dskzz

Well it's up. Enjoy! And thanks for everyone else's great work on the CE and all the awesome mods out there,

Ahh I just had to stick UnlockManufacture( "ManTech.Saracen" ); in my _BaseBuilt.lua thanks for your help, it works now and I'm gonna push it right on up to Steam!

By the way I'm using the Saracen Reborn for my model.

Can I make a manufacture that starts without research? I added the ManTech.AWACs to manufactures.xml and I added the ManTech.AWACs string to Strings, it's not showing up. I have the UnlockKnowledge and I can see the AWACs in the infopedia. Log says Missing string for label 'WorkshopView.Produces'

Hi yes, sorry I want to be able to buy the plane at startup. That doesn't seem to work, although it did work back when I first built the mod a few years ago. Any way to make that happen? Thanks

Hi all, you may remember a few years back I did an AWACs mod which let you put in an AWAC recon flier at the game start. I playtested it and I loved it, thought it added a whole new level of strategy to the game. Well, I'd love to update it to the CE version and be able to upload it to Steam. The problem is I just can't get the damn thing to work. I wonder if anyone could help? I also can't seem to get the modding log to show up, I can get the thing to show up in the Xenopedia. I can get the Condor purchase box to move, so it registers something there, but just no. It's not working. AWACFuel3.zip

Thanks darkray! I will do Foehammer.

darkray, glad to hear it all worked out! By the way Max Caine sent me a message that all of the Lore++ special characters are now escaped so I think things will go a lot easier from here on out. Lore is a great package and that escaping problem is one of those insanely minor PITA details that even the best of coders forget to address sometimes. Add in the fact that XML is, IMHO, a messy "language" and, well, there you have it! Speaking of which I think that my next project will be a mod installer for xenonauts. Maybe in the next few days I'll post something to that effect (but in the meantime, I'll just bump my AWACS post by talking about it here:) ). Shouldn't be too hard, I think just a diff comparison of the xml files should do the trick, don't know if I'll even need to parse the files first or not. If anyone out there has done any work to that effect or has any thoughts please let me know (and thereby also keep the AWACS post on the front page)! PS Notepad++ is awesome. I do all my coding in it. And the plugins are terrific. A handy tool for anyone doing any mods is the XML Tools Plugin for Notepad++. It's finicky (but so is XML) and takes some massaging to find errors it raises, but it sure is helpful to have!

Max, Honestly don't think darkray described the problem correctly. As he said he's new to modding xenonauts. For some reason, occasionally Excel won't read the xml files' schema correctly and excel reports it as "corrupt." OK I just opened a random xml file. Some of them in the /assets directory get the excel icon and open automatically into excel some get the xml web page icon and open w/ IE. MAnually opening one w/ excel (in this case, armours) get the message "The specified XML source does not refer to a schema. Excel will create a schema based on the XML source data." (Darkray, do you get that message) Although it does load the file ok once I do that. OK. So Lore+ does have some problems. I downloaded Lore+ (been meaning to install it anyways) and tried opening the xenopedia file in excel. I get "The file cannot be opened because of errors." It spits out a log file. Long one - here it is https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/28665072/mods/lore_errors.txt Once I click through the OK it fails to open. For the record opened it in notepad++. Ran my XML chcker - "Parsing error at line 311:EntityReft: expecting ; Just doing some minor debugging, I delete that entry and it find an error in the prior entry. Looks like failure to escape some special character somewhere. It may not be a big enough deal to mess up Xenonauts but it makes it impossible to load into Excel, which makes life a bit difficult for those who want to add stuff to it via excel. HOW TO FIX IT Huh boy I can't help myself when I find a problem I have to debug it. Researches.ScoutingMission - The data string where it says " Meaning no disrespect to R&D" the & needs to be escaped, removed or encoded and that should make everything work just find.

