON["Construction<br/>…v50a → 0.68a → 0.69a → 0.70a"]
    CON --> FORKS["Later Construction-family mods<br/>mostly forks of 0.69a, some 0.70a"]

The credits connect to the rest of this handbook

Credits.txt [mod-script] names two people whose work appears elsewhere in these pages:

• BadShot — “Taking the time to help me with some nasty bugs. Knowing alot for tribes2 stuff.. and being willing to share it. Helping all those other modders.” He is the author of 26 of the tutorials in the community corpus.
• DynaBlade — “His Awesome function librarys.” Also a tutorial author, and saveBuilding.cs is credited as “a joint effort of DynaBlade and JackTL” [mod-script].

Also credited: Construct (the original idea, testing, the installer), Lucid (code help, the deconstruct gun, the load screen), Child_Killer, T2CC (“Their great forum and putting all that coding power at your very fingertips”), and Mostlikely, who signs most of the version history.

The tutorial corpus, the forum, and the flagship mod were the same small community. The techniques documented in 03 · Content Recipes are the ones these people were writing down for each other while building this.

The licence stance

From Credits.txt [mod-script]:

“I don’t need any credit for this mod, it was created for the people who want to play it (which includes me). Feel free to use any stuff from this mod or ask me about it if you can’t extract it somehow.”

Which is why the fork tree is so wide.

The fork family

Sections 59–68 document the derivatives. Nine of the ten fingerprint closest to 0.69a; Atomic Construction is the one exception, closer to 0.68a — established by comparing MD5 hashes of each fork’s .cs files against all three baselines and taking the closest match. For consistency the table below scores every fork against the same fixed baseline, 0.69a, regardless of which is individually closest.

† Scored against 0.69a for table consistency; Atomic Construction’s true closest match is 0.68a, at 36%.

Read the “Identical to 0.69a” column as how much of 0.69a survives untouched. A high number is not a criticism — Power Edition is additive by design and all the better for it. A low number means the fork rewrote the base rather than extending it, which makes merging anything back essentially impossible.

Installation naming. Almost every one of these installs as GameData/Construction/ regardless of its name — they are alternatives, not companions, and only one can be present at a time. TCCM is the exception, installing under its own name. The directory names under mod-doc-ref/ are review labels chosen for this documentation, not install paths.

Two things you may also see filed alongside these forks, that aren’t documented as forks here. A folder named “Classic Construction” is 100% byte-identical to 0.70a — an unmodified re-release under a different label, not a fork with its own content (see 67 · Atomic Construction for the fingerprint). And “Structural Infinity” is not a mod at all — a server-side patch, “Version 0.7, written by Electricutioner, 5/24/2010,” that lifts Torque’s roughly 1024-object ghost/visibility limit so a Construction server can host larger builds. It requires a modified Tribes2_server.exe and ships matching patched binaries rather than .cs content, which puts it outside what this handbook’s script-fingerprinting method can document.

Why study it

A note on evidence

Claims sourced from Construction’s own scripts, readme, credits, or version history are marked [mod-script]. This is community code by many hands across several years, with inconsistent style and some abandoned experiments still in the tree. Where its comments and its code disagree, this section follows the code — the policy applied to Sierra’s comments throughout this handbook.

Version-specific claims name the version. Where all three behave alike, the text says “Construction”.