That would be the Accelerated Construction tech, but the base game research.txt only has one "ABILITIES" line (and with techs that have two abilities, they're contained on a single line), so I'm guessing this is a modded research.txt you're editing? I haven't actually encountered this but if two abilities lines work properly in game I'll look at how I can handle that.
As it stands though the tool expects the abilities to be on a single line, so it would remove one or the other if you had two. I'll see what I can do about it this evening.
Modding Tool [1.1.0 Released!]
RE: Modding Tool
Ah yes you're absolutely right, it's a modded research.txt but I didn't realize that particular thing wasn't in the base game. The two "abilities" lines do work in-game. In case it's helpful, I'll put it here, it's from Research Unleashed (and also present originally in the AI Improvement Mod). Maybe it could condense them into one line? Although not sure if that's worth the coding effort.
PROJECT ;106, Enhanced Construction, 2, 32, 1, 3, 0, 0.0,
ABILITIES ;Resupply Ships, 3, 3, 0, 1
ABILITIES ;Increased Construction Size, 2, 2, 400, 0
PARENTS ;105, N
Thanks!
PROJECT ;106, Enhanced Construction, 2, 32, 1, 3, 0, 0.0,
ABILITIES ;Resupply Ships, 3, 3, 0, 1
ABILITIES ;Increased Construction Size, 2, 2, 400, 0
PARENTS ;105, N
Thanks!
RE: Modding Tool
It's not as difficult as you might think to deal with, the program reads both lines already but because it's only expecting one ability line the second simply overrides the first.
Anyway, should be sorted now with revision 2. You'll get a note in the input log about it if it happens when you load a mod.
Anyway, should be sorted now with revision 2. You'll get a note in the input log about it if it happens when you load a mod.
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Nightskies
- Posts: 271
- Joined: Tue Aug 09, 2016 3:00 am
- Location: Colorado
RE: Modding Tool
Hello, Sabranan (and others interested in the project). Let me tell you about my day. It started with a solid, satisfying workday. Then relaxing at home, a bit of reading and a little coffee causes inspiration to continue my presently personal mod project. I get annoyed at the Firepower functionality. So I start searching the internet for a way to make my own formula for firepower.
Instead, my focus comes to this thread. Read to page 3, and started getting excited. Read to page 5, register to forum, then hesitantly downloaded your work. After fiddling with a test folder for a minute, I get a little emotional. This won't just save time. It will preserve coherency for making adjustments across the board for other big changes and finding errors, especially when it comes to racial design templates and characters. A mere 10 minutes of work using this on my project and one of my biggest annoyances with it gets fixed.
Sir, you deserve a drink at least. I'm hoping I'll find time to also help you get this done- even if not, it's a great help as is.
Instead, my focus comes to this thread. Read to page 3, and started getting excited. Read to page 5, register to forum, then hesitantly downloaded your work. After fiddling with a test folder for a minute, I get a little emotional. This won't just save time. It will preserve coherency for making adjustments across the board for other big changes and finding errors, especially when it comes to racial design templates and characters. A mere 10 minutes of work using this on my project and one of my biggest annoyances with it gets fixed.
Sir, you deserve a drink at least. I'm hoping I'll find time to also help you get this done- even if not, it's a great help as is.
RE: Modding Tool
It’s wonderful to hear I’m making modding easier for people, it's the whole point of this project. So thank you for your kind words Nightskies!
RE: Modding Tool
Revision 3 is up, and allows creating, inserting and deleting components in the same way as research projects work. It’s a pain in the ass to actually code it to catch the various possible references to components in the research and races forms but it does work really beautifully!
RE: Modding Tool
Revision 4 is up, a few things to note:
The input process now detects if there are multiple prioritize build wonders stored in a policies file. I’m guessing this was allowed in older versions of DW, but since Universe doesn’t support it the tool will use only the first entry and inform the user in the debug output.
The facilities form now allows creating/inserting/deleting facilities, just like research and components.
The remaining root folder forms now all support creating new projects, although not deleting or inserting yet.
