General Modding Questions Thread (All Welcome)

No, the artform of proper patching died many years ago.  Its just a matter of shutting down, replacing the file, and restarting.  In the grand scheme of things, replacement is by far less complex.

I'm a bit biased as I spent my career in the telecommunications sector, where 99.999% and now 99.99999% uptime reliability was an industry mandate.  That very small amount of downtime was "reserved" for outages/crashes  But now with the architecture being fully distributed, even we dont properly patch anymore.  I dont know anyone who does anymore...

Just keep a copy of the original in a safe place, and have a good version control convention.

Thanks it's just doing a complete file replacement for a tech tree mod is going to introduce all kinds of compatibility issues .

Another question, i've tried editing ComponentClasDefs.xml but adding a new class there produces an enumeration error. I think i've found the .xcd files that handle that but editing those seems to have no effect, anyone familiar with editing this sort of thing care to lead me through adding a new class to the relevant xml plus any other file entries i have to make for dependencies sake. 

Yeah, don't mess with the Schema - it's not moddable and there's apparently no plans to make it so. Changing it in the mod folder does nothing, and in the game folder just results in a horrible post-menu crash. 

I had the same issue when trying to add a strategic resource. I believe that the schema is basically saying that the only valid values that can be used for the uniqueid are the ones listed in Enums/ShipComponentTypes.xsd - itself another schema file, and thus un-editable. I know of no-one who's found a way round this (though I've only really searched in the case of adding resources), but if you do find a way then it'll probably unlock a lot of other potential changes.

Well bugger.

Thats a bit of an issue as i'm setting the dread lords up to be fairly unique in their weaponry and defences. Specifically they don;t use separate modules for each type, they get universal modules that whilst less powerful in any one area, (meaning they suffer more against mixed defences wit weaponry, defences get a separate unique aspect that accounts for their weakness), are a lot more mass efficient for broad spectrum uses. In mean sure i could use an existing weapon and defence type but doing so is not exactly ideal for getting the game to use them intelligently.

Hmmm, need to think on this some more. See what else i can do.

Thanks for pitching in though.

You can always use the EscortCarrierModule type, that's currently unused

It might be worth seeing what happens if you re-activate the cloaking devices that are presently commented out, too - they might have component types that are usable in the same manner.

ooh yeah, I'd forgotten about those!

I suspect it will 'work' as a container, so long as you give it a handled PrimaryStat. I expect the cloak itself wasn't included because the AI couldn't handle it - perhaps there are even models for it in-game, though I haven't seen them. There also isn't currently a ship component which uses them - though it'd be interesting to add one

From looking at the schema the cloaking module stuff was never implemented, i'll have to try the carrier module idea out later. Having a weird localisation fle issue. The inputted text doesn't appear to be getting used and i'm not sure why. Relevant sections of code. It's specifically the display name that's not showing up.

And

Huh. Again, there's nothing wrong with this section of xml. Like, at all. Can you show us the entry immediately before it? There may be an error there which is preventing it reading the research chamber.

Complete XML text file:

Also here's a screenshot of the in game, notice how the name displays in the building list but not on mouseover...

And a fresh rar with the files in inn case you want that too.

http://www.filedropper.com/dreadlords2

Again, not much looks wrong there - though the fact it's appearing correctly in the list but not on mouseover suggests the problem might be in the building definition itself, rather than the localization files. This again looks ok, though. Try rewriting in a new file; might be some weird unicode issue or something.

This has been commented out. Remove the green symbols to make the code live again.

<!-- <StringTable>
<Label>DreadResearchChamber_ShortDec</Label>
<String>Improves Research and Military Manufacturing</String>
</StringTable>

<StringTable>
<Label>DreadResearchChamber_Dec</Label>
<String>The military prototyping centre is where all the technology our military machine needs is developed, from starship, to personal weaponry, to manufacturing centres to the Logistics buildings required to support them.</String>
</StringTable> -->

That's not the bit which is broken, though - it's the one above the comment which is refusing to run properly.

Oh! Ok, I will have deeper look at the files.

First thought is that maybe there are too many characters in <Something>BlahBlah_TooManyBlahBlah's</Something>

<InternalName> in other files certainly has a character limit. Maybe here too. And when there is nothing else it could be in the code, certainly a suspect. Maybe its 19 and not 20. Edit, No It depends.

