Ack! Modder help needed for TechAreas

Shadow99 · #1 December 9th, 2000, 06:42 PM

I was finally able to get around to adding my new tech areas to techareas.txt & after hours of creating, organizing, & fixing typos I tried to start up SE4. SE4 responded with "error cannot load techareas.txt"! Has anyone else tried adding techareas to SE4 before & did it work for you?

I should note I'd run into all sorts of hassles trying to edit this file as notepad didn't want to alter the file (though wordpad had no trouble except to ask me if I really wanted to make it a text file)...

I had finished 90% of my mod (this was basically the Last step before final beta testing) adding 8 new tech areas & allowing the research of items already added earlier (though not usable), so this is kinda a major set back if SE4 won't accept new tech areas...

Talenn · #2 December 9th, 2000, 07:36 PM

Yes, I've added Tech Areas with no problems. Make sure all you dependancies are ok. Also, check and recheck that you dont have any extra spaces between lines somewhere or that you didnt accidentally delete a space. I had the same problem and a careful recheck led me to an incorrect spacing problem which through the whole thing off.

Talenn

Shadow99 · #3 December 9th, 2000, 07:45 PM

hmm... I'm on my 4th or 5th rechecking & haven't noticed anything yet... Though I did remove all tech areas that didn't have components based on them yet (just saved them in another file for now) Last check...

btw where did you add the new techs in the file? I reorganized mine to fit in the applied science/theoretical science/weapon science categories...

Oh also did you alter the existing techs at the same time? as I redid the whole shields area (cut it down to 5 lvls.) with my new specialty shields tree...

Oh Final Last thing: did you ahve anything which might partially duplicate a word used in another area? I'm startign to think my use of the word 'Shield' about 5 times might be confusing it...

[This message has been edited by Shadow99 (edited 09 December 2000).]

Jubala · #4 December 9th, 2000, 08:35 PM

May I suggest you use UltraEdit to edit your files? It's a superb editor that can basically anything up to and possibly even including cook coffee. You can find it at http://www.ultraedit.com/

Baron Munchausen · #5 December 10th, 2000, 05:03 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Shadow99:
I was finally able to get around to adding my new tech areas to techareas.txt & after hours of creating, organizing, & fixing typos I tried to start up SE4. SE4 responded with "error cannot load techareas.txt"! Has anyone else tried adding techareas to SE4 before & did it work for you?

I should note I'd run into all sorts of hassles trying to edit this file as notepad didn't want to alter the file (though wordpad had no trouble except to ask me if I really wanted to make it a text file)...

I had finished 90% of my mod (this was basically the Last step before final beta testing) adding 8 new tech areas & allowing the research of items already added earlier (though not usable), so this is kinda a major set back if SE4 won't accept new tech areas...

I have extensively modified the tech areas in my custom copy of the game. However, just today I tried something new. I tried to give a tech area TWO prerequisites instead of one. What did the game say? Error: Cannot load Teachareas.txt -- argh! It seems that despite the field where you give the number of required techs it cannot deal with more than one.

Did you create tech areas requiring more than one prerequisite tech? Change them and it will probably work. Other than requiring ONE blank line between entries it is fairly forgiving. I'll be reporting this new bug to MM after I post here.

Shadow99 · #6 December 10th, 2000, 06:01 AM

Jubala I've used UEdit before, but It did more than I needed... My preffered app is Cetus CNotepad, but even though it creates plain ascii text files I get errors when I edit SE4 in that app... Even the edit command in DOS tells me they are standard txt files, but apparently that isn't enough so I use MS's tools for the moment...

& Baron indeed I did... I sectioned Shields into many types of specialty Shields (ECM, System, Cloaking, good old Phased, etc) which each required 2 tech areas to develop...

I guess this is something it would be nice for MM to fix... & I'll resend a note about my prob to MM with what seems to be the prob tomorrow if I can...

thanks

Noble713 · #7 December 10th, 2000, 04:09 PM

Hmmm, you're right, it won't accept 2 tech requirements. This is interesting, as I'm sure it used to work fine in the Version that shipped (or was it the .99 demo?).

Shadow99 · #8 December 10th, 2000, 06:39 PM

Just wanted to add it did indeed fix that problem, though now I have to figure out another good way of limiting you from having some of the 'better' shield types to early on... & of course I need to figure out a way for the computer to even realize it should build them as well... but that can wait a bit...