Essentials Series/Introduction to modding

Welcome to the start of the Essential Series modding tutorials! My goal with this series is to start at a beginner level (zero knowledge) of modding and progress into all kinds of useful things for modding the game. Although the information in the series will be based mostly on Battle For Bikini Bottom, a lot of it is the same for modding of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, Scooby-Doo: Night of 100 Frights, The Incrediblse and Rise of the Underminer as the five games were built on the same engine, and I will try to point out any differences between them.

Although the tutorials are presented in an order, modding is a non-linear process and you will likely find yourself going back and forth through the pages to understand certain concepts better or review things. If you do not understand something in the tutorials, you are stuck or need help with something, or would like to know something not covered in the tutorials, you can ask for help in the Discussion for one of the pages, or in the Modding Discord server (link to the server on the navigation bar to the left of the page).

Filesystem
We'll be using Dolphin and the GameCube version of the game, so if you haven't yet, follow this tutorial to set up Dolphin to play a modded copy of the game. Modding on Xbox or PS2 is also possible, but I recommend only doing that after you're used to working in the GameCube version. If you take a look at the game's extracted files, you will notice HIP and HOP files in various folders. Each HIP/HOP pair with the same name corresponds to an area of a level (the exception to this rule is Scooby, which only has a single HIP file and no HOP per area). The following pages have a complete list of HIP/HOP files and what they correspond to:


 * Filesystem (Battle for Bikini Bottom)
 * Filesystem (The Spongebob Squarepants Movie Game)
 * Filesystem (Scooby-Doo: Night Of 100 Frights)
 * Filesystem (The Incredibles)

Aside from the HIP/HOP files, there's also the sb.ini (name varies depending on game, but it's the only INI file in the game's root), which is an easily editable INI file containing a lot of general game settings. Right now you'll want to open it in a text editor and set the ShowMenuOnBoot setting to 0 instead of 1. This will make the game start straight into the level file set by the BOOT parameter instead of into the main menu.

Industrial Park
Industrial Park is our level editor for all five games. See the next page in the tutorial to get started with it.