Newbie pulling hair out

Malamitto · #1 August 25th, 2002, 10:22 PM

I've had this wonderful game for almost two months now, and twice now I have had a problem running SEIV on my Dell windows XP POS. When i try to run any number of downloaded races and shipsets, SEIV gives me A TON of errors in regards to the settings file. Not only does this prevent me from using most races I want to download, it prevents me from even starting any mods that contain any new races. This is driving me nuts. Does anyone know why SEIV is doing this, and what I can do to stop it?

Phoenix-D · #2 August 25th, 2002, 10:36 PM

You're probably using races designed for an earlier Version of SE4.

Does it say "blah blah blah not found in AI_settings.txt"? or similar?

Phoenix-D

Suicide Junkie · #3 August 25th, 2002, 10:41 PM

If the races are part of a mod, it is likely that you downloaded the SE4 classic Version of the mod.

Check to see if there is a Gold Version of the mod available.

Malamitto · #4 August 25th, 2002, 10:59 PM

Yeah, the record "blah blah blah" stuff does sound about right, that would explain why some are working and some are not, I guess I'll have to go find some newer Versions of the races I want to use.

Phoenix-D · #5 August 25th, 2002, 11:09 PM

If you want you can also add the lines it complains about yourself; just copy/paste them from a race that works.

Rollo · #6 August 25th, 2002, 11:20 PM

here is a link that might be of help:
http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...&f=23&t=004966

gregebowman · #7 August 26th, 2002, 07:38 PM

Believe me, Malmitto, I had the same problem recently. You just have to edit the old races, and there are more than enough experience players here to tell you exactly how do it. I just had to modify some races Last night that I downloaded. It's not that hard. Just a matter of cutting and pasting.

[ August 26, 2002, 19:04: Message edited by: gregebowman ]

Purna · #8 August 26th, 2002, 07:54 PM

It seems like SEIV is not very good about being upwards-compatible. I'm surprised this isn't on anyone's wish-list for future Versions.

Sure, it might be hard to make a mod-race take advantage of new technologies, but it should be easy enough to give all of these new fields reasonable default values, which is what everyone is doing with the cut'n'paste technique. Old fields should always carry the same semantics, too...if anything major changes, a new field should be defined, and the deprecated one should just be ignored.

Each of these files should also have a Version/revision number as a field, so that you could set an option like "Gold Version AI only" in your setup screen.

Suicide Junkie · #9 August 26th, 2002, 08:11 PM

SE4 is pretty darn good about being forwards compatible!
Look at any patch, and you will see that savegames and mods all still work.
Classic to Gold is NOT a patch, and is NOT a reasonable comparison.

Malamitto · #10 August 26th, 2002, 08:45 PM

Wow, the cut and paste trick went a long way towards solving the problem. Thanks to everyone for those suggestions, the only problem I have now is with a pesky MOD that won't seem to function, but thats not as big an issue as getting the older AIs to work.

Thanks!