Ack! Modder help needed for TechAreas

[Baron Munchausen]

quote:

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Originally posted by Shadow99:
I was finally able to get around to adding my new tech areas to techareas.txt & after hours of creating, organizing, & fixing typos I tried to start up SE4. SE4 responded with "error cannot load techareas.txt"! Has anyone else tried adding techareas to SE4 before & did it work for you?

I should note I'd run into all sorts of hassles trying to edit this file as notepad didn't want to alter the file (though wordpad had no trouble except to ask me if I really wanted to make it a text file)...

I had finished 90% of my mod (this was basically the Last step before final beta testing) adding 8 new tech areas & allowing the research of items already added earlier (though not usable), so this is kinda a major set back if SE4 won't accept new tech areas...

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I have extensively modified the tech areas in my custom copy of the game. However, just today I tried something new. I tried to give a tech area TWO prerequisites instead of one. What did the game say? Error: Cannot load Teachareas.txt -- argh! It seems that despite the field where you give the number of required techs it cannot deal with more than one. Did you create tech areas requiring more than one prerequisite tech? Change them and it will probably work. Other than requiring ONE blank line between entries it is fairly forgiving. I'll be reporting this new bug to MM after I post here.

[Shadow99]

Jubala I've used UEdit before, but It did more than I needed... My preffered app is Cetus CNotepad, but even though it creates plain ascii text files I get errors when I edit SE4 in that app... Even the edit command in DOS tells me they are standard txt files, but apparently that isn't enough so I use MS's tools for the moment...

& Baron indeed I did... I sectioned Shields into many types of specialty Shields (ECM, System, Cloaking, good old Phased, etc) which each required 2 tech areas to develop...

I guess this is something it would be nice for MM to fix... & I'll resend a note about my prob to MM with what seems to be the prob tomorrow if I can...

thanks

[Noble713]

Hmmm, you're right, it won't accept 2 tech requirements. This is interesting, as I'm sure it used to work fine in the Version that shipped (or was it the .99 demo?).

[Shadow99]

Just wanted to add it did indeed fix that problem, though now I have to figure out another good way of limiting you from having some of the 'better' shield types to early on... & of course I need to figure out a way for the computer to even realize it should build them as well... but that can wait a bit...