The mods.xml folder allows you to enable and disable mods as well as specifiy their load order. It will be auto-generated if not present and can be found in the lml folder. New mods will be automatically added and are enabled by default. The tag IsExtension in an install.xml file allows you to indicate that a given mod package is extending another mod. If set to true, the extension package will automatically be added as the last item in the mods.xml load order (the default is new mods are added at the top) so it can overwrite other mods loaded first.
Load order / Overwriting mods
The new load order feature specifies the order in which LML loads both, data and streaming files into the game. This is usually not important, unless you want to overwrite files from another mod. If you install a new car model NINEF in one folder and then download a separate texture pack for this model, you may not want to overwrite the texture file in the original NINEF folder. Instead, to keep things separated and clean you can have a separate folder with just the texture in it. By moving this mod down the load order list, its texture file will be loaded last, i.e. it will be the one the game uses.
A few words of caution regarding overwriting. For streaming files the parser is usually smart enough to detect multiple files with the same name and will only ever send the last one according to the load order to the game. This just makes the process a bit quicker and prevents the game from reloading a resource multiple times.
For data files this is obviously not possible, since they do not have unique names. Hence all data files are sent to the game and it is up to the game to respect the load order. Most data file parsers in the game reject new entries with the same name, which means that internally we send the overwritten data file first instead of last, to make sure it is used. All other entries with the same name are then rejected by the game. Alas, things are not always that simple and a few data file parsers, such as carvariations respect the last loaded file, so here we flip the load order again. This is nothing you need to worry about too much, but something to keep in mind when playing around with less common data files in case you run into issues. The log file also indicates the order in which the files are sent to aid debugging.
If you find a file parser that requires overwritten files to be sent last, just tell me and I will make the necessary changes.
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