The input process now detects if there are multiple prioritize build wonders stored in a policies file. I’m guessing this was allowed in older versions of DW, but since Universe doesn’t support it the tool will use only the first entry and inform the user in the debug output.
The facilities form now allows creating/inserting/deleting facilities, just like research and components.
The remaining root folder forms now all support creating new projects, although not deleting or inserting yet.
RE: Modding Tool
Revision 5 is up, fighters can now be created, inserted or deleted.
RE: Modding Tool
I’m on holiday this week, so I should have plenty of time to at least get us up to 0.2.1.
Revision 6 is up now, which gives the plagues form create/insert/delete functionality. I expect to do 3 more revisions today (for resources, governments and race families). That’ll be all the root forms done, just leaving creation/deletion of races left.
Race families could be a bit of a pain due to the way the fields are all generated on runtime, but we’ll see!
Creating and deleting races is a unique one because on the one hand there’s no need to do insertion (the order is irrelevant), but on the other hand creating a new race means creating new policy, dialogue, character and design templates files. Hoping to get that done either today or tomorrow, and that’ll be core functionality finished for every form!
In other news, revision 6 has pushed me past 30,000 lines of code for the project! I think I can honestly say I never expected it to get that big when I started, but there it is.
Revision 6 is up now, which gives the plagues form create/insert/delete functionality. I expect to do 3 more revisions today (for resources, governments and race families). That’ll be all the root forms done, just leaving creation/deletion of races left.
Race families could be a bit of a pain due to the way the fields are all generated on runtime, but we’ll see!
Creating and deleting races is a unique one because on the one hand there’s no need to do insertion (the order is irrelevant), but on the other hand creating a new race means creating new policy, dialogue, character and design templates files. Hoping to get that done either today or tomorrow, and that’ll be core functionality finished for every form!
In other news, revision 6 has pushed me past 30,000 lines of code for the project! I think I can honestly say I never expected it to get that big when I started, but there it is.
RE: Modding Tool
Revision 7 is up with the governments form create/insert/delete all working.
RE: Modding Tool
Revision 8 is up with the resources form's create/insert/delete all working.
RE: Modding Tool
Revision 9 completes my work for today, having the Race Families form working as it should. That's all the root files done (the biases are changed as you create new projects in the parent forms)!
I decided not to include an insert function in it since the order of race families is totally irrelevant, and coding two forms to reference each other when the controls are all generated on runtime turns out to be a damn pain.
I decided not to include an insert function in it since the order of race families is totally irrelevant, and coding two forms to reference each other when the controls are all generated on runtime turns out to be a damn pain.
RE: Modding Tool
Just wanted to stop being a lurker for second to say it's an awesome tool and it's appreciated. Even if I haven't been doing any modding recently I'm much more likely to in future knowing this is here to help!
RE: Modding Tool
Thanks Landris!
Also, just a quick note for anyone trying to update yesterday, I spent much of the day setting up a new NAS so updates were probably a bit on/off. My poor Seagate BlackArmor kept dropping the network connection and would then just sit there doing nothing for hours and hours like a petulant child.
My new QNAP device has so far been a dream come true! The old device literally had no options for converting between a static volume and RAID, this thing can do it on the fly. The old one had no software for transferring files from the device itself, meaning I had to run file copying by hooking my laptop up to the router and using it as a go-between, even between drives in the unit. The new one can do it from the device itself and can recognise windows shares. That means transfers of around 100MBps, which let me transfer the whole 2.91TB of data from the old system in about 8.5 hours.
It's even managed to host the update folder in the same location, removing my worry that I'd have to push an update specifically to change the update path and break automatic updates for all previous versions.
Right now it's in the process of rebuilding the RAID 1 array so it's in a "degraded" state, but so far it doesn't seem to be actually hurting access speeds. In any event that process should finish today sometime and put me in a much happier place regarding NAS setup.
Also, just a quick note for anyone trying to update yesterday, I spent much of the day setting up a new NAS so updates were probably a bit on/off. My poor Seagate BlackArmor kept dropping the network connection and would then just sit there doing nothing for hours and hours like a petulant child.
