ShadowDragon8685

I modded it to have the 30-round magazine and a five-round burst, because those things didn't actually have burst selectors, they just taught the shooters to fire controlled bursts of full auto. Honestly, I think that's kind of important, because I'd realized that with the mod, I was giving practically everybody M16 Carbines, as despite the lower damage and range, the range seldom came into issue and the reduced TU for firing and the reduced carry weight was more than worth the reduced damage and inability to go to careful Aim.

That's... Highly peculiar. Compression error? Maybe a problem with Mediafire? If it's happening between modder and moddee, that could explain mysterious/unreproducible problems.

Oh, and I've missed one important thing, too: Named Cell! Sometimes you'll find elements like this: <NamedCell ss:Name="_FilterDatabase"/> They're annoying. Ctrl-H them and replace them with an empty string to be rid of them. But sometimes, you'll find them on more than one line, like this: <Row> <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Abandon</Data></Cell> <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Abandon mission</Data><NamedCell ss:Name="_FilterDatabase"/></Cell> </Row> I hate that, don't you? Fortunately, there's a solution. Go to the find/replace dialoge again, and move back up one radio button, from Regular Expressions to Extended, and plug in the following: <NamedCell\r\n ss:Name="_FilterDatabase"/> Again, replacing it with the empty string will do you good. Find and replace all, preferably in all your open documents. Ctrl-F and look for NamedCell again. If you see it again, you'll have to adjust the search string. Each "\r\n" tells Notepad++ to select across another line break (Return, Newline, I guess.) Remember you need to select the white-space, too, when you're copy-pasting the second line part of NamedCell to plug into Notepad++. Happy hunting!

Actually, I prefer people to concatenate it to SD8685 or even SD. That doesn't bother me. First: Yeah, I realized that. I'm not sure where I got v21RC1 or why I thought it was current or near-current. I probably googled and grabbed the first one I saw. It has been holding up well, but since I realized it was so old, I'm now cleaning the metadata from v21RC1, 1.06, and 1.09, to do a text diff on them all and see what changed, as I'd heard there were bugs in the later versions, missing stuff and all that. Secondly: That's good to know. I do wonder what caused that, though; same basic glitch in the files, two entirely different mods. Did they pass through the Excel of the same collaborator at some point, I can't help but wonder?

Three reasons. One: I'm an obstinate pig-headed jackass and once I've set myself to something I'm either going to finish it or get frustrated, angry at everything it represents, and sod off to sulk for a while. Two: I'm still trying to get this all to work just right so I can play a bloody full game the way I want it to play. Three: I've developed a personal vendetta against this metadata BS and I want to see it scourged from the files we're distributing around these parts.

I just looked at all the files I'm going to have to clean... I despaired for a while, and then I stepped up my game. By which I mean I whined to a friend until he told me how to use Notepad++'s powerful regular expressions to do what I want them to do. Get the latest version of Notepad++, it's presently 6.6.8. I mean, this will probably work with versions newer than 5, but why take a chance? Note: When they updated Notepad++ past the fives, the plugincompare plugin - you know, that thing we all got Notepad++ for in the first place - broke syntax highlighting. To fix this, Google Notepad++ Compare Plugin 1.5.6.2 and install the updated version that unbreaks syntax highlighting. Anyway, here's what you do: Use <Row[^>].* To find and select ROW elements with stuff in them. Replace it with <Row>, replace them all. If, for some reason, the file you're working on has the <Row> elements on the same line as other elements, do not do this, as this is lazy and greedy and will gobble up EVERYTHING on the line. Do not have Matches Newline checked or you are in for a baaad day! That's part of the battle down. Now! Use <Cell[^>].*?[^/]> To selectively select CELL elements with BS in them. Note that this will SKIP self-closing CELL Elements; do normal searches to find them and kill them MANUALLY. What's a self-closing element? It's one that looks like this <Cell ss:Style="Bullshit"/> The key is the />. But now that the other Cell elements have been normalized, a simple expression can take care of them. Plug <Cell[^>].*?> into your search for, and replace all with <Cell/>. Bing badda boom, bob's your uncle.

I'm not sure where this problem came from, but I'm working with a copy of Lore+ to try and integrate it into Khall's Carbines, in a CE .25 build, and I've noticed something very peculiar with the row containing VEQ.PURCOST. It spams, after VEQ.PURCOST and Purchase cost, AEQ.PURCOST and Purchase cost approximately eleventy-billion times. I don't know whence that came from, or if it's been fixed in the recent editions or not (the one I have is, evidently, Lore+v21stableRC1,) but you should check to make sure that hasn't carried over. Since I've seen just about the exact same thing happen in a completely different mod, I'm beginning to suspect this is a flaw in Microsoft Excel.

That's a real headache. Oh well, it shouldn't be too hard to fix it. It's a shame there are folks out there who can't shake their Micro$uck addictions, though. I'm sure there's open-source alternatives to Excel. Are they less derptarded about obvious things like that?

Wow, really? That's... A ridiculous headache. Okay, let me refine my question: does Xenonauts require the correct row count to read from Strings.xml? I mean, it wouldn't really be hard to put it back in, just count the number of </Row> tags, really. Hell, do a ctrl-H, replacing </Row> with <!-- Morkmorkbjork --> or whatever, write down how many times Notepad++ tells you it replaced it, and then put it back.

I admit, I'm not 100% on it, but I'm fairly sure that the file doesn't even need to contain the row count. I suspect that's yet more metadata in the <Table> tag, which is only useful for spreadsheet files which are, themselves, too lazy to count. I'm betting (my ass, in fact,) that it would work with <Table> bare of metadata.

