cheers!

Edit: I made a small mod, using the tutorial. I created a new ability and replaced the Dunov Battlecruiser's Magnetize with it. I got the game running, built a battlecruiser, but when I pointed over the ability on the ability management screen, the game had a minidump crash. Can anyone explain what I might have done wrong?

They should. In the user path, where you put the mod, there's a Settings folder. Open the user.setting file inside with notepad, and towards the bottom there's a line that reads showErrors FALSE. Set it to TRUE, run your mod again, and paste the error you get from your crash please

Nevermind, I've fixed it, but thanks for your error message thing. Thanks!

EDIT: No, I'd put a space in the buff file's name, but not in the line referencing the buff.

How do I make the string work? I've got the ability working, but it can't find the string entries for name and description. The string references are the same as the entries in the .str file. What might I have done wrong?

Oh, thanks!

It still doesn't seem to work...

Nope. When you say it doesn't work, what exactly happens?

This is how the string file works:

Each string entry has 3 lines: StringInfo, ID, and Value. The "stringInfo" tag tells the game to expect an ID and Value to follow. The ID is the internal tag for the string. The Value is the actual text displayed in game.

So if an entity contains this line: nameStringID "IDS_ABILITY_BEAMBLAST_NAME" the game is going to search through the stringInfos until it comes across the matching ID "IDS_ABILITY_BEAMBLAST_NAME", take its Value field, and display it in game.

So, when you make your ability, if you give it a nameStringID "IDS_ABILITY_MYSUPERABILITY_NAME" and a descStringID "IDS_ABILITY_MYSUPERABILITY_DESC", you will need to add this to the English.str file (anywhere works):

stringInfo
        ID "IDS_ABILITY_MYSUPERABILITY_NAME"
        Value "Super Ability"

stringInfo
        ID "IDS_ABILITY_MYSUPERABILITY_DESC"
        Value "This super ability does all sorts of mean things."

and then increase the string count number up top by 2.

Well, I can't really say what you should do next. I would recommend not jumping into it head first, though. Pick out a few of the more interesting things you'd like to do, and figure out how you'd do them. If you want to have some funky ability (people so far have come up with some rather crazy stuff for abilities!) figure out and practice doing it so you get a better grip on how it all fits together. If you know you want to tweak research, spend some time figuring out how research fits together. Get comfortable doing practice/tests of all that you know you'll have to do, and then the bulk of your time will go towards actually doing it rather than learning how to

It's all up to you, though! There are a bunch of people in the modding community that are fairly active on the forums, if you need help with anything.

Nope, it doesn't work backwards.