Newbie pulling hair out
 

I've had this wonderful game for almost two months now, and twice now I have had a problem running SEIV on my Dell windows XP POS. When i try to run any number of downloaded races and shipsets, SEIV gives me A TON of errors in regards to the settings file. Not only does this prevent me from using most races I want to download, it prevents me from even starting any mods that contain any new races. This is driving me nuts. Does anyone know why SEIV is doing this, and what I can do to stop it?

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

You're probably using races designed for an earlier Version of SE4.

Does it say "blah blah blah not found in AI_settings.txt"? or similar?

Phoenix-D

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

If the races are part of a mod, it is likely that you downloaded the SE4 classic Version of the mod.

Check to see if there is a Gold Version of the mod available.

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

Yeah, the record "blah blah blah" stuff does sound about right, that would explain why some are working and some are not, I guess I'll have to go find some newer Versions of the races I want to use.

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

If you want you can also add the lines it complains about yourself; just copy/paste them from a race that works.

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

here is a link that might be of help:
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...&f=23&t=004966

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

Believe me, Malmitto, I had the same problem recently. You just have to edit the old races, and there are more than enough experience players here to tell you exactly how do it. I just had to modify some races Last night that I downloaded. It's not that hard. Just a matter of cutting and pasting.

[ August 26, 2002, 19:04: Message edited by: gregebowman ]

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

It seems like SEIV is not very good about being upwards-compatible. I'm surprised this isn't on anyone's wish-list for future Versions.

Sure, it might be hard to make a mod-race take advantage of new technologies, but it should be easy enough to give all of these new fields reasonable default values, which is what everyone is doing with the cut'n'paste technique. Old fields should always carry the same semantics, too...if anything major changes, a new field should be defined, and the deprecated one should just be ignored.

Each of these files should also have a Version/revision number as a field, so that you could set an option like "Gold Version AI only" in your setup screen.

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

SE4 is pretty darn good about being forwards compatible!
Look at any patch, and you will see that savegames and mods all still work.
Classic to Gold is NOT a patch, and is NOT a reasonable comparison.

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

Wow, the cut and paste trick went a long way towards solving the problem. Thanks to everyone for those suggestions, the only problem I have now is with a pesky MOD that won't seem to function, but thats not as big an issue as getting the older AIs to work.

Thanks!

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

Oh? Pardon my ignorance. I was under the impression that Gold was just Classic repackaged with a bunch of mods and a new manual. But I am new to the whole series with Gold.

It can help to avoid confusion like this by bumping the major revision number when making a non-upwards compatible change in the software.

The progression from IV to V does not introduce the ambiguity that arises when going from "Classic" to "Gold". And no one would expect SEIV files to work unmodified on SEV.

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

"It can help to avoid confusion like this by bumping the major revision number when making a non-upwards compatible change in the software."

They did..1.49 is the Last classic patch, and Gold as installed is 1.60.

Phoenix-D

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

Well, I agree they bumped some number. Whether it was the major revision number or the minor revision number really depends a lot on the software developer. To me, 1.60 looks like it should be a minor, upwards-compatible patch on 1.49, just as 1.78 is a minor, upwards-compatible patch on 1.60. I might have thought otherwise if Gold came out as, say, 2.08.

Either way, in my short time on this board, I have observed that some customers have expectations that mods developed for 1.49 should work on 1.60. Apparently, they often do not. That situation can be solved in at least two ways:

1) Improve the upwards compatibility between major releases.

2) Adjust customer expectations by clearly distinguishing the products.

I still think that (1) would not be all that hard, and some effort here would potentially increase customer happiness some small percentage. (Not as much as Urban Pacification.)

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

Backward compatability is especially tough if you add new features, which MM does a lot of sometimes. The original AI files from say, Version 1.00 lack a lot of lines that 1.49 has (well, a few I think).

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

Converting from Classic to Gold isn't all that difficult...there are only a few additional lines in the data files - which are documented on this forum somewhere.

Re: Newbie pulling hair out
 

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">That's the link Rollo posted below, the same thread as the one in my sig.