Woohoo!

Ok, I had little problem with my mod, as most of my files are 'added' not altered. But there would be 2 things I think we'd all like.
1. A list of all the files that have been altered for 1.04, so we don't have to arrange by modified, and then check if anything has changed in it (I noticed some files in 1.03 were modified, but had no changes whatsoever (a texture file, and a few .entity files)).
2. This probably will go against certain 'regulations' and I'll most likely be shot down quickly on this one, but would it be possible to get the reference data files for 1.04 *breathes in deeply* before its release? Or failing that proposal, with the release of 1.04, so we can get cracking straight away?

I have to say, I'm honoured that you've asked us directly yourself. Most devs would throw out a sticky and let it get to 500 pages before even reading and responding. This game is definitely well supported, despite what many of the 'haters' says, keep up the outstanding work, as I'm sure you will

I'll agree with Uzii also.

A list of non-obvious changed files (meaning, if the patch notes say some ship was changed, obviously the entity file is), and the reference data right along (or closely following) the patch release would be great.

As a slight aside not directly related to converting - but the ability to make comments in the files that the game would skip over when loading/reading the file would be all kinds of awesome. Right now any typo or blank space causes pretty spectacular crashes.

It doesn't have to be anything major, just having it skip lines prefaced with // or blank lines would work great. That way we could prettify the files a bit (especially the string file) so that it's a lot easier for us to work with.

It would actually help speed up conversion/updating since we could comment such nifty things as how many additional strings/counts were added so we wouldn't need to re-count everything, etc.

Thanks!

I would also like to see the reference files early, or at least released at the same time as the patch.

The most time consuming part is using a merge program (like tortoisemerge) and merging all the changed files line by line. It would be great if in the reference data folder there was a new folder of 'changed files' to make the merge process easier.

Thank you very much Uzii, you have been a great help to most of the people on here and I think you should get an award   I will check the program out when I get home.

It would be nice to get the Sins Symbol Files so we can debug directly what is erroring...as is you have to do a ton of Trial and Error rather than going directly after the problem....

OH YEAH, please find some way to get us access to the AI, that would be very helpful as when you make a lot of changes you need to change the AI with it so it interacts properly with what you have changed(does that make sense)

I think everything so far has been great, the support from the devs and the community is overwhelming and just cannot be beat. With that out of the way I'm jumping on the 'Agree with Uzii' bandwagon because he said everything that I thought of first. Having access to the 1.04 files either before hand or at the time of release would drasticly improve the conversion of any current mods, as well as getting a list of modified files (I say all of them just to be safe )

I can also agree with having some sort of tool that would let us read the dump files when the game crashes so we don't always scratch our heads or have to back track through 10 different files to find a single space out of line or whatever.

I was slightly suprised to find that there wasn't any sort of supported commenting system available to the files, or maybe there is one and we just haven't discovered yet what is is. Either way having the ability to comment lines out, or even add notes to files would help out tons.

Well, I'm going to agree with Uzii too.. oh wait...

I do think though that what has been said about commenting out lines would be a very nice addition, although not imperative. The ability to read those Dump files is however, and would save all of us many hours, possibly days, searching for a typo. The Logs that can be enabled are, well, to say the least, basic, and only seem to highlight non-fatal errors. I have been through a couple and now don't get any, even when it dumps.

I also agree with the point Leon brought up about removing the need to have all the files in a folder. Won't make much of a difference to most things, although cleaner, but the Meshes folder, even mostly in Binary, is approaching 70Mb alone for me, and with a total unpacked size of nearly 370Mb, its something I could do without. Soon I won't be able to upload to Rapidshare in one sitting (split zip file), and I am beginning to feel limited to what I can do, as the size of my mod is ballooning rapidly.

Are there any non-used sounds, meshes or texures? Would be great to have some more stuff to work with. When i savage from other games i always have to ask for permission. Mostly they don't care or are glad to help out, but some deveopers don't answer or are not reachable.

commenting !!!

diff logs of file changes/ delete / adds

some rudimentary folder heirachy (maybe just abilities/buffs/research subjects)

guidelines on how exactly the file parser reads files (how does it handle white space, blank lines etc)

make a userstrings.str that overrides/appends to the english.str on load

About ConvertData.exe I really want somekind of multiple file converting. Convert every single file by hand input is really hard work.

EDIT - Please release official 3dmax plugin or script   

While a magician should never reveal his tricks, here's one anyway:

FOR /R .\ %G IN (*.entity) DO C:\SolarMod\ConvertData\convertdata.exe entity %~nG%~xG ..\..\HeavyNova\GameInfo\%~nG%~xG

A couple of glitches I ran into in 1.03--

1) The planet type for research seems to be bugged--the game seems to only allow one new type to be defined correctly. Add more and and all planets can be colonized with the first tech added, but the name will be wrong.

2) The player entity files indicate that extra tech blocks or fields can be added but it does not work in game. Bugged or not meant to be expanded? I'd like to add whole new research fields or at least add blocks onto the existing fields, but it doesn't look possible right now.