Novice Modding Question

[scbfromnc]

I've created a mod to , among other things, increase the number of shields on the TruLight Seeker to five. Mod is installed as a false patch. All of the other changes I made show up, but the number of shield bays remains at two. (The Technical Specifications section of info correctly shows 5x200 MJ shields, but shields installed in shield bays is two). I've gone back in and looked at the cat file and types/tships is correctly edited to show 5x200 MJ shields. What would explain the change not showing up in-game?

[Killjaeden]

you have to spawn a new ship for some changes to take effect, shield number beeing one of them

[scbfromnc]

Thank you for the quick reply!

[Idleking]

Since I find this topic's title appropriate for the question I have for you guys, I'll simply hijack this thread, since OP's question has already been resolved. So here we go:

I've successfully modded some of the TFiles by now (mainly focusing on ROF of weapons and damage per Bullet to reduce amount of bullets while maintaining dps - kudos to DrBullwinkle for the idea!), so I'm familiar with the X3 Editor by now.
The issue I currently face is to change the "variants" of ships (e.g. "hauler", "sentinel", etc.). I'd like to delete the redundant "Vanguard" variant of the Hyperion as well as modifying/adding some other ships (there's no Mercury Miner for example).
So.. to put it simply:
Where can I do that?

[scbfromnc]

There are others that can answer this better than I, but I can point you to a good modding guide that gives an example for creating new ships: http://www.scribd.com/doc/175534094/X3-Modding-guide

[DrBullwinkle]

On X3Editor's "General" tab: Variation index.

Change the index number for different suffixes.

[Idleking]

Thanks for the answer scbfromnc, I've read through this guide, but that actually is total overkill for what I intend to do just now, but I'll keep it in mind if I should go big one day

On X3Editor's "General" tab: Variation index.

Change the index number for different suffixes.

FFS! It was hiding right in front of me
Thanks DrB

Edit:
Darn it, if I only could make X3E2 always load the associated TFiles too.
The randomness of that happening kinda annoys me *sigh*
Yes, I've set the correct paths etc, sometimes it works and I see the names instead of IDs in the list, but sometimes it doesn't, but I'm up for a challenge

Edit2:
No seriously, wtf's going on. I deleted all the files except TShips and all he complains about is "Couldn't find warelists.txt"

[DrBullwinkle]

You did not describe what problem you are having, but X3Editor does load associated files. Reliably.

You can see each file's path in the title bar for the X3Editor window. That is handy for keeping track of which file you are looking at.

[Idleking]

[..]X3Editor does load associated files. Reliably.[..]

Sad to say, but that's a "no" on my part:
http://i.imgur.com/QdFiNIL.jpg

As I said, it seems to be random. Sometimes it doesn't create a VFS, sometimes it does, and loads the other files.
Last time I had it open, I the Names etc. were all displayed correctly, now I started it up again and got this.
None of a too big deal, since I have the patience to figure things out, but still annoying due to the fact that I couldn't yet

Oh, before you ask:
I extracted every \types\ directory in the cat/dat that I found into the directory the loaded TShips is in, as well as set the path in the Editor config respectively. I even run X3E as admin, but that didn't do anything so far...



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[DrBullwinkle]

You extracted TShips outside of your game folder. How do you expect X3Editor to be able to find related text files?

Don't extract stuff. If you want to save into game folder (rather than overwriting files in vanilla .cats), then do that. See the Ship Ticks tutorials in my sig for examples. Also read the section on File Precedence, which will help you understand how the files work.

[Idleking]

You extracted TShips outside of your game folder. How do you expect X3Editor to be able to find related text files?

Well, if the respective files aren't there at all, it tells me "types\tcockpits not found", so I thought X3E handled relative paths on its own.
If the files are there, it just does nothing, so then I concluded it must be a weird bug or something like that.

But okay, just me being a dumbass.
Setting the path to the game to the game dir and loading files from my "working directory" does the trick
I don't know why X3E needs the path to the game dir instead of a destination to the files which are actually loaded, but that's doubleshadow's business, not mine

[DrBullwinkle]

Setting the path to the game to the game dir and loading files from my "working directory" does the trick

Yes. However, you cannot test that way, so it is of questionable value.

The Ship Tricks tutorial on File Precedence might help you to understand how the X file system works. There are several tutorials which walk you through a sound development methodology.