New Mod: Build-A-Battle

TL;DR summary: I've built a simple mod called "Build-A-Battle" that adds a UniGUI menu which allows spawning ships into the single-player campaign, with options for the type of ship, number of ships, alignment/hostility status, and spawn distance-from-player.

Earlier this year, driven largely out of disappointment that upcoming Expanse "Osiris Reborn" game is going to be a generic squad-based third-person shooter instead of a space sim (which I totally get the economic/market reasons for, but still...) -- and having a new-to-me Steamdeck, along with discovering that there was a fairly complete custom input profile for the game on that device, I decided to revisit I-War2. I had fond memories of the first game, actually bought a Logitech flight stick back in the day primarily for that game, though only ever played the demo of IW2 and my main recollections were that I found it less-engaging than the first game, couldn't figure out what to do/where to go, and visually everything seemed overly "green." Though revisiting it a quarter century later, it's rapidly become one of my fav. games of all time -- a fully-Newtonian space sim, that is also effectively an open world "Belter-piracy simulator," with action-RPG elements, and with a noticeable lack of handholding/guard-rails? Yes please! (also on the lack of guard-rails, I know I've seen it cited as a flaw in the game, but I actually like the "beautiful chaos" aspect of the game, and the way you can E.g. finish 90% of a mission, but still die/fail because a random pirate attack takes out the ship you need to meet up with for mission completion).

All that said, after a few months of obsessively playing the game, and adding some mods like Future Trader, iFleet, etc, I started to come up with a few ideas for mods of my own. This particular mod was originally conceived of as a testing/companion tool for another mod that I have in mind -- without going into too much detail, I'm thinking that IW2 would be a very good fit for a mod that adds gameplay mechanics that (*ahem*) resemble but are legally distinct from certain patent-protected gameplay systems in the Monolith Studios Middle Earth games. But it ended up turning into a bit of a rabbit hole, once I realized that a mod for arbitrarily spawning different types of ships could be useful/fun in general.

And that lead to the mod that I'm tentatively calling "Build-A-Battle" (BaB for short). I have a few additions planned, and want to polish it up a bit before posting to the mods library here, but just wanted to post at this point in case anyone has any feedback/suggestions/pointers for a noob to POG, etc. A copy of the latest build is attached here.

A quick summary:

Mod Features/USP

• UniGUI menu that allows spawning ships in single-player campaign mode
• Lefthand column contains options for selecting ship types, corresponding with the way ships are classified in the in-game encyclopedia (mostly -- I fudged in a few places, E.g. including the Capital carrier with Cruisers)
• Nearly all of the main combat ship classes in the game can be selected/spawned currently (tugs, fighters, interceptors, patcoms, corvettes, destroyers, cruisers, carriers) -- though I don't yet have a solid handle on the 230-odd internal ship types/variations that the game has, so that part definitely needs some refining.
• There are also functional options for: the number of ships to spawn, their alignment/hostility status, and the distance they spawn from the player.

What can it be used for currently?

• Testing/playing around. Want to try out different weapons/loadouts against a ship(s) that won't fight back? Pick "Passive (target dummy)" under the "Alignment" options.
• Fun with other mods: using the iFleet mod, and want to spawn a bunch of ships so you can quickly build up your fleet? The "Passive" alignment works well for that too.
• Want to have a quick fight against a group of hostile ships, while being able to choose the type of ship & how many of them there are (and use your custom loadout, unlike in Instant Action)? Pick the "Hostile (marauders)" option under alignment.
• Or used FutureTrader to buy a whole bunch of gunstars to defend your base, but want to give them an actual attack to defend against? Use "Marauders (hostile)" option under alignment -- and bump up the number of ships to 10-15.

Future Roadmap
The main feature that I'd like to add is a "horde mode" function -- so making it a complete replacement for Instant Action, but within single player mode; so basically an on-demand Instant Action mode within single-player, with support for custom loadouts.

In practical terms, I'm thinking I can keep most of the existing UI as-is -- and add a separate option in the left pane for "Freeform Mode" and "Horde Mode" (with "Freeform Mode" being the existing, "spawn-arbitrary-ship with custom distance/alignment"-mode -- and keeping that as the default). And if "Horde Mode" is selected on the left, I see the right-hand UI changing slightly -- removing the "Ship Class" and "Quantity" options, and showing a set of "Wave Escalation" options (with options for controlling how much each wave's strength will increase compared to the previous wave -- with options for 25%/the default, 50%, and 75%). And also changing/replacing the "Spawn" button with a "Start/Stop" button, since typically horde modes == "infinite waves until the player dies."

