Herman2000 wrote: ↑Sun, 13. Sep 20, 00:06
The go-to tool for editing files in the game would be "
X3 Editor 2". Though it's not suited for touching mission-related xml-files, but those can be opened in any old text editor.
that seems to be the case, i downloaded both X3 Editor2 and X Studio just in case. already unpacked the Cats from my Xtended download and currently trying to figure out how were the ships added in the TShips file. from what i read each fake patch sits over the original files at least hierarchy wise so im trying to understand how did the Xtended devs organize the TShips file so i can updated based on Albion Prelude IDs.
i was originally just going to edit the cats from the TC folder directly but after thinking about it it seems im gonna have to port the whole mod to Albion Prelude so it can be compatible with the expansion ships and other functionalities so thats the new direction. plan so far is:
1. find which files on the XTC Cats are compatible with AP
2. find which files on the XTC Cats require a major reorganization in order to work with AP ID lists (already trying for ships since they are the most important element but im sure Stations and Weapons also need a look)
3. make a new set of Cats from that change that can be put in the AP folder directly
4. check if the Scripts work or if they require adjustments based on the new Cats
5. see if the bugs found on the latest comments of the thread can be sorted out while working on this port
i have already made a list of the IDs on AP TShips, now need to make a List of all the ships added on Xtended that arent a mirror of the expansion ships (Factory Ships for example), i also want to take a look on the way the file is written but the text editor version is so massive im not sure what im looking at.
UPDATE:
i finished writting a series of lists files of all the ships with their IDs on AP, Xtended and even Cadius Xtra Ship Pack. now im trying to check the TShips files directly to understand which line is which ship and how they are implemented (file is too bloated and too unorganized, i thought they would be organized by ID in the .txt as they appear on editor but anyways). the objective is to take the Xtended TShips file as base (due to the way its organized) then edit the entries so they match their AP counterparts (as some of them were later introduced in the expansion, EX: Pteranodon, Mammoth, Phoenix, etc..), there's a lot of overlapping between the vanilla game and the 2 mods so i'll have to do some renaming in the case of some ships (for those cases where the mod added extra ships that have their own models but have the same name as pre-existing ships, EX: Falchion line of ships implemented in Xtended, Xtra implementes another Falchion strike bomber).
general logic of the procedure is that outside of ships there's not much critical content edited by Xtended that will crash the game (weapons and stations should behave correctly, just need to edit them to have certain ships avaliable but that's not important atm). and if the fork of Xtended TC + Xtra Ships pack i downloaded is right, then the bonus ships should also be compatible for porting them into the new TShips file.