Newbie pulling hair out

[Purna]

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.

[Suicide Junkie]

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.

[Malamitto]

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!

[Purna]

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.

[Phoenix-D]

"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

[Purna]

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.)

[Instar]

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).