In using the modkit and applying the included community mods on Linux, I ran into a few minor snags. I figured these issues and their solutions should be documented, and I don't see an existing thread about it, so I'm making one.

To verify that the details given in this post are correct, I'm running through the process again with a fresh install of Brigador: Up-Armored Edition v1.65 for Linux (brigador_up_armored_edition_v1_65_56925.sh), as well as Brigador Modkit & Map Editor v1.65 for Linux (brigador_modkit_map_editor_v1_65_56925.sh) which is found under "DLC installers". (If these filenames are no longer current when you read this, then perhaps neither is the information in this post.)

Installation after downloading each to ~/Downloads/:

chmod u+x ~/Downloads/brigador_up_armored_edition_v1_65_56925.sh
~/Downloads/brigador_up_armored_edition_v1_65_56925.sh
chmod u+x ~/Downloads/brigador_modkit_map_editor_v1_65_56925.sh
~/Downloads/brigador_modkit_map_editor_v1_65_56925.sh

I let each installer use the default installation directory:

cd ~/'GOG Games'/'Brigador Up Armored Edition'/

The README file included with the modkit indicates that BrigadorModkit.zip should be extracted into "your /Brigador directory", which I would assume means the top-level folder, except that it also says the "assets" folders should line up. The existing "assets" folder is at game/assets, and listing the contents of BrigadorModkit.zip shows an "assets" folder at the top level, so we should unzip into the "game" folder:

unzip game/modkit/BrigadorModkit.zip -d game

In fact, everything that follows is done inside of that "game" folder, so we can just enter it now:

cd game/

The next step given by the README is to run dumppack.bat, but this is wrong. This file does exist, having been extracted to the "game" folder along with a genpack.bat, but despite this version of the modkit clearly being packaged for Linux, these are batch files for Windows. Each would run brigador.exe, the Windows executable we don't have, with arguments. Fortunately, the exact same arguments do work with the Linux executable as well. So the "dumppack" command is as follows:

./brigador --console -dumppack

The README's next steps are to run the "genpack" command and to launch the game, but I think that can wait until some mods are actually installed, so instead we can go ahead and extract the community compilation. Again the README says the "assets" folders should line up, but listing the contents of Modkit_CommunityCompilation_v2.2.zip shows that everything is inside of a "Modkit_CommunityCompilation_v2.2" folder at the top level. If we let the unzip program create that folder, merging the "assets" folders properly afterwards might be difficult. Instead, we can use a temporary symbolic link to extract the contents of that "Modkit_CommunityCompilation_v2.2" folder directly into the "game" folder.

ln -s . Modkit_CommunityCompilation_v2.2
unzip -o modkit/Modkit_CommunityCompilation_v2.2.zip -d .
rm Modkit_CommunityCompilation_v2.2

At this point, we should be ready to run the "genpack" command. However, when I did that, I got the following error:

ERROR: In 'assets/data/global.json', referenced file 'assets/ui/menu/brigadorsplash_fullrez_alt_grave2rave.png' but could not find in pack file!

This is a problem; when I tried to launch the game after this, it crashed with a segmentation fault. The referenced ".png" file indeed does not exist, as it seems the community compilation's global.json expects a splash image that was removed from the game as of v1.65. We need to fix this splash image reference before running the "genpack" command. To use the default Brigador v1.65 splash image:

sed s/'brigadorsplash_fullrez_alt_grave2rave'/'blood_anniversary_splash-text'/ -i assets/data/global.json

This should be enough to get the "genpack" command to work, but I also noticed that my modded game would show the "Grave to the Rave" update message from 2021 on the main menu, whereas unmodded v1.65 does not. This isn't a big deal, but it annoys me, and we can get rid of that by also undoing another change to global.json as follows:

sed s/'data\.global\.main_menu_text'/'data.global.info0.name'/ -i assets/data/global.json

Now the main menu should just say "WELCOME BRIGADOR" as it does in an unmodified copy of Brigador: Up-Armored Edition v1.65. (On that note, yes, the menu screen does say v1.63 at the top, but the output printed when running the game from the command line says "Jun 29 2022 Release" which means it's v1.65.)

The last step is to run the "genpack" command:

./brigador --console -genpack

Bonus: To save ourselves the trouble of passing these "dumppack" and "genpack" arguments to the Linux executable manually, as shown above, we can also create a shell script from each batch file as follows:

sed s?'brigador\.exe'?'./brigador'? dumppack.bat > dumppack.sh
chmod u+x dumppack.sh
sed s?'brigador\.exe'?'./brigador'? genpack.bat > genpack.sh
chmod u+x genpack.sh

The "dumppack" and "genpack" commands are then simplified to

./dumppack.sh

and

./genpack.sh

respectively.