Newbie and Mod Merging...

That can't possibly be a good combination

from Sins Forums

Hello everyone,

I recently purchased Sins of a Solar Empire since I heard so many good things about it. I was not too sure about it, but since there was very minimal DRM, I felt compelled to support a company taking a stand against it - the polar opposite of Spore's DRM measures. Thankfully, I do not hate it lol. I've played a few times through, and was surprised about a lack of a campaign though.

Anyway, I felt the planets were a bit lacking, kind of like with Galactic Civilizations II. I remember playing the old games "Stars!" and every single planet had different levels of "support" for your particular race, and different races had different colonizable planets. It seems most games nowadays make every race, no matter how different, have seemingly the same requirements for planet colonization, and each planet is either colonizeable by every player, or not colonizable by anyone at all. I'm getting off topic though, sorry.

I looked up some mods to see if there was any remedy for the lack of planet types. I want to stay away from any total conversion mods or additional races for the moment. I found what appears to be a couple highly popular mods around here that adds some extra planet types and such. Unfortunately, from reading around, it seems the modding system is not quite as easy as it was with Oblivion. It seems each mod completely overwrites one another since they carry every file rather than selectively loading only the files they change. As a result, only one mod can be loaded at a time (as far as I currently understand it.) To get multiple mods to work concurrently, you need to do some editing to merge them. This is where I get stuck.

I'm sure everyone will probably get annoyed if people keep posting requests for mod merging, and most of you probably have better things to do, so I'm trying to figure out how to do this myself, if I can possibly get some guidance from the more experienced.

I'm trying to merge Uzii's Sins Plus v1.3a, DANMAN's Solar Sins v2.0, pndrev's Slow Pirates, and moofoo's TransUI.

While I'm aware that Solar Sins does include elements of Sins Plus already, it does not incorporate everything, including 3 of the extra planet types, which is why I'm trying to merge them for the full effect of both packages' planets and stars.

According to some guides posted on this forum, I should start with the smallest mod, which in my case is the Slow Pirates mod (I assume.) I've downloaded the latest ForgeTools and converted the Slow Pirates mod files into text and used a program to compare the files for differences. Unfortunately, I can't actually find the file the mod changes to slow the pirate's raids down. Every file that has differences is either some research time changes, or it's the same number with extra trailing decimals removed. This is quite discouraging as I have no idea what to expect once I get to the more complex mods like Sins Plus and Solar Sins.

I apologize for the extremely long, first post and appreciate any help or advice offered.

Thanks!

modding
3,539 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top

Anyone? Or am I going to hoof it alone? :/

I assume I'm on my own here, but in case anyone was in the same boat as me, that Slow pirates mod doesn't even work.. (Stupid of me not to test it out first before I tried merging it.) Anyway, it's simple enough to go to the gameplay.constants file and changing the First and Normal Warning times. I think this is all I need to do to slow the pirates down, I don't want to mess with anything else like their strength or fleet composition.

All I need to do now is merge Solar Sins and Sins Plus.. This might get hairy considering there's very much overlap as Solar Sins incorporates a lot of Sins Plus. I need to add in the parts of Sins Plus that were left out, and it seems the string file for Solar Sins includes entries for files related to other races I assume from 7 Deadly Sins that I'll need to remove.

I hope I'm on the right track here.. or if not, hope someone would be kind enough to tell me and maybe point me in the right direction.

Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top

I hope I'm on the right track here.. or if not, hope someone would be kind enough to tell me and maybe point me in the right direction.
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Well, I haven't played with Solar Sins and my last run of Sins Plus was ages ago (I prefer mostly vanilla). But on principle it sounds like you've got the right idea, getting Sins Plus into Solar Sins.

One note about the Strings file, you don't need to worry about removing entries, they can sit there unusued and it won't matter, you just have to make sure that everything that is used is in there. That should save you some work.

Also if you haven't done so already, open your user.setting file and at the end set showErrors to TRUE. That way if something goes wrong with your mod you'll be a much more detailed error message showing which file and which line, so you can investigate.

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top

Thanks for the tip!

Wouldnt unused entries in the (already long) strings file slow things down? This is really the only reason I have for wanting to remove them, just to optimize something that seems overly large and inefficient.

That showErrors tip sounds great, but what kind of errors would it display? As far as I know, when something's wrong with the mod, it just crashes the game and generates a minidump that I can't read.

Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top

Wouldnt unused entries in the (already long) strings file slow things down? This is really the only reason I have for wanting to remove them, just to optimize something that seems overly large and inefficient.
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Unless there's very very many extra strings, you probably won't notice anything. Strings are very simple things and take little effort to process. It'd make the file cleaner to remove them certainly, but if performance is your main drive for doing it, I don't think the time investment will pay off. Basically look at it this way: loading the Strings file more or less does the same thing as reading the 860+ entity files line by line, parsing them to extract the data it needs and storing it somewhere. And some of those entities get pretty long :P An extra 50-100 strings to process won't make a difference on that kind of scale.

That showErrors tip sounds great, but what kind of errors would it display? As far as I know, when something's wrong with the mod, it just crashes the game and generates a minidump that I can't read.
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It's been a while since I used it, but from memory: it will show you a dialog box with the file name, line number, and contents of the line that caused the error and I *think* a somewhat generic message for the type of error, like if you have bad syntax or something. You'll also be given the option to try and continue, but obviously for a lot of errors the mod can't load. For some it might be able to continue. This'll be much better than the minidump :)