Tooling/Dev Process
One of the biggest hurdles I expected thankfully didn't exist. While initially getting started, knowing the age of the game, I was essentially holding my breath waiting for an unpleasant discovery along the lines of "dev/modding for this game requires software that won't run in anything newer than Windows 2000 SP1, so get ready to fire up VirtualBox." But surprisingly, in a good way, getting the SDK installed and working on Win10 was one of the easiest parts -- IIRC, the only quirk I ran into was that I had to copy over flux.dll from the game's install folder. That, and making some tweaks to the compile.bat script, so that it would also create a zip file copy of the mod & copy it to the game's mods folder.

And yes, I used AI -- Gemini specifically -- to write the actual code. While I do know how to code, I haven't worked with POG or done game modding before, and it's been decades since I've touched C.

If that's an issue/sticking point for anyone, I'll just say that I hear you -- I'm as averse to low-effort 'AI slop' as the next person... probably more so, working in a technical/creative field. I do software/web application development for a living, and from that context I can say that this was definitely not 'low-effort' (not in the literal sense at least, it's taken about 15-20 hours so far); it was more like dev projects I've worked on that involved managing junior developers. And in many ways more hands-on, since I was basically doing every part of the dev process except for the coding -- compiling each updated version of the POG code, testing, providing feedback on the results/documenting what worked & what needed to be fixed, "feeding" Gemini samples of POG and header files from other mods for reference/guidance, tracking down the list of internal names that the game uses for ship types (after getting stuck for an hour or two with a mostly finished UI, except that it couldn't actually spawn anything other than the "old_destroyer"/Bastille-class destroyer).

Conversely, if your reaction is "that sounds like a good idea, I've had a mod concept rattling around my brain for a while but don't know how to implement it, where do I start?" Now that I have Gemini fairly well-trained in the ins-and-outs of POG, I could probably get it to spit out a "quick start" prompt for anyone looking to do something similar, along with a list of source files from the SDK & existing mods that would be useful to provide for reference.

Speaking of which, and as a post-script -- I'm HUGELY appreciative of how many mods for IW2 include full POG source and header files. That's been absolutely invaluable; and 9 times out of 10 when I hit a roadblock where Gemini seemed to be chasing its own tail, the way out ended up being "here are the .pog and .h files for another mod that works in a similar way to what I have in mind, figure things out from that."

Got a few updates made. I haven't really bothered with any sort of formal build-numbering for it so far, aside from copying the zip to an archive folder & sticking a date & time-stamp in the filename -- so this is effectively "build 2026-10-30.0019".

Not all of the changes are functional/working yet, though one fairly significant piece is (I'll leave that to last). The changes:

• There's now a "Spectator Mode" toggle in the left pane of the menu, though it currently doesn't work as intended yet.
• I attempted to fix the behaviour of ships spawned with the the "Friendly (allied)" alignment -- previously they were set to "escort" behaviour, so they acted like wingmen that had been given a "defend me" command. Though that's not working properly yet either, currently ships spawned with that alignment are completely passive & don't react even if shot
• I tweaked the "Alignment" options slightly, and split the "Hostile" option out into two separate options:
  • Hostile (to Player)
  • Hostile (Free-for-All)

The "Free-for-All" option isn't working yet, that's another piece that I need to fix.Though you can probably see what I have in mind: once the Spectator option & the "Free-for-All" alignment option are working, it should be possible to create large battles by spawning in a group of "Independent" or "Friendly" ships, and a group of "Free-for-All" ships, who should attack each other (but not the player's ship if Spectator Mode is toggled on.

And for the addition that does work: under "Ship Type" on the right, I've added a "DEBUG (All Ships)" option, which shows a menu with all spawnable ships (mostly) listed by their internal names from the sims/ships/ in the resource.zip file. I say mostly, since there were a few that didn't have any prefix indicating what faction they belonged to, so I added a prefix for the display name of those ones -- E.g. "navy_default." For context, something I discovered when digging into resource.zip was that there wasn't a single file for each ship that could be modified with different attributes (loadout, hull colours/decoration, etc) as I'd expected -- but instead the files defining the ships are organized by faction, and most of the factions have their own separate variation of most ship types. I was planning to have options in the main Ship Type menus for a "typical" version of each ship, but the way the ship info is stored/organized under-the-hood has made that a bit tricky to figure out which variant of each ship to use, since there's 5-6 variants (or more) of most ship types. So I'm planning to use the "DEBUG" category/menu to spawn each of them so I can take a look at them in-game.

