Wanted: Savegame ConVersion!

Jubala · #1 January 10th, 2001, 07:31 AM

I want the game (or a standalone app.) to be able to convert savegames from one Version/mod of SE4 to another. It will be vital for pbem games and would be extremely useful for modders. Any change in the textfiles does unfortunate things to your components, facilities, ships... well, just about everythin!

We tried to upgrade a 0.99 demo to 1.19 full and man did some nasty **** happen then!

So, if the game could run a comparison between the old and the new and make the necessary changes in the savegame I would be a very happy camper.

My curiosity rears it's ugly head:
Just what the heck is meant with the phrase "happy camper"? I know the general meaning, but where does it come from?

Nyx · #2 January 10th, 2001, 07:05 PM

Originally? I have no idea where Happy Camper comes from, but I use it because of the Orz from Star Control 2.

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Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

Jubala · #3 January 11th, 2001, 01:16 AM

Well, Don't know who the Orz from Star Control 2 are. Heck, I don't even know what SC2 is so that didn't help much. Kind of surprises me that nobody else seems interested in a savegame converter though.

Come on, you know you want it, now own up to it and confess!

[This message has been edited by Jubala (edited 11 January 2001).]

Jubala · #4 January 14th, 2001, 04:02 AM

I can't believe I'm the only one who wants this feature. There should be a horde of modders and pbem'ers out there that would kill their mother for this.

apache · #5 January 14th, 2001, 04:36 AM

It's just not possible. You can't possibly change the components on a ship effectively from mod to mod. What if you have a ship with PPBs on it at 30 kts each. Lets say the next patch or mod increases that to 40kts each for balance reasons. How could the program compensate? Change your designs? Make invalid ships?
And what if ship requirements were changed in some way so that ships in your queues are now not valid designs? How would the program fix this? Kill all of your queues? Allow you to build these things?
It just would not work because you either lose half the stuff in your game because the program would delete it because its invalid, or you have a bunch of illegal designs.
You would end up having to do more work to fix what this program would do than it would take to start a new game.

Barnacle Bill · #6 January 14th, 2001, 01:11 PM

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.

Jubala · #7 January 14th, 2001, 04:32 PM

I'm not talking about ships that much. I can live with having my ships get useless (or illegal). All I want is for all components, hulls, facilities and tech levels be the same both before and after. Shouldn't be too hard imo. Besides, ships become illegal and still fly around as it works now too so I don't see that as a problem. Just don't let us build more of them. Or anything else that has become illegal for that matter. That would at least make it playable after an upgrade, change, patch, mod, whatever. As it is now you can just forget it. I know, I tried.