Essentials Series/Introduction to modding

Essentials Series
Introduction Industrial Park basics Editing Assets Templates Links Dispatchers Tikis and Enemies
Sound and Music Extracting Models Custom Models/Textures Custom Animations
Boulders Buttons Cameras Counters Conditionals Duplicatotron Particles Platforms Portals Simple Objects Slides Springboards Stage Controllers Talk Boxes Timers Triggers User Interfaces
Porting a GameCube level to Xbox

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.

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. 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 following pages have a complete list of HIP/HOP files and what they correspond to:

Aside from the HIP/HOP files, there's also the sb.ini (name varies depending on game, but it's the only INI file), 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.