All the mods in the installer should have these tags, and as of 0.76b1 the lobbies will have access to them. I personally want to change the list/drop down box mod selector into a much prettier and more useful tool using this, and any old mod not implementing the tags correctly will look plain weird, that or itll look like little efforts been put into it.
Another example of weirdness in the lobbies from not using these tags would be the battle list. The new lobbies have started using the abbreviated versions of the mod names instead of the actual names in the mod column of the battle table. If the mod doesn’t update the tag or puts in something like n/a or moo it’ll look weird.
However, some people still don’t get it, so I’m going to explain it clearly in one place with diagrams, that way modders aren’t chasing around the forums playing jigsaw
The magic diagram of explanation
Some of these tags where added by me, some by trepan, but they don’t replace any of the older tags.
Here we can see that BA and CA are not original games, they’re mods of TA. This is why their game tag would have the value “Total Annihilation”, and their shortgame tag is “TA”.
shortgame and shortname are the abbreviated versions of the name and game tags. BA instead of Balance annihilation, EE instead of expand and exterminate, and so on.
EE is an original game, it is not a mod of another game, therefore the official EE content will have the same values for game and name, as well a shortname and shortgame. A mod that was pure OTA from cavedog with no changes, aka zwzsg classic TA would have the name=Total Annihilation; and shortname=TA; as well as game=Total Annihilation; and shortgame=Total Annihilation; because it is the original, the official unmodded content.
The mutator tag should contain the value official if it isn’t a mutator and its playable. If it’s a mutator or variant of the mod then it’ll have a different value, such as the ‘deployment’ mutator. Putting in mutator=deployment mutator; would lead to situations such as “You are playing the deployment mutator mutator”