SporeModderFX: The Project pane

The Project Pane is the left side of the program. It allows you to navigate through the files in your project. It looks something like this:

The Project view

The panel is mostly occupied by the project view, which is a tree that is used to navigate all the files of the current project.

As explained in the introduction tutorial, apart from its own files, a project can have multiple projects used for reference and investigation. The project files are the mod files, the other projects are source files. If you enable the Show only modded files checkbox, the Project view will only show the mod files (the ones that belong to the project) and exclude all other files.

To differentiate between these file types, the program uses different colors:

• Black: source file (the file is only present in a source project)
• Blue: source & mod file (the file is both present in your project and a source project)
• Blue, bold: mod file (the file is only present in your project)

When you select a file, it will be displayed in the editor. If you double click a file, it will open a new tab in the editor that can be accessed later.

The search bar

On top of the panel is the search bar. In this bar we can write one or multiple words that we want to find; when we press the button, the program will search that text within all files in our projects (and its source projects as well). Since this might take some time (searching text through thousands of files!) the Project pane becomes disabled while searching. There's a small progress bar below the text field that tells us the progress of the current search.

When a search is finished, the project view will only show the folders and files that matched the search. If you want to remove that filter, and show all files again, erase the text from the search bar and press the button again.

Special items

At the bottom of the panel there's a list of special items, which are common to all projects. Right now there's only one, the Effects Editor