"Text FileArchive missing label" generally has something to do with versions, IIRC. Look at the top of the file for things as

TXT

or

TXT2
SinsArchiveVersion 194

Ok, posting here as I am trying to figure out how I got something to work in the past but I lost the files and am trying to recreate it.

Basically, creating a passive ability for planets and other locations that will "pull" ships back to the gravity well that have gone off into deep space trying to "chase" a target or some such.  

So far, I have the ABILITY (pastebin links) created, which applies buff to self on the orbit body, points to this BUFF which adds a periodic BUFF 2A to ships within the gravwell and a BUFF 2B to ships outside the gravwell.  Right now I have a modifier to speed/turn/accel just to make sure this part was working and it is.  BUFF 2B applies BUFF 3 if the ship does not have BUFF 2A which should "pull" the ship back to first spawner, the planet, until it is in range to get BUFF 2A reapplied.

I have missed something here and I don't know what it may be.  Something like this worked in the past but I lost the files in an unfortunate OneDrive mishap.  Maybe I don't have the pull hard enough and/or need to disable engines in BUFF 2B or BUFF 3?  I know I currently have the ranges set to 100,000 and 200,000 currently, that was just the last test I performed.  Was originally 80,000 and 120,000.

If anyone knows of a better way to do this I'm open as well.  just want to stop the scenario of a corvette chasing another corvette forever causing all enemies of one or both corvettes to then chase them when they arrive in the gravwell.  This particularly affects AI units and Mercs/Rebels/Pirates.

Thank you in advance for any insight

I would try disabling engines. I did essentially this for black holes in E4X, but I'm not sure of any pull abilities that don't disable engines.

I think there's a value "OnlyWhenMovingFar" for the AIUseTime property of an Ability. Perhaps that helps making things easier on the buff-chain.

Further I would try experimenting with these actions:

- ForceAttackersToRepickAttackTarget

- InitializeMovementTowardLastSpawner (perhaps there's also a FirstSpawner)

- MatchTargetVelocity (of the planet, making the ship go to 0 speed naturally)

- TeleportTowardsMoveTarget or TeleportTowardsTarget (if everything else fails, just teleport them back to the planet for an amount)

Good luck, and let us know what you find out please!

I'm trying to mod more research arrows into the game, but I can't figure out how.

Currently, I'm just trying to get the research window to display an arrow leading from a prerequisite to the tile just above it. This arrow already exists in the game files! BackdropInGame.dds already has this exact arrow, and it's already listed in Screen-InGame.brushes as "ResearchWindowArrowUp1".

Except ResearchWindowArrowUp1 isn't included under the arrowBrushes section of ResearchScreen.window. The problem I'm having is, any attempt to alter what's listed under arrowBrushes breaks the research window UI.

Adding the line "Up1 "ResearchWindowArrowUp1"" before "Up2 "ResearchWindowArrowUp2"" produces this:

All other research windows are similarly broken. (This disaster generates the expected flood of error popups in Developer.exe)

Trying to tease out exactly what the game will accept (new arrow listed at the bottom of arrowBrushes, or simply changing the twos in "Up2 "ResearchWindowArrowUp2"" to ones) just yields the same broken research window every time.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there something important I'm overlooking, or is it just impossible to add new arrows to the research window? I'd greatly appreciate any help with this.

As far as I'm aware, no mods have successfully added a research arrow type that doesn't already exist in the game.

EDIT: Nevermind I figured it out, I'm an idiot  

I've been trying to add 2 extra research levels to RESEARCHSUBJECT_COSTDECREASERESOURCES.entity. The research has 2 extra levels but the cost decrease for the extra levels doesn't apply, any idea why?

The only change I made from the original was in this line:

Entire file: https://pastebin.com/SfwaVMLG

So how do you import an .obj into Mod Tool and have it textured? Especially with multiple texture files on it?

Hi there - I have a few questions I'd hope to get an answer to.  :)   I'm specifically for looking for certain kinds of mods that have been made, but there's so many it's hard to be sure whether what I'm looking for is out there (and if not, if it can be created), so I'll just post it out.

1.  Is there an Improved AI Mod standalone?

I realize that no AI will ever be as good as a human most likely and that you need quite the programmer to make a good one, but if there actually is an Advanced AI somewhere for the game, that would be nice.

2.  No Fleet Income Penalty when not at cap intervals

I like the Tax penalty when upgrading to new fleet levels, but having the tax be retained when your fleet is destroyed has simply never made sense to me (and can make recovery nigh impossible, which one would think would be the point).  Are there any mods that make it so that the tax is only applied if your ACTUAL fleet usage is enough to enter the taxation zone?  (e.g. 0-100 fleet points = no tax, regardless of level upgrade; 101-250 = 9% tax regardless of level upgrade, etc...)

3.  Simple Balance Mods

I realize some mods do balance while expanding the game, I'm just wondering if there are mods that ONLY do balance and nothing else.  Following some games and reading up on things I've noticed that some Capital Ships (for example) are almost never used because they are considered underpowered - the very concept that such an animal could exist doesn't make sense to me...I think everything should have its place and I'm wondering if any Balance Mod has addressed this to the community's satisfaction.

Might have more questions later but for now this will do.  :)   Thanks!

Sorry for posting on a very old thread, I have tried doing some searches and I am turning up nothing. I have read and re-read certain files till I am blue in the face and I can't spot how to do it.

Can someone assist with how to add a fourth race to the Player Setup screen? I first thought it would be a simple modification of racePictureArea but boy was I mistaken! I am trying to look at other mods that have achieved this and I know it must be something in Screen-FrontEnd but I can't see it.

Any help is appreciated.

P.S. Myfist resources no longer work, I found a thread where he has resolved it but his answers were not in the thread and the website is no longer found.

