Including Extended Metadata

As we covered in the earlier sections, you can provide some very basic metadata on your mod in the special _meta object. There’s actually a few extra bits of information you can also optionally provide, that will be covered in more detail below.

It is worth noting that most of this information is only relevant to the hosted Project Sicario app, not to the merger (PSM). The merger is designed to run without user interaction so if you’re only expecting to be supporting PSM users, you can skip most of this.

_meta

As a refresher, the _meta object is a simple object just allows you to add a little metadata about your patch mod that will be shown to users. The displayName (as you’d guess) is the name that is shown to users. You can also include a description key in this object if you’d like (it’s not required though). The author field is used to show the author of a patch mod, but note that if you upload your mod to a Sicario server, the author field will be overwritten (to prevent impersonation).

_sicario

The _sicario object is where we put app-specific metadata about your mod. The most important/common ones will be group, private and preview

All of these properties are optional.

Group (group)

"_sicario": {
    "group": "NPC Tweaks"
}

Including a group will tell Sicario to visually group matching mods together in the UI. This is optional and should only be used where it makes sense, or you will risk your mod being completely hidden from users

Private (private)

"_sicario": {
    "private": true
}

Marking a mod as private means it will only be visible to the uploader, not to other users. Note that uploaded mods will often be automatically set to private and that private mods are (obviously) only visible while signed in.

Preview/Unstable (preview)

"_sicario": {
    "preview": true
}

Marking a mod as preview effectively flags it as potentially incomplete or unstable. These mods (whether public or private) will be hidden by default, but can be enabled from the build view.

Overwrites (overwrites)

"_sicario": {
    "overwrites": true
}

This is a convenience flag that Sicario uses internally, and that it will show to the user to warn them if a patch might overwrite other mods. I’d urge patch authors to set this flag if their mod changes properties without checking current values.