A few quick 'Gold' questions...

[Talenn]

SJ:

Thanx for the info. I've been 'one stepping' ever since that disaster.

Rollo:

No probs. I was really just checking to see if it will be continued to be updated in the future. One of the things that drove me away from SE4 in the first place was the IMMENSE amount of work required to manually update my game every time a patch was released. Every data file and every AI file for like 40+ races had to be checked and tweaked each patch. That just became a time consuming nightmare that I didnt want to deal with.

I really like the feel of the Devnullmod, but I didnt want to play it a lot and get used to it only to have it be obsolete as soon as the first patch comes out. Also, I like being able to just download new races and AIs at will, and that pretty much requires use of the 'standard' tech set. I'm kind of split at the moment as to which I'm going to play.

I'll keep an eye out for further developments in the mod.

Thanx again,
Talenn

[Suicide Junkie]

quote:

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the IMMENSE amount of work required to manually update my game every time a patch was released

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Really? All I've ever done is glance through the history file, and copy in any good ideas I see.
Even for Classic to Gold, a bunch of search-replaces and a handful of new feature edits was all I had to do to P&N!

Between 1.41 and 1.49, the only change affecting a data mod was:
"14. Changed - You cannot repair an Emergency Propulsion Pod or an Emergency Resupply Pod without a space yard being present."
And that dosen't really require data changes unless you depended on the pods for a special function.

[Q]

I too feared the amount of work to adapt my modifications to SE IV Gold. However it turned out to be only a matter of a few hours mainly for the component file to adjust. I am positively surprised.
To make the AI use drones efficiently however might be a completely different story and I did not yet start this.

[Talenn]

Suicide Junkie:

Hmm, maybe I was just doing something wrong, but those first few patches (say, till about 1.27 or so) required me to manually update a lot of files so as not to overwrite them. The components and facilities files seemed to change almost every patch and doing a file compare to update them was really tedius.

If there had been an easy way, I prolly never would have left SE4 in the first place. I think I was gone before all of the GUI file editors were out there cuz I never saw them...might have made the job a bit easier...

At any rate, maybe I was just doing things the hard way, but it was hours worth of work to get everything up and running again with each patch. After a while, I wasnt playing the game often enough to warrant that kind of investment.

I'm not even going to touch the data in Gold. As much as I am tempted to tinker, I'm going to leave well enough alone and play with the base set. At least then I wont have to do any updating.

Talenn

[Suicide Junkie]

It sounds like you are trying to rebuild your mod from the patched files. Once you've gone beyond about 10 changed components, it is easier to tweak the existing mod, rather than to remod the patched files.

In order to update for Gold, you need to:
- add two lines to settings.txt.
- search-replace in components.txt the allowed vehicle, and can target lists. (about 6 changes)
- insert the seconday image line into all entries of vehiclesize.txt (may be easier to remod this one file, depending on how much you've changed)
- maybe a few other things I can't recall.

I can write a program to do all the above things automatically, which should get your mod running under Gold.
After that, you'd just need to copy the drone bits from Gold.