If anyone has any ideas of the best "typical" variant of each ship type to use, I'm definitely open to them. I do have the list of internal ship names in a few different formats that I could share: raw output of running the "tree" command on the sims/ships/ folder, lists of the ones that successfully spawned and the ones that didn't, and a CSV list of the ones that are spawnable. Which I'd also be happy to share if that's of use to anyone else (assuming it's not already readily available info & I haven't just reinvented the wheel).

Screenshot & latest build attached.

Got some more progress made, latest build attached -- not bothering with a new screenshot this time, as there are no visible UI changes.This is "build" 2026-10-31.2124.

The changes from the last build:

• The "Spectator Mode" option now works -- if you spawn ships with the "Hostile" alignment, they will attack you if spectator mode is off/the default, and will ignore you/stop attacking if spectator mode is toggled on. Though I haven't tested yet to see if that setting also applies to "normal" hostile ships that the single player game spawns itself.
• The "opposing teams" functionality is now mostly working -- I re-worked the UI for that slightly, so there are now dedicated alignment options for that: "Team 1 (Navy)" and "Team 2 (Marauders)". Ships spawned on team 1 will now automatically be hostile to & attack ships spawned on team 2, and vice-versa. Though it's not working entirely reliably yet, still a few quirks with things like ships going on the attack initially, but then going idle/passive once their target is destroyed, even if their are other "enemy" ships still present.

I've also ended up switching from Gemini to AI Studio, as it seemed that I was running up against the limits of Gemini's abilities -- mainly after getting stuck in a few "feature 1 is fixed, but now feature 2 is broken; and now feature 2 is fixed, but feature 2 is broken again" loops. So far, the results have been better.

Also spent a bit of time digging into the code myself, partly to try to figure out the parts Gemini was getting stuck on (and partly because I do want to have more of at least a high-level understanding of how the code works & what it's doing). Two main observations from that are that I have even more admiration for what people have been able to accomplish with mods for this game, seeing the limitations they were dealing with -- in particular, it seems to be nearly impossible to use "DRY" coding patterns for defining UniGUI menus. E.g. in a modern language, if I had to use the same nearly-identical code to output a list of/buttons for 33 ships, my first inclination would be "put the code for the buttons in a function, put the list of ships & their details into an array, then do a while/for loop through the array of ships, and run the code to generate button for each ship." But doing that in POG/with UniGUI, as far as I can tell the only way to do that is to write out the full code block to generate the button for every individual ship -- and 33 ships means repeating the same 3-line block of nearly identical code 33 times.

In the same vein, trying to wrangle sizing & vertical positioning of multiple UI elements in UniGUI menus is a real challenge -- especially coming from web layout, where that's usually relative -- E.g. if you increase the height of the top element in a column by 10px, then all of the elements below it automatically get shifted downwards by 10px (unless you go out of your way to use absolute positioning). But with UniGUI, the height and position of elements is all relative: you set the y-position of the top element in a column, then its height, then you have to add both of those to figure out the y-position that the 2nd element will need to have, and then repeat that process again if you have a 3rd or 4th item in the same column. And if you update the height or position for any element except for the bottom one, then you have re-do the calculations for y-position of all the elements below it. In a lot of ways, it makes me think of a "worst of both worlds" mix of print & web layout -- everything is statically-positioned like it is for print, but all the sizes & positions are defined in code like it is for the web.

Super cool to see some new development. I have recently done the thing with the (cheap, open-weight) AIs and built a new POG compiler/decompiler that has brought the byte-exact roundtrip up a bit from the pc.exe/community decompiler roundtrip. Significantly it preserves resolved symbol names and makes debugging and probing easier. I'm working on a bunch of IWar2 related stuff, but the compiler and a strict Bring Your Own Assets deep inspection documentation project (which also cover a handful of mods, including Torn Stars) is all that has come out of it yet. I haven't thought about releasing these, but seeing that someone is actually doing IWar2 mods (still/again), maybe it could be interesting to someone else? I would need to do a pass to make sure I'm really as strict about copyright that the project claims before publishing, but that's good work to do anyhow. Let me know if it sounds interesting.

PS. Since you're doing assisted coding I should add that the documentation project is agent-friendly and ships an "iwar2-nerd" skill; it can explain the inner workings of pretty much anything in the game; the script layer (POG), the glue-layers, the VM and the pog/pkg bytecode, the renderer, the GUI or the game mechanics behind the story beats of the game. With the project built/regenerated, agents can use it as a reference and code POG pretty flawlessly. 

