Myrd didn't really make it obvious that plugins were stored separately and only loaded by the game's engine, at runtime.
(the alternative would have been that Fear & Loathing be used: by the modders, to fabricate a set of tags that they'd release instead of whole archives; by the end-users, to inject those tags into their archives locally)
(that's more or less the way we can expect to do it now)
At any rate, the plugin-handling source is something we'd gladly have a look at.
As I said, Oni uses pretty much the same system of tags as Myth. If we can add a plugin-loading module to the main engine's DLL and a plugin-writing module to "Oni Un/Packer" (our public tag-managing dev-tool), we'll be happy no end. Alternatively, we could do it that other way (injecting tags into original archives rather than loading them at runtime).
DLLs:
Our main (dis)assembler released a set of minimal DLLs for the demo, Russian and standard English versions. I'll be linking to them soon, here and on the Oni forum and wiki. Meanwhile, you may want to wipe the dust off your copy of Oni and remember how to play it
Apart from that, the modding so far is made of sporadic hacking and scripting. The most systematic effort so far was Oni Team Arena (a series of modular scripts, no tag modding) that emulated multiplayer, with bots. Then there were a number of more or less modular, more or less patch-friendly hacks, such as glass-breaking combos, enhanced weapons, smarter and deadlier AI, recombination or "revelation" of original content... Because of the time required by a full-scale mod integrating all the knowledge, there was only one such initiative and a half so far: a heavily modded (and somewhat buggy) Syndicate Warehouse. Not by me
Answering Myrd, the only alternative to DLLs on the Mac is to add Mach-O sections. Whatever they are
We're PC folks, and while we have added a few features to Omni's port (sometimes without even disassembling it... 
), we (the current "we" 
) probably won't be able to keep the OS X port "up to date".Dislaimer:
About myself. I'm by no means the "lead programmer" there. I hardly know how to code in C++
What I've been doing is monitoring/coordinating/whatever all the knowledge between the few hackers around. I've done some hacking myself, but so far it was all about pushing the envelope in terms of potential.It's hard to make plans at this point, but if we get enough people (old and new) to work on systematic, modular upgrades, there could be something like "Oni 7th Anniversary Edition" by January 2008. The ingredients are there
Lothar & Some Loser: thanks for the tips, I'll check. The reason why we still may want to contact T2 is that, dammit, the source would help a lot!
Depending on how realistic "Oni 7th Anniversary" looks, say, a month from now, it could be quite an incentive for T2 to give us the source.
Dunno... We need to have another look at what we have. And who we have (new content just won't happen without modders)
)