The Glossary

In the wild, changes to a game are often called both, mod(ification) and plugin. For us at Andraste, mods and plugins have a different but distinct meaning.

In general, everything that has the capability of modifying a given application or game in any given way, for us is called Mod (modification).

Plugins, in contrast, are a specific species of mods: They contain code modifications, such as hooks to game functions or writing to game memory, as opposed to asset-only changing modifications.

When talking about the "framework", we refer to the integral andraste component that is responsible for launching and hooking into the game. The framework provides all kinds of functionality for mod/plugin authors to use.

There can be various flavours of the framework, as some games may want to replace specific components to be more specific for their game. If this doesn’t happen, we talk about the generic framwork (i.e. game agnostic, provided by the andraste team).

When managing your UI Launcher profiles, you may have to manage framework versions that can mean varying andraste versions and flavours.

In contrast to the framework, there is the UI Launcher at the outer level and mods/plugins being driven by the framework.