Matrix Games Forums

Need some help, gentlemen.

Somehow I have broken the ship captain assignment in my mod.

All ships with no skipper assigned in the editor - i.e. "Captain 0 = Random" - are skippered by a nameless "Staff officer".

I have added a lot of ships, but also more than enough skippers for them, so lack of leaders shouldn't be the problem.

Any ideas?

Random means it creates a random leader not assigns one from whoever is available. You added a bunch of ldrs that won't be used unless you put them in cmd of a ship either by spending pps or changing them in the database to be in cmd of said ships

Thx for the explanation - one more thing that is not working like I have assumed [:o]

But why "Staff officer" instead of named random leader?

Randomly picked example - the AP Devonshire in the Sing Fast Rein TF is set to random leader, in the base scenario DBB-29C the ship has a named leader, in my mod the ship is skippered by a staff officer.

Maybe because I blocked so many slots in the leader database with my "additional leaders?

Ahhh I see says the blind man, I missed the meaning of "staff officer". Not sure about that but it may be due to having no ldr slots left in array or very few or leader from wrong nation leading a ship from another side but thats just a guess in either case. IIRC in the past postings I've seen staff officer postings but not in some years. FWIW, you might try a forum search for "staff officer" to see what comes up - there's some kind of long involved google search that will show postings since forum search isn't the best but I've forgotten how.

Thx for trying to help. I had searched for "staff officer" before posting [;)] and only found posts about LCUs and air groups.

I just checked once more and now found something: tm.asp?m=2391528

In this post some claim random leaders are taken from the leader list, others think they are generated outside that list.

In fact, they must be generated outside the list (like you said) - I have checked some names of "random leader" and they are not in the leader list.


So I cleaned my leader list of the hundreds of additional leaders I had added and fired up the scenario once more - but the staff REMFs were still there!

But alas, I think I have found the reason for my problem.

Since the beginning of my modding days I have had problems with saving the .csv files with Excel in a format that is compatible with witploadae.exe. I suspect this has to do with conversion issues from "text to columns" and/or between US and EU versions of Excel or whatever. So I am using OpenOffice which usually works ok to convert the csv in to column form and save the file in compatible format.

Now, acting on a hunch, I loaded my csv files with Excel instead of OpenOffice and did not convert text to columns - and compared the leader list with the csv file of unmodded DBB29-C.

And *drumroll* what did I discover:

My mod: [slot number],,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,,,,,,,,,,,,,

unmodded: [slot number],"",0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,,,,,,,,,,,,,

There is "" missing in all unused leader slots.

After replacing ,, with ,"", I now have named random leaders where they belong!

Must have had something to do with data lost during the text to column conversion or else.

And it looks like random leaders are not taken from the leader list but use slots in the leader list.

So, I have reinstated most of my additional named leaders - problem solved.

Glad it worked out & you just gave me help as in my old days of modding WITP/CHS, I would see the same data loss/corruption when using witpload program to import/export but did assume it was something along the lines of diff versions of excel creating the problems.