If you're talking about player portraits for additional factions, its not easy. The game only supports 3 factions displaying there. Mods that have added a second row in the portrait texture itself, and completely changed the game UI so that it actually looks like its loading more than 3.

It is a complete hack and requires lots of changes to the UI anywhere the large player portrait is displayed, including the in game diplomacy screen as well.

I am not afraid of the work involved, I am just not sure how to do it. Do I need to add additional lines to load those screens up twice. One showing the area I need and the second showing the area I want? I couldn't see that in the files I have examined in other mods so it probably isn't this solution.

My diplomacy screen is working fine, everything is working fine with my multiple factions. I even built a six portrait UI area for the Player Setup area and the first 3 squares are populated perfectly. I just can't figure out how to populate the bottom three squares.

P.S. GoaFan77 its nice to see you still around on these forums. I haven't been back for many years but I never stopped playing Sins.

You're not quite understanding what I'm saying. The game is only loading three factions. There's nothing you can do to change that.

The trick is to change it so that the three that it is loading actually looks like 6, even though the game is only loading three factions worth Portraits. For example, in Interregnum the Empire and TEC large portraits are actually in one file together. That means you need to hide where the second faction at the bottom appears in the in game UI, everywhere but the player setup screen.

Yup, I'm definitely an old timer here now. xD

Has anyone had any luck adding additional color choices to the faction creation set up? Or has anyone already released a mod that does that? Changing the current colors is easy enough, just haven't had much luck in adding additional color choices to the menu.

Hey everyone, me again. I'm having an issue where my mod crashes things. It's only after I start a game, and always at least several minutes into it—sometimes as long as several hours. When I play using dev.exe, I don't get an error pop-up when the game crashes, nor is there anything useful in the debug file.

I've narrowed it down to an issue with the Vasari Loyalist faction specifically (all other factions will never crash the game). So this should be easy to solve, right? Just track down the files that are unique to Vasari Loyalist, and the problem should be in there. Except I have! Every relevant file is perfectly fine. (I even tested by removing their Titan from the game, then the Solitary Path research item. Still crashes.) As far as I can tell, there are no typos, no mistakes, no errors, no janky buff chains. Everything should legitimately be working fine, except it doesn't.

I've posted my mod files to GitHub. Please help me, I'm at the end of my rope here. I would love to release my mod to the public one day, but I can't do that if one whole faction (my favorite faction!) consistently crashes the game.

Update: used my standard troubleshooting technique (set up a four-player game in dev.exe, all the same (problem) faction, set player to AI, let the game run until it crashes), but this time with all research that's unique to Vasari Loyalists removed from their player file. It still crashed. But... that's it. That research and the player file itself are the only differences between the Vasari Loyalist and Vasari Rebel factions. I just compared the two player files, just in case, but there's nothing in the Vasari Loyalist player file that should be causing a crash. Everything is valid as far as I can tell. What the hell is going on?

Solution: LMAO it was the missing byte-order mark in the player file. Just had to change the encoding from UTF-8 to UTF-8-BOM and bam, no crashes. Game runs for 4+ hours now without any issues.

Nevermind, the crashing problem is back. Same circumstances: only with Vasari Loyalist. Except now I've checked literally everything there is to to check, so I have no idea what to try.

I'd appreciate any suggestions.

I have one clue, but it's not helpful: if it's just me playing Vasari Loyalist, it takes several hours to crash. I hit 3 hours 53 minutes in my latest game before (no matter how often I reload the most recent autosave and try a different set of actions, including doing nothing) the game insists on crashing. But if it's the AI playing Vasari Loyalist, it consistently crashes between 30 and 60 minutes in. So it's something the AI does relatively soon in a game, but something I do relatively late in a game.

Huh, interesting. I stick the unmodded, original player file for Vasari Loyalist in my mod, and everything runs fine without crashing. I copy over the researchInfo list (so, just the RESEARCHSUBJECT item list) from the modded file, run a test, and it crashes only a few minutes in.

So it is something with the faction's research. But it's 90% the same list as the one in the Vasari Rebel player file, so it's something wrong with the faction-specific research, except I already tested by removing that stuff before and it still crashed. So maybe it's how the list is formatted, somehow?

Update: I stuck the (modded) Vasari Rebel researchInfo list into an original (unmodded) Vasari Loyalist player file and it runs fine. No crashes. So now it's just a matter of patiently, tediously changing one thing at a time in that list. Hopefully, there'll be an obvious problem file I can narrow it down to.

Found the problem! The game didn't like how I altered the Kostura cannon's buff chain.

At some point, I'd left the Vasari Rebel faction unable to build the cannon, hence why only Vasari Loyalist crashed. It wouldn't crash the game on building, firing, or cannonshell impact though, which is why it didn't appear obviously broken (I could fire the cannon several times over the course of a game before crashing). That's weird, and it took me forever to figure it out, but I'm glad I've fixed it now.

I don't believe you can increase available colors, just change them.

I'm trying to mod more research arrows into the game, but I can't figure out how.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to do this. You have to design your tech trees with the arrows currently already used by the game.

Does anyone know what the `MinimumArtifactLevel` does in the research entities? I thought that they were all just set to -1 but I just came across `RESEARCHSUBJECT_COWARDSSUBMISSION` which has it set to 1. So, uh, what does that even do?

Other techs also have it, like Acclimatization of Will.

I'm trying to mod more research arrows into the game, but I can't figure out how.

projectfreetv.onl

waplus

Thank you for your guidance with this one. It was the pointer I needed in order to succeed. I managed to get 6 races with the appropriate choices working.

GoaFan77 says it isn't possible to add different arrows, but if your question is about adding more arrows then the game will automatically populate the arrows I believe if you have added the research correctly.