My new QNAP device has so far been a dream come true! The old device literally had no options for converting between a static volume and RAID, this thing can do it on the fly. The old one had no software for transferring files from the device itself, meaning I had to run file copying by hooking my laptop up to the router and using it as a go-between, even between drives in the unit. The new one can do it from the device itself and can recognise windows shares. That means transfers of around 100MBps, which let me transfer the whole 2.91TB of data from the old system in about 8.5 hours.
It's even managed to host the update folder in the same location, removing my worry that I'd have to push an update specifically to change the update path and break automatic updates for all previous versions.
Right now it's in the process of rebuilding the RAID 1 array so it's in a "degraded" state, but so far it doesn't seem to be actually hurting access speeds. In any event that process should finish today sometime and put me in a much happier place regarding NAS setup.
RE: Modding Tool
Ok, revision 10 is up and this is a big one.
Characters can now be created/deleted. Again there’s no insert function because the Character ID’s aren’t actually used by the characters file, it’s just an index for my tool. It doesn’t matter what order you load them in, as long as you set an appropriate appearance order for each one.
Next up, race creation is now functional. I’ve spent most of the day on this and I need a break now, so I’ll have a go at tackling deleting a race tomorrow.
Upon creating a new race, race biases are automatically created for you (defaulting to 0) as are dialogue, characters, design templates and policy files. For this reason, if you create a new race and want to output the race form, it’ll force you to also output those other forms as well. Not doing so would create a situation where you’d end up with an isolated race file and we just can’t have that (especially the race biases).
This update has created a new rule for mods, while it would normally just be “best practice” it’s now become essential if you want to load a mod into my tool. You have to have standard and pirate policies for any race (even for races that can’t be played as standard/pirate empires). Just blank files are acceptable, so long as they’re there.
There's some new error checking too, it’ll now drop files in subfolders that aren’t actually going to be loaded.
Characters can now be created/deleted. Again there’s no insert function because the Character ID’s aren’t actually used by the characters file, it’s just an index for my tool. It doesn’t matter what order you load them in, as long as you set an appropriate appearance order for each one.
Next up, race creation is now functional. I’ve spent most of the day on this and I need a break now, so I’ll have a go at tackling deleting a race tomorrow.
Upon creating a new race, race biases are automatically created for you (defaulting to 0) as are dialogue, characters, design templates and policy files. For this reason, if you create a new race and want to output the race form, it’ll force you to also output those other forms as well. Not doing so would create a situation where you’d end up with an isolated race file and we just can’t have that (especially the race biases).
This update has created a new rule for mods, while it would normally just be “best practice” it’s now become essential if you want to load a mod into my tool. You have to have standard and pirate policies for any race (even for races that can’t be played as standard/pirate empires). Just blank files are acceptable, so long as they’re there.
There's some new error checking too, it’ll now drop files in subfolders that aren’t actually going to be loaded.
RE: Modding Tool
Races can now be deleted. Doing so will remove any race biases for that race as well as dialogue, characters, design templates and policy files so it’ll ask you for confirmation first and force you to output those forms if you want to output races.
Otherwise you could end up with references to a race that doesn’t exist and that would certainly screw up your day.
The “Allowed Races” part of the research file hasn’t been forgotten about either, if you delete a race any reference in there will be cleared for you.
I may be up for implementing other features if they’re easy enough to do, or maybe larger ones after I publish 1.0.0. Depends on how easy/intelligent the suggestions are. 0.2.1 is now ready for download!
For now, the remaining work is:
(0.2.2) Making it as obvious as possible what does what and what the effects will be.
(0.2.3) Restricting entries into textboxes to what DW supports.
Then it’s onto graphics for 0.3.
But that’s game, set and match for the actual features. We now have a fully functional modding tool for DW:U!
Otherwise you could end up with references to a race that doesn’t exist and that would certainly screw up your day.