Yep! too many characters in the text <String>Military Prototyping Facility</String>

<StringTable>
<Label>DreadResearchChamber_Name</Label>
<String>Military Prototyping Facility</String>
</StringTable>

<StringTable>
<Label>DreadResearchChamber_ShortDec</Label>
<String>Improves Research and Military Manufacturing</String>
</StringTable>

<StringTable>
<Label>DreadResearchChamber_Dec</Label>
<String>The military prototyping centre is where all the technology our military machine needs is developed, from starship, to personal weaponry, to manufacturing centres to the Logistics buildings required to support them.</String>
</StringTable>

If you shorten this to something like <String>Military Prototyping</String> or something it should work.

28,29 or 30 characters, including spaces, depending on the characters, seems to be the limit for this string. To clarify why it may vary depending character type, its the total length of the string which matters. So if your string has lots of wide upper-case characters you won't be able to fit as many in as compared to a string with all skinny characters like lower case "i" & "l". 

Some of the other ImprovementDefText...... _Name strings will have to be shortened also.

Ahh cheers, so far only two seem to be affected, the one noted and the T3 version of the research Lab, weird that that's affected when the other 3 aren't and they're much longer. probably a weird formulae or something for determining the limit.

Thanks for figuring it out.

Hmmm, that implies the lengths of the strings are determined by the field they match in improvements.xml. That's bad - we'll need to test each string 'type' individually in order to determine max length (I'd hoped it was in the schema, but IIRC then in C you declare the max length of the string, so I'm guessing it's buried in hardcode).

Yeah lots of damms being said here too Naselus. Here's a selection of the finalised strings that do work so everyone can do length comparisons with them.

Yeh! the string length is not determined by the schema and as such I don't think anything to do with the xml. Likely the field widths are a pixel dimension determined by the UI programming. It may be possible to change the font for the fields thus allowing more text, but don't know for sure yet, as I haven't looked into it. If that is possible, likely it would be a global setting changing the font for everything in that field or field type.

Okay i'm going to go open a thread for testing the version i've got working now. But i thought i'd show you a bit of text that produced a chuckle when i tracked the bug in it down.

Anyone got an idea how to get the AI to use a custom constructor module without using the total conversion methode?

Right now i got it working by getting changing the generic name of the "TechTree" Tech and

replacing the now missing improvements and components with exact copies (only differing InternalName),

but the StarbaseModules are problematic because of the way Mining works (Prerequ Module in StrategicResourceDefs).

So i just added "my" TechTree Tech as an option to the 4 BaseModules.

Can you clarify. Is the AI simply not building ships equipped with the module, or is auto-generation not producing ships using the module?

Also a more mechanics based question i'm hoping someone can answer in case i ever want to play with such values, (i'm allready thinking about my next project as i have a god idea of 99% of the stuff i need/want to do with the existing one). First how does +Diplomacy transfer mechanically speaking into actual relations.

Second aside from the obvious +% tourism income and the very nebulous galaxy control aspect, (as in is it influence, galactic population, percentage of habitable planets controlled, e.t.c), how exactly is Tourism Income determined?

The issue with names being too long like you encountered is entirely a UI issue.

Essentially in tooltips there is an absolute limit to the number of characters the field will accept.  Its not that its specifically limited anywhere but the tooltip window is fixed width, if you look closely in the screenshot you will see the bottom of the text peeping out.  What is happening is once text hits the limit of the fixed width of the tooltip window it tried to wrap the text to the next line, in fact if you make the string long enough you will see the end of the string start to appear in the window as it wraps down.

This is the case in a number of places I have encountered, some windows are dynamic and resize like the desc area of the tooltip window but even then most have an upper limit on how far they will extend.

Would be really nice if the dev's would expose not only the XSD's to modding but the UI files in the screens directory too when we could tweak as needed ourselves.

In regards to your question about diplomacy see the DiplomacyDefs.xml in it you will see a list of Behaviors and MinRelations, the MinRelations is directly effected by diplomacy bonuses, so for example if you have a diplomacy bonus of +2 and relations with a race of 5 then they will be willing to engage in any behavior with a MinRelations of 7 or less.  There does seem to be some +/- effect related to this figure too in regards to the negative actions they are willing to enact against you as well.

Check the screenshot i posted, there's clearly underscores in the out of view text, that was never in the original text. I'm pretty sure there's something else going on there. But i have seen the rest of the behaviours you mention.

Also thanks for the diplomacy explanation, fills in why diplomacy is effectively non-functional. I assumed it just added/subtracted from their opinion of you in some way but if that's all it does and it's a scale of 1-10 when you can have a +3 building on every world, yeah. So non-functional.

As Long as you have the Standard Constructor Module the AI will use this,

no matter how much better the custome one is.