Smart Mod Manager manages your collection of mods, allows you to quickly switch between them, add and remove mods in any order. It is also capable of merging mods together.
SMM works with nearly all existing mods. The exception is mods that come with their own installers. If you want to install such a mod, it is best to ask its author to provide a "plain" version.
SMM can merge mods together. If two mods conflict with each other, SMM will ask you to choose the more important one. However, it is not always possible to merge mods correctly. Mods that are similar to each other are difficult to merge.
SMM makes mods simple, but does not hide anything from you. The Diagram View shows exactly what is going on behind the scenes. Higher priority mods are displayed above lower priority mods. Links are drawn between conflicting mods. You can click on a link to see what is wrong.
Have a good time playing!
SMM is capable of installing mods without any help from the modder. However, you can add some additional information about your mod. SMM looks for the following files in the same folder the gamedata folder of your mod is located in: description.txt, image.png, and readme.txt.
This is a description of the mod. It consists of several fields on separate lines. For example, if SMM was a mod, its description.txt might have looked like this:
author: Don Reba
name: Smart Mod Manager
version: 1.3
game version: 1.0009
description: Makes mods simple.
url: http://www.smart-mod-manager.org
patch: no
All fields are optional. You can omit any of them. Here is what each one is for:
There can be description files for multiple languages. Add a two-letter language suffix to each translated file, for example: description-de.txt to German and description-ru.txt to Russian. Here is the full list of language codes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes
Also, if you include a picture named image.png or image.jpg, it will be used as a preview picture of your mod. SMM will resize it, if necessary.
If you include a file named readme.txt, SMM will pick it up. Like description.txt, this file can be in different languages. The same way, translations should have two-letter language suffixes, such as readme-de.txt and readme-ru.txt.
Sometimes you want to make small changes to a mod and only distribute the changed files. SMM supports this with a patch system. A patch is like a mod, except that it must have the line patch: yes in its description.txt. A patch must have the same name as the mod it is applied to, but a different version. When applying a patch, SMM replaces files of the original mod instead of merging them with the patch. SMM allows the user to replace patches without reinstalling the original mod. All patches are assumed to be cumulative.
The best way to help improve SMM is to say what you think about it. What do you think is done right? What needs improvement? Feedback is genuinly valuable. There is a discussion forum and an issue tracker for you.
You can also contribute by translating SMM. Translations are stored in language.txt files as pairs of lines. The first line in each pair is the original, and the second is the translation. SMM uses the language of the operating system if it has the right file; otherwise it defaults to English.