The “Allowed Races” part of the research file hasn’t been forgotten about either, if you delete a race any reference in there will be cleared for you.
I may be up for implementing other features if they’re easy enough to do, or maybe larger ones after I publish 1.0.0. Depends on how easy/intelligent the suggestions are. 0.2.1 is now ready for download!
For now, the remaining work is:
(0.2.2) Making it as obvious as possible what does what and what the effects will be.
(0.2.3) Restricting entries into textboxes to what DW supports.
Then it’s onto graphics for 0.3.
But that’s game, set and match for the actual features. We now have a fully functional modding tool for DW:U!
RE: Modding Tool
And I have my first bugfix already, just noticed that if I loaded a blank mod folder in to the tool it would fail. Sorted now, so if you want to create a brand new mod by copying the DW files, you don't have to copy them over yourself. Just create a blank folder (in the DW:U \Customization folder) with whatever name you want your mod to have and load that into the tool, it'll populate it for you when you output!
RE: Modding Tool
Woooooo! Still going to wait for 0.2.3 before I start using it lol
RE: Modding Tool
So, for revision 2 of 0.2.1 we have the character’s form tidied up, it’s laid out a little better and it now enables/disables buttons and fields more appropriately as you create and delete characters.
It also has tooltips implemented for all of its buttons and fields, with the lone exception of the races selector (since that already has a header telling you what it is). This is a basic blueprint for how the other forms will be changed for 0.2.2 so let me know if it’s giving you any issues!
Finally, I’ve sorted the tab index. This means when you press the tab key (or shift & tab for reverse) it should now go through the controls in a logical order, whereas before it would jump all over the place.
It also has tooltips implemented for all of its buttons and fields, with the lone exception of the races selector (since that already has a header telling you what it is). This is a basic blueprint for how the other forms will be changed for 0.2.2 so let me know if it’s giving you any issues!
Finally, I’ve sorted the tab index. This means when you press the tab key (or shift & tab for reverse) it should now go through the controls in a logical order, whereas before it would jump all over the place.
RE: Modding Tool
Dialogue form up now with revision 3, again it’s been tidied up (and shrunk considerably), some tooltips added and the tab order set. I’ve also set it so the variable buttons now tell you exactly what variable they reference.
On another matter, a couple people have privately asked if I’ll accept donations so now seems a good time to address it.
I’m not in a position where I “need” the money or anything like that. I’m literally just a guy working on this in my spare time, but if people want to buy me a drink or whatever to say thanks then I have no problem with that. Since I’m at a point in development where people have offered I figure I might as well give them an easy way to do it.
The best way I’ve found to do it is by a simple PayPal send money link, so I’ve made one specifically for this tool. I’ve put the link in the “about” section of the tool as “buy me a drink”, that way it’s obvious but not in your face.
If you’re donating, be sure to leave it set as a gift as opposed to goods & services. No need to have part of your donation taken by PayPal if you’re not actually buying something! It should default to GDP since I’m in the UK, so just be aware if you’re based elsewhere there’ll be a currency conversion going on.
Just to be clear, this tool is free and always will be. Donating is of course optional and I don’t want anyone to feel pressured or anything.
On another matter, a couple people have privately asked if I’ll accept donations so now seems a good time to address it.
I’m not in a position where I “need” the money or anything like that. I’m literally just a guy working on this in my spare time, but if people want to buy me a drink or whatever to say thanks then I have no problem with that. Since I’m at a point in development where people have offered I figure I might as well give them an easy way to do it.
The best way I’ve found to do it is by a simple PayPal send money link, so I’ve made one specifically for this tool. I’ve put the link in the “about” section of the tool as “buy me a drink”, that way it’s obvious but not in your face.
If you’re donating, be sure to leave it set as a gift as opposed to goods & services. No need to have part of your donation taken by PayPal if you’re not actually buying something! It should default to GDP since I’m in the UK, so just be aware if you’re based elsewhere there’ll be a currency conversion going on.
Just to be clear, this tool is free and always will be. Donating is of course optional and I don’t want anyone to feel pressured or anything.