[Barnacle Bill]

A couple of observations on how it works now, which I have not seen mentioned on the board:

1) If you edit Components.txt and change the size of anything, this has no effect on ships in the saved games. It will effect new designs, but existing ones are "grandfathered" under whatever size the components had when you designed them.

2) If you edit Components.txt and delete a component that is used in a design, you will get an error if you open the design screen. I haven't tried this with any examples of the design using the deleted component still around, so I don't know what would happen then. If you obsolete the design using the component to be deleted, and wait until the game eventually purges the obsolete design from the list, then you can delete it from Components.txt without a problem.

3) If you edit the RacialTraits.txt and add or delete any trait, .emp files saved under the old RacialTraits.txt file won't load anymore. It doesn't matter if the empire in the .emp is affected by the change or not. If you restore the old one, they work again. To use a new racial trait, though, you have to recreate all the .emp files from scratch. This means going through all of them and recording all the selections made first, before you edit RacialTraits.txt, then going in and recreating them all after the edit.

The first two are curiosities without a lot of impact as long as you know about them. The third is a pain. I would suggest making the .emp files into text files you could edit outside the game, so that changes to RacialTraits.txt don't create so much work. When you import a .emp file into a game setup, the game could still check them against the current RacialTraits.txt (to see that no trait is used in the .emp which is not in the current file) and check their point total under current files against the limit.