Best way is to just open with any text editor, they are all in plain text.

-Open your Documents folder
-Open the "CnCRemastered" folder, and go into "Mods" -> "Red_Alert"
-Make a folder, and call it... well whatever you want. "RulesMod" or something?
-Add a text file called "ccmod.json" in there, with the following contents:

{
"name": "rules.ini mod",
"description": "rules.ini mod",
"author": "Nyerguds",
"load_order": 2,
"version_low": 0,
"version_high": 1,
"game_type": "RA"
}

(Replace "Nyerguds" with your own name of couse)
-Make a "ccdata" folder inside your mod folder
-Add the rules.ini file into the "ccdata" folder.

There, you're done. Now just load the game, go into Options/Accessibility, go to mods, and enable the rules.ini mod. Now you can edit rules.ini and play with your tweaks.

Hi @Nyerguds, unfortunately your suggestion does not seem to work, at least not when wanting to increase the parameter MaxMoney. I was able to create the mod and activate it in the game, but after restarting the game my change of this specific parameter was not showing.

Are you trying this in RA or TD?

Originally posted by Viriidaoutlaw:

Hi @Nyerguds, unfortunately your suggestion does not seem to work, at least not when wanting to increase the parameter MaxMoney. I was able to create the mod and activate it in the game, but after restarting the game my change of this specific parameter was not showing.

You could've specified what this "MaxMoney" actually is. Had to dig it up myself, and found out that you're trying to change the maximum amount of money you can start with in skirmish games.

Menu and user interface related things are no longer managed by the original game engine; they are managed by the GlyphX part.

Get OS Big Editor and dig through the xml files in the .meg archives in the game install folder; there may be something in there.

Originally posted by EternalNooblet:

Are you trying this in RA or TD?

In Red Alert. Putting it in the base folder of CnCRemastered, as instructed everywhere.

Originally posted by Nyerguds:

Originally posted by Viriidaoutlaw:

Hi @Nyerguds, unfortunately your suggestion does not seem to work, at least not when wanting to increase the parameter MaxMoney. I was able to create the mod and activate it in the game, but after restarting the game my change of this specific parameter was not showing.

Menu and user interface related things are no longer managed by the original game engine; they are managed by the GlyphX part.

Get OS Big Editor and dig through the xml files in the .meg archives in the game install folder; there may be something in there.

Thanks for your reply.

So are you saying that making unit and building related changes DOES work, and the rest does not? That would mean I need to make changes in several files then?

Originally posted by Viriidaoutlaw:

So are you saying that making unit and building related changes DOES work, and the rest does not?

Yes and no... some things do need to be adapted in the UI part anyway to function correctly. I believe the XMLs list prerequisites, for example. But I have no idea if it indeed uses that info to check what construction options to show.

Originally posted by Viriidaoutlaw:

That would mean I need to make changes in several files then?

I suppose so? I never really dug into the XML part much.

I'll have to try this later, I just know I was able to do some crazy things with TibEd that I'd love to do again, like MIG fighters with infinite ammo, Tesla coils that could be placed far from the base...

Originally posted by Nyerguds:

-Open your Documents folder
-Open the "CnCRemastered" folder, and go into "Mods" -> "Red_Alert"
-Make a folder, and call it... well whatever you want. "RulesMod" or something?
-Add a text file called "ccmod.json" in there, with the following contents:

{
"name": "rules.ini mod",
"description": "rules.ini mod",
"author": "me",
"load_order": 2,
"version_low": 0,
"version_high": 1,
"game_type": "RA"
}

-Make a "ccdata" folder inside your mod folder
-Add the rules.ini file into the "ccdata" folder.

There, you're done. Now just load the game, go into Options/Accessibility, go to mods, and enable the rules.ini mod. Now you can edit rules.ini and play with your tweaks.

Hi so i did as you said above and nothing worked. there was nothing different in game or out of game. the last bit was confusing. -Add the rules.ini file into the "ccdata" folder. do you mean that the text file we made is the rules.ini ? even tho we called it ccmod.json and put it where because we already made it in the RuleMod folder

So you went into this topic not really knowing what rules.ini actually is, then?

Are you familiar with the concept of file extensions? Because one is a .ini file and the other is a .json file, and that extension automatically implies it is a different file type. These two happen to both be types of text files, but still. If you want to make sure you do everything correctly, make sure to enable showing extensions, to avoid making files that are actually called something like "ccmod.json.txt". If you don't know how to do that, simply use an online search to look for "show file extensions" for your Windows version.

Anyway. No, I specifically said in which folder to put the ccmod.json file, and in which folder to put the rules.ini files, so clearly they are not the same.

"rules.ini" is a file that is inside the classic game data, which contains all the game stats in an easily editable text format. You can't just "make" it; it needs to be extracted from the game files and put in there. If you try to just create it yourself, all the game stats will be empty, and nothing in the game will work correctly. It needs to contain all the game data to start with.

The file is located in the game's "local.mix" archive, which itself is located inside "main.mix". You can find a main.mix inside most of the subfolders under "Data\CNCDATA\RED_ALERT" in your game installation. While the contents of all of these main.mix files is slightly different (in terms of missions), the rules.ini file in each one is the same.

You just need a tool to extract it from the game's proprietary mix format. If you don't want to mess around with the two decades old XCC Mixer tool to do that, Mobius Map Editor[github.com] can open mix archives and extract stuff from them too.

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.