Old ship design move

from Stardock Forums

Long time player of GalCiv 2 "The Dread Lords" 1.53 ver

Was in gamestop the other day and saw GalCiv 2 "ToA; the Ultimate Edition" and bought it based on the awesome looking new content.

I'm trying to move a series of ship designs (loosely based on the Starblazers cartoon series; blank hulls w/o tech items so they should be visible from the start of a new game) over to ToA. I have copied the files to the appropriate folders based on a quick design I made in ToA but the game does not see the old files at all. Does anyone know of a way to do this / something I missed / files to old? I don't want to lose the designs as several of them (the Argo & Andromeda) took many painstaking hours to get right. Time i can better spend on the Gamilons now :)

I did notice the old files are UTF-8 code and the new ones are "ISO-8990-7" or something and have a couple extra lines of code; dont know if that makes a diff.

B.

3,262 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Hey... I was going to make a post asking the same question. I guess great minds do think alike after all.

I'm very interested in knowing the answer as well. Ship designs from DL and DA don't port into TA properly. Some designs - especially the really detailed and parts heavy ones - don't port at all.

Some help please?

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

All versions of the game seem to use the same file formats now (the encoding is not important, AFAIK). There are just a couple of things to watch out for:

1) The original game only has five user-accessible style sets, and each is shared by two or three races. In DA/TA, each race has its own style so the Sn_ prefixes on the ship files will most likely not match up. You'll need to change the number there in order for it to appear uder the race you expect it to. This is probably what you're running into right now.

2) Between DA and TA a lot of parts have gotten updated, higher quality models. A number of these models may not match up internally as to the order of the hardpoints, etc., and that can result in mangled designs if you try to copy them straight over. This isn't so easy to fix as the first issue. Most people who wanted to do this badly enough ended up copying all the old models back in from DA, and re-adding the improved ones as additional options. Note though that doing this will break all the base templates for similar reasons as the DA designs broke, so you'll want to copy the DA templates over too.

 

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Ah. Thanks for the info! I guess I'll have to take option #2. Basically that means I copy all the files inside the Gfx\Models folder on DA and copy them into the same named folder on TA, right?

Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Starblazers cartoon series!!!!!

Post? I have been trying to make those type of ships for a while. I just suck at shipbuilding.