I'm glad to hear that it worked for you darkray. I can't speak for Lore+, I haven't gotten around to installing it yet, however, you should be able to mod the actual XML code if you can't open the files in excel. I have seen a few XML files that I couldn't open because the schema (basically the layout that tells the XML reader what the values for each "column" are) is somehow corrupted. That might be what you are experiencing. The xenopedia is probably tough to add to in xml, but the strings file shouldn't be to tough. That's the more important file anyway because without it instead of seeing "AWACS" all you see is ###### which for me spoils it! First BACKUP strings.xml! I can't promise you this will work correctly! Next, open strings.xml in notepad or a better editor (I use notepad++), scroll down somewhere to the middle of the file. If you want, search for Chinook, and add in after that entry. Find a line around there that says </row> then copy and paste this on the line right after that: <Row ss:AutoFitHeight="0"> <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">airplane.human.awacs</Data><NamedCell ss:Name="_FilterDatabase"/></Cell> <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">AWACS</Data><NamedCell ss:Name="_FilterDatabase"/></Cell> </Row> <Row ss:AutoFitHeight="0"> <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">E-3 AWACS</Data><NamedCell ss:Name="_FilterDatabase"/></Cell> <Cell ss:StyleID="s68"><Data ss:Type="String">E-3 AWACS</Data><NamedCell ss:Name="_FilterDatabase"/></Cell> </Row> Good luck! Let me know if you have problems.

Love this idea!

Darkray - absolutely. I have Office 2010. Execl lets me load any of the xml files in the /assets folder. That makes modding easy. All you do is open any of the files you want to mod in excel and you can modify the values like they were laid out in a spreadsheet - no need to add any messy XML code to the files. If the xml files don't open up in excel automatically you can right click on the file, select open with, and then pick excel. (Assuming you have a PC and Excel) So the "_readme_what_to_add.xlsx" file lists each file that I modified along with the line i added in excel. So what you do is go to your xenonauts assets folder. If you are using xenonauts off steam you need to right click on the game, click properties, click view local files or something like that. If youve gotten one mod installed already you prolly know how to do this anyway. When you got the file open, go through each file I listed in the _what_to_add sheet, copy that line, and insert the line into open file. For example, modding aircrafts.xml you open that file in /assets, copy the line from _what_to_add - airplane.human.awacs, 200, 0, 4800, 800... take that whole line, copy it and paste it into the aircrafts.xml file in xenonauts. save file, then do the same for the other files I listed - items, strings, and xenopedia. NOTE - in _what_to_add each entry (mostly) has a grey line with the column names. DONT ADD THAT LINE! The final entry, scripts_basebuilt.lua is not an xml file so its a special case. But the process is the same. Open that file w/ a text editor from xenonautes (/assets/scripts/_basebuilt.lua) and copy the line UnlockKnowledge to the open file. Save file. Copy all the image files included in the zip as well - those are the two folders aircrafts and xenopediaimages. You can more or less just copy those directories onto the directories in the game folder. I hope that all was clear! I'm not much of a tech writer. lol. If you have any more questions, my email is in the readme or feel free to post more on this thread. Good hunting! d Now if you can't get these open in excel let me know I'll see about hutning down the actual XML code.

Thanks for the kind words and please def check it out. If you think it fits the role and would be an asset I'd love to get it considered for inclusion in your remake...that would rock! I've used a lot of Into Darkness' mods to get my game to play the way I like.

Thanks you and everyone else for you enthusiasm! Good call on the Xenopedia entry. I've sort of wanted to rewrite that any, it's just stock from off of Wikipedia. I can do better. And yeah, the USAF markings do stick out. Wanted to see if it all worked before I spent the extra time removing that. Plus it occured to me sometime that the Xenonauts organization doesn't really have a logo - or does it? Like X-Com was also the name of the group. Technically, Xenonauts isn't XCom. Is there an emblem? I guess I can make it blank but that's sort of boring. Maybe a UN logo? Your troops are all in blue afterall, lol. 2 - This was def a concern. Are you referring to the equip screen or the base screen? RE - the base screen, If you saw the last version of the mod, the wings extended the entire width of the hanger. I wound up shrinking the image slightly to make it fit in the hanger better. So you propose squaring off the wings maybe like a quarter of the way in from the ends, and making them flush with the hanger walls? The base screen, that's actually a good idea I can expand the pic considerably you are right it is a huge bird, with wingspan almost as big as the fuselage length.

& also cyph stupid mistake fixed. I renamed the items file. could you give it another try please? i will still test on a virtual box. Please let me know if it fails again.