https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/376221

The link will help you with what you need to know to get started on modding.

There should be a converter in there somewhere.

Try harpo99999's tools as well if you need to.

I can`T make Harpos textbinner work- program fails and freezes my computer..

You don't really need the binary to text converter unless you are wanting to reverse engineer someone else's mod.

First, download the complete set of reference files from here.

http://soase.weebly.com/modding-tools.html

If you are modding diplomacy then download the Diplomacy 1.2 patch reference files from here.

http://soase.weebly.com/diplomacy-12.html

Found a place with a proper conversion software:

http://xtremestudios.net/portal/downloads.html

This turned out to be bugged and only worked a little while. I`ve now made my own set of batch files to convert the various file types

Seems the extreme studios converter works fine.

I\ve made the first iteration of my mod (number 1), but i can`t enable it.

The computer freezes.

I check the folder and then i enable the mod- i get a checksum and then the game freezes along with a mini-dump.

Found what the problem was- sins needs to redo all the files or something and needs several seconds per file.

I just deleted most of the files and the mod worked fine.

Now i need to integrate it with "requiem" mod before i move on to number 2 of my 3 goal project.

Sounds good mate..

I`m having some issues moving on to the second stage. This being my first day of modding i`m not yet comfortable with writing up my own entity files.

IS THERE A SIGN OR COMMAND I CAN USE TO REPLACE NUMBERS IN ENTITY FILES?

i`m on number 2 now.

I`m trying to achieve the following:

-Deploying a starbase provides 200 additional supply units and 1 additional cap ship slot.

I see a number of approaches to the problem but i figured the easiest would be to write up workaround that modifes the values in the "researchsubject" files regardles of what level the player has researched. This can be seen in the example below;

"HUDICON_RESEARCHSUBJECT_MAXSHIPSLOTSPHASE0"... Could i replace the 0 with something neutral?

If this is not possible i could try to write up a seperate entity that could be referenced in the starbase entity file, but i`m not sure how to do this yet. This is my first day afterall.

The third option is to modify the base value from the start of the game- i.e 100 supply units. If i can find that value somewhere i can write up a modification to that each time a starbase is deployed and it would be unaffected by player research, but i can`t find that value anywhere.

Is the starting 100 unit supply in the gameplay constants file or somewhere else?

yeah- and it`s still not guaranteed it will work. I don`t understand these things well enough to fully appreaciate my options. I`ll need to read up on the topic and try to figure something out.

At my current low level of proficiency i perceive the following issue:

even if i write up a seperate entity to reference in the starbase file i`ll need a value to modify.

Actually i might have an idea.

I almost have this working.

Also i figured out where the problem is. The conversion was going fine i though but when i re-converted from bin to txt i found out a lot of information was disappearing. My additions to the ability file caused string, hudand item info to disappear.

 when i converted to bin it looked like this:

nameStringID "IDS_ABILITY_DEPLOYSTARBASETECH_NAME"
descStringID "IDS_ABILITY_DEPLOYSTARBASETECH_DESC"
hudIcon "HUDICON_ABILITY_DEPLOYSTARBASETECH"
smallHudIcon "HUDICON_ABILITY_DEPLOYSTARBASETECH"
infoCardIcon ""

When i converted back to txt it looked like this:

nameStringID ""
descStringID ""
hudIcon ""
smallHudIcon ""
infoCardIcon ""

I converted the english.str file to text and much to my dismay i discovered that the string i`m struggling with doesn`t exist in the string archive.

I really need to thank Ryat and Harpo..

Gratefull for the feedback..

i have 2 issues at the moment:

1. when i rewrite the ability file the "namestring" and "descstring" as well as "hudicon" gets reset. Research prerequisites also get reset to 0.

2. I went moved a string file into my mod path and insterted my own strings into string file. This caused a "no string    found" error. i could still navigate the folders and managed to disable my mod, which removed the "no string found error"

The current conundrum presents me with a couple of questions:

1. Is there a registry file somewhere stating how many lines there are supposed to be in an ability file or what order the file should be written in?

2. The "no string found" occurred after i introduced the relevant strings to the string file:

"IDS_ABILITY_DEPLOYSTARBASETECH_NAME"
"IDS_ABILITY_DEPLOYSTARBASETECH_DESC"

   Not entirely sure how this caused a bug but I`ll figure it out.

The biggest issue is why my ability file keeps getting RESET when i convert it from TXT to BIN

I tried switching the above strings for the following:

IDS_RESEARCHFLOATMODIFIER_SHIPMAXSLOTS_NAME"
IDS_RESEARCHFLOATMODIFIER_SHIPMAXSLOTS_DESC"

didn`t work.

The ability file accepts when i add research prereguisites, but all other updates cause the "strings" and "huds" to reset..

(Number of line - 2) / 3 should also yield the correct count number.

have you tried running the mod in text mode, ie without converting to bin?

and running in the dev.exe?

harpo