ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Firstly, can I say a well done to darkgod for this game, just 'what the doctor ordered' for those working across multiple platforms.

Having finally finished a game to the point of gaining Adventurer, i'd like to try and add a few esoteric features.
At least from the off-line player perspective, and from a linux users direction, after I worked out what was needed to do to sort out my initial problems (http://forums.te4.org/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=48860).
Can I ask a few silly developing type questions?
I've looked at https://te4.org/wiki/Main_Page, but I have a couple of basic questions still, before I go any deeper.

1- do i need to recomplile everything to include some object I have created, or can I just copy the files into the relevant directories of a working version to try it out?
2- Is there a set of very basic instructions for creating each type of object (players character type / item / quests / etc.)?

No doubt there will be more depending on your answers.

and thanks again for such an enjoyable game.

OK, i've done a lot of reading and playing around and have sort of worked out 2- above, but 1- confuses me. I can create a tome zip file and add it to the addons, but I want to be able to dynamically play around if I can and that doesn't seem possible.

Are you making addons or changing base game assets directly? If the former, you don't need to zip things up, just having everything in a folder in Talesmajeyal/game/addons/tome-youraddon will work perfectly well. If you are changing base assets, they need to be unpacked into their normal directory, and the zipped version stashed outside of scope. I do all my edits in Notepad++ while the game is running, but you will have to quite the module and re-load in order to recompile. The only way to do things fully dynamically would be to re-load files from the development console, and I'm afraid I don't know if that's remotely possible.

Thank you Lokean, I shall persevere with the character first I think and then go from there.