Ok, it looks like I will need to go into a bit more detail about declaring mod packs to the game. You currently do need to tell the game which mod packs you want to have active. You do this by passing the game a script command for each mod you want to have active.
Here's a step-by-step guide:
- find your preferences.empire_script.txt file (in Application Data on an XP machine)
- create a new text file next to it called user.empire_script.txt
- inside there, list your mods like this, one line per mod:
mod my_pack.pack;
The user script gets processed on load, and will tell the game to load your mods in that order. There are a whole bunch of other commands that can be used from there, including dependency definitions and so on, but we'll leave those for now. As I said, this is a quick preview of mechanisms that will be properly documented in the mod dev package.
So, about running 'unpacked'. Yes, the game currently will run unpacked, but doing that will alter the way in which the data precedence works in some cases, which means that as we add more patches it's not guaranteed to keep working. It may be convenient to work that way while tinkering with a mod, and that's fine, it's exactly why the feature exists, but I'd strongly recommend against giving other people mods which work like that. One last note - LtChambers is actually correct when he's seperating the released packs by CA into 'boot' and 'release' categories, but it's a minor distinction which has no real practical value from your point of view - for a modder, the two might as well be identical