Post
by dunderhead327 » Thu, 3. Feb 22, 14:57
TLDR: Yes, I think you are probably correct.
The ship section of the encyclopedia is a bit of a mess, but was much worse before I re-wrote it for Mayhem 3.5. The changes in Mayhem 3.8 (and, therefore, the Rebalance mod) unfortunately mean that the descriptions of the M1s, M2+s, and M7Cs no longer reflect the ships' actual capabilities, especially their cost/benefit analyses.
To avoid the risk of losing data, I created the 8483-L044.xml file to override 8383-L044.xml. I cleansed the data in 8483 by removing the duplicate and unused ship records (of which there were many), but TBH I was losing the will to live by the time I got to the Terran capital ships, so I may have missed one. However, I believe that any xxx01 or xxx02 records relating to ships which are in 8383 but not 8483 are not used. xxx01 files are linked somehow to the ship models, and hold the text displayed in the HUD and system map. The xxx02 records hold the text displayed in the encyclopedia. I don't know how they are associated to each other, nor do I know why duplicate or missing keys do not cause any problems (e.g. there are no 16741 or 16751 records, but 16742 and 16752 do exist). In a number of cases, as here, the xxx01 and xxx02 for a particular ship are not consecutive. I have not been a programmer for many years, and my experience would not be relevant in any case, so I didn't even try to investigate the code.
Looking at 8483-L044.xml, I think you are right. The name of the Tobosaku in the HUD etc. comes from the first 16701, but its encyclopedia entry is 16992, while the Cikyu uses the other 16701, and 16702. Black magic! If you want to test this, changing the text between ">" and "<" won't break your game (but you probably already knew that).