Mod Game Data Storage
Mods can store data about a game in one of four buckets, listed below.
Note that all of these are specific to just your mod. You will never see another mod's data in here and you can be sure that nothing you write will conflict with what another mod writes.
Mod.Settings
Mod.Settings should be used to store configuration options that players set when creating a game with your mod. Once a game is created, they can never be changed. They also get stored in templates.
All hooks can read from Mod.Settings, but the only place that it can be written to is in the Client_SaveConfigureUI hook.
Mod.PublicGameData
Mod.PublicGameData is used to store information about a game that everyone can see (all players in the game plus spectators). It can be read and written from any server hook. It can be read from any client hook except Client_PresentSettingsUI, Client_PresentConfigureUI, and Client_SaveConfigureUI. It can never be written to from any client hook.
Note that Mod.PublicGameData must be a lua table, and when writing to it, you must assign a table directly in instead of changing something in the table. For example:
Wrong:
Mod.PublicGameData.someField = 'hello'
Right:
local publicGameData = Mod.PublicGameData publicGameData.someField = 'hello' Mod.PublicGameData = publicGameData
Mod.PrivateGameData
Mod.PrivateGameData is identical to Mod.PublicGameData in every way except that it cannot be read from any client hooks. This is useful if you want private information that players should not know about.
Mod.PlayerGameData
Mod.PlayerGameData is used to store data that only one player in the game will be allowed to view. This is a table indexed by player ID. For example, to store private information about a player whose ID is 12345, a mod could do this in a server hook:
local playerGameData = Mod.PlayerGameData;
playerGameData[12345] = { Secret='attack jim' }
Mod.PlayerGameData = playerGameData;
This would store data that would only be delivered to player 12345. While server hooks must specify the player ID when writing to Mod.PlayerGameData, client hooks only deal with a single player (the signed in player on the client), so the extra index is not necessary. Therefore, clients can read it as such:
if Mod.PlayerGameData.Secret == 'atatck jim' then ...
Note that the information placed into the player index must be a table, and like Mod.PublicGameData the final table must be written into Mod.PlayerGameData for it to persist correctly.