Super cool to see some new development. I have recently done the thing with the (cheap, open-weight) AIs and built a new POG compiler/decompiler that has brought the byte-exact roundtrip up a bit from the pc.exe/community decompiler roundtrip. Significantly it preserves resolved symbol names and makes debugging and probing easier. I'm working on a bunch of IWar2 related stuff, but the compiler and a strict Bring Your Own Assets deep inspection documentation project (which also cover a handful of mods, including Torn Stars) is all that has come out of it yet. I haven't thought about releasing these, but seeing that someone is actually doing IWar2 mods (still/again), maybe it could be interesting to someone else? I would need to do a pass to make sure I'm really as strict about copyright that the project claims before publishing, but that's good work to do anyhow. Let me know if it sounds interesting.

Yeah, that definitely sounds interesting! I haven't run into any major roadblocks with pc.exe itself or gotten to the point of attempting to decompile any existing pkg files -- but the documentation sounds like it would a big help! 

PS. Since you're doing assisted coding I should add that the documentation project is agent-friendly and ships an "iwar2-nerd" skill; it can explain the inner workings of pretty much anything in the game; the script layer (POG), the glue-layers, the VM and the pog/pkg bytecode, the renderer, the GUI or the game mechanics behind the story beats of the game. With the project built/regenerated, agents can use it as a reference and code POG pretty flawlessly. 

I expect that would be extremely useful! That's the part that's turned out to require the most "legwork" with my own mod experiments, hitting points where I need details on the game's inner-workings that I don't already know & that AI can't reliably infer from code samples. E.g. through trial-and-error trying to get the "opposing teamsbattle-sandbox" functionality working, I seem to have accidentally recreated the way the single-player game handles the "search for hostiles/approach and attack if spotted" logic (once I realized it wasn't simply a matter of just assigning faction alignment to spawned NPC ships, and they had to also be given periodic "search for hostile contacts/hostile found, attack" orders).

And I see that you posted a github link, I'll give a try shortly!

Made some more progress, I have the "Horde Mode" largely functional now -- updated build attached. There's an earlier test build that I didn't bother posting, as I was mostly using it for finding issues & figuring out the most "sensible default" for the various options. I've modeled it after the game's built-in "Instant Action" mode overall, the latest build mainly adds a similar "score" functionality. The only real issue I found with the earlier build was that it was sometimes possible to trigger the AI ship's "run away" behaviour, causing it to flee via LDS (only seemed to happen when using a large group of iFleet ships in horde mode) -- effectively soft-locking the horde mode by making it impossible to clear the current wave, so the next one would never be spawned. That should be fixed now.

One thing I haven't added, and am a bit on-the-fence about, is functionality to automatically spawn friendly wingmen along with the hostile ships (the way Instant Action mode does). My initial thinking is that that's less necessary in regular single player mode, since it does work alongside other modes like iFleet that allow you to have a fleet of controllable friendly ships; and the mod itself does have the option to manually spawn friendly wingmen. Though on the flipside, I can see it being awkward to have to manually spawn in replacement wingmen during later waves, so I may add an option/some options for that after testing a bit more.

Some quick "release notes"/notes on the changes from the last build posted here:

• In the UniGUI subscreen, there is now a "MODE" in the left pane, with options for "Freeform" (the default, which displays the existing ship-spawning options in the right pane) -- and "Horde Mode"
• If "Horde Mode" is selected on the left, then a different set of options appear in the right pane -- for "STARTING SHIPS" (1, 3, 5, 10, 15), "WAVES" (Infinite, 5, 10, 15), "ESCALATE WAVES BY" (25%, 50%, 75%), and "SPAWN DISTANCE" (15km, 20km, 30km, 40km).
• Functionally, it works largely the same the existing "Instant Action" mode -- you get attacked by waves of hostile ships, clearing each wave triggers another wave of hostile ships, and each wave throws slightly more and/or tougher ships at you than the last wave. And the waves continue until you either get destroyed, or until you successfully clear the number of waves you select (if you select something other than "Infinite")
• Below the options, there is a "HIGH SCORE" display (the value for that should be preserved in game saves); and at the bottom, there's a "START HORDE" button -- clicking that closes UniGUI and starts horde mode.
• While horde mode is running, there's some basic status display in the middle of the screen/below the targeting reticle -- notice that horde mode is starting, confirmation of each wave cleared, and notice of next wave starting. The current score is also shown below that, temporarily switching after you destroy one of the horde ships to show its point value.

The latest build is attached (2026-11-12002:05) along with screenshots of the updated UI.