New Modder -- Modding the races question

from GalCiv2 Forums

Hello all, New (as of today) owner of a copy of Ultimate edition, but for the past several years I've had GCII Game of the Year Edition, and the Dark Avatar addons.  So here is my question:

 

When I was playing with my old copy (GCII+DA) and I downloaded the update, I received an "Example" folder with some "extreme" mods (changing the races, the tech tree, etc) that worked great with GCII, however, when I tried to replicate the procedure for DA with my own custom race, I could not get it to work.  I've heard rumors that this was a problem with DA, and that with Twilight I would be able to create my own races and have it work.  So below is what I was doing, will this work for Twilight?

 

First attempt: Altered the Custom Race in raceconfig.xml to have the information I wanted for my special race, set the name, image file, etc, and increased the customization points to 20 (because I wanted something that I could easily show worked)

First results: Got my 20 Customization points, didn't get the change in the starting techs that I had made, or the image, some research says that this is because DA wants to make sure that the Custom Race doesn't get overwritten.

Second Attempt: took the Alterian Resistance, edited their data same as above.

Second Results: Did not work.  To figure out what was going on I then turned on the "Example" Mod folder in DA, and noticed that even with the example mods, the Alterian Resistance didn't change, even though everything else did.  This led to my third attempt.

Third attempt: Replaced the Yor with my custom race data.

Third Results: upon loading the game it looked like it was going to work, my custom race image (stored in GC2\Mods\test3\data\gfx) worked wonderfully, and all changes I had were looking good.  At this point I decided to restart the game with a custom map (Milky Way) because I thought I had it working... when starting my second game the Yor were back and my custom race was gone.  No changes had been made to the mod folder between Third Attempt Game 1 and Third Attempt Game 2.

So, will what I'm trying to do work with Ultimate Edition/Twilight?

modding
3,635 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Hmm well I cant say that I have experience with complete race modding, I have had wonderous success with custom tech trees. If you start a new tech tree in the editor, save it, and then open its file in notepad you can then copy important techs you want from the main races. I made a tree that combined the unique techs of all the main races into one super tech tree, and after a few setbacks I managed to make it work. Don't know how to help you on the image and such though, I would suggest just starting a custom race normally and putting the image you want into the folder with the other race images, then selecting your modded tech tree and unique image. That's how I do things anyway.

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

ingame, edit the custom race to your liking, then exit the game(after you save the race), then edit the custom race fie in your GC2/GC2DarkAvatar/GC2TwilightArnor directory.

it will work then.

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