My original idea was to design a system where you can just add small tweaks to methods in the original game to fix issues. For instance I just updated the GitHub repo with a small tweak that now draws a line between the last vertex and the mouse cursor when building the chassis baseplate (just like RA2 used to have).
That being said, I also added code to tweak the methods that load up components like seen in the first post. Essentially there are 2 that I changed. The first loads up the list of all components in the game (from a JSON file). I hooked into this function and made it append a second set of json to the end that describes the new components I want to add (just the dagger shown in the first post). That json file has an entry that says what Unity prefab to load when you add the component. So the second method I hooked is the one that loads the prefabs. I check to see if the prefab it is looking for is one I've added and if it is, I load it up from a Unity asset bundle I created (if not I just let it load as normal).
So to create the new components, you have to use Unity (free personal version works fine - its what I have) to create a new gameObject and pack it into an asset bundle.
To do that you basically create a new Unity gameobject that has a child gameobject containing the model mesh, and the physics collider (if you've ever used Unity you'd know this is just a normal sort of thing you would do). You also add a child gameobject called 'AttachPoint' that gets converted into an object where RA3 should attach the component when you add it. Then you put it into an asset bundle using the Unity asset bundle option, and then build the bundle (I included an editor script in the GitHub Unity project that will build it for you from the Assets menu). The components.json file is also included in that asset bundle. That probably all sounds like nonsense, but its actually pretty straight forward once you see it in action.
The system could be improved to use multiple asset bundles or something, and there is no way to specify the type of attach point right now (fixed, motor, wheel, swing, socket, plug, etc). But it is just a proof of concept right now.
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