So, I've been digging through the guts of several mods, trying to figure out how to merge them, and I've come to a distressing conclusion. Metadata sucks! The core of modding is using a text editor which can do a text diff; I suspect most people use Notepad++ for this, though there are alternatives. You know what metadata does to a text diff? It makes it weep, it makes it scream, it makes it cry uncle. When you're doing a text diff, you only want to see actual differences in the files you're working with, not every single cell where one person who last edited the file used Arial and where the other used Microsoft Sans-Serif. Not to mention that it bloats your file size significantly. How significantly? About twice as much. I've spent the last hour cleaning up Khall's Carbines's Strings.xml. It started at over 12,000Kb, though much of that is because his spreadsheet program must have glitched somewhere and repeated the same few cells in a row approximately ten bajillion times. Clean up the glitched info, and you get a file that's been pared down to about 640K. Clean up the blasted metadata, though - the NamedCell nonsense, the style info, etcetera - and you can get the sucker down to 390. That's not liposuction, that's taking a chainsaw to the file. So, what should a properly edited Strings.xml file look like? <?xml version="1.0"?><Workbook><Worksheet ss:Name="strings"> <Table> <Column/> <Column/> <Row> <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Column Name</Data></Cell> <Cell><Data ss:Type="String">Column Contents</Data></Cell> </Row>... </Table></Worksheet></Workbook> And honestly, I'm not even 100% that <Workbook> and <Worksheet> are necessary, but I ain't gonna strip 'em. But that's it - you should have a <Row> tag, containing two <Cell> tags, which contain a <Data ss:Type="String"> tag, which contains your info. Not only does this make things much lighter in the file size and much, much easier for whatever text diff program you're going to use in the end, but it enhances human readability by approximately over nine thousand percent. Once you've pared most of the file down this way, you can just hold the page down key to scan the file and look for bits that are obviously out-of-place. For example, just by visual scanning, I detected a long section beginning with Items.AlienBaseCoreDesc and proceeding to Researches.HeavyDroneWreckageDesc where the second cell is missing entirely, and I'll have to look into that. Oh, and one last tip? <!-- This is a comment. --> That's the comment tag. Everything ignores it, it's just for human readability, which makes it the most perfect thing ever for someone tinkering in the guts of an XML file to leave themselves (or future modders) notes as regards what they've seen which they thought was strange in the file, or (perhaps more importantly) done to the file. Documenting your work now will save you massive headaches later, I promise you that. (Plus, it makes it very easy to ctrl-F on the string "<!--" to find things you've seen before.)

This may be a trivial, or impossible request, but... Would it be possible for you to set the spreadsheet programs you're using to strip out or omit cell and table metadata on saving? Editing spreadsheet-formatted XML files in Notepad++ isn't so hard, without the metadata making things godawful confusing and inserting random line breaks everywhere.

It seems that an awful lot of Strings.xml entries went missing in Khall's Carbines's strings.xml, in addition to the ridiculousness of three entries being copied like, tens and tens of thousands of times. But, after I beat those back into shape, and stripped cell metadata from the Community Edition's Strings.xml, I've got enough commonality for a text diff to actually be meaningful. And by that I mean it's like, 80% commonality. It's taking me a looong time, but I think I'm closing in on fixing this bad boy.

Chacineiro, you might consider that shotguns are very good in close quarters assault. Their maximum potential damage received a buff: he set the damage of each pellet down to 3/5ths, but doubled the number of pellets, so the new maximum damage potential is 1/5th higher, and the damage will follow the curve more, giving you more assured likely damage. A shotgun is good on the close quarters offense. Alien jackass crouched behind a low wall with a gun? Run up to the wall with a shotgun and feed him a faceful of hot lead/lasers/plasma/hypersonic ferrous metal. But they are not good in close quarters defense, because they're big and cumbersome and difficult to bring to bear. In theory, though, this need not be the case; there is in theory some design space for, say, a short-barreled shotgun with a low ammo capacity but a hellacious reaction modifier. But I digress; if you want to get that delicious reaction fire, use a pistol or a carbine. If you want to blow someone the hell away at point-blank range, use a shotgun. If you want to get someone into point-blank range so he can blow an alien's face off without getting his own ass blown off from reaction fire, use a flashbang to get the alien's heads down. Or a full burst from a machine gunner. Combined arms for the win.

I would point out that there is already a powerful sonic grenade weapon in the game. That's what the "bang" part of the flashbang is. That said, an LRAD mounted a Hunter would be interesting, if possibly anachronistic. Then again, reverse-engineering alien tech is an excuse which forgives a multitude of sins. How about grenade launchers? Fires miniaturized (lower splash and less-damaging; but no less suppressive) versions of the standard grenades, at far greater range. The M79 grenade launcher (single-shot, break action,) was introduced in 1961, so that's been around a while. The China Lake (pump-action, 3-round tube magazine,) grenade launcher was introduced in 1968 for the Navy SEALs, and the Milkor MGL (the ubiquitous six-round cylinder grenade launcher seen in every game with grenade launchers ever) will be prototyped in 1981 - slightly anachronistic, but there's nothing saying your lab boys can't engineer something akin to it. Grenade launchers would, I think, be quite nice weapons - after all, the aliens do get their exploding plasma rifle, it's only fair we should have something to return the favor with. With the lesser damage and splash range, they wouldn't be quite as useful as having a grenadier throw a full-sized grenade in, but they'd be faster to fire and with a longer range, so they'd be more practical for room-clearance and for long-range suppression.