Sokar408

Join Date 06/2008

[Modding] Creating new abilities

What am I doing wrong?

Alright so I'm getting the hang of this "modding" if we can call what I'm doing that, thanks to some very helpful people. However now I have moved on to making new abilities. My first try was to make a MissileBarrage equivelant, actually the same, only difference would be that instead of missiles, it would fire that ghostly looking missiles that the Advent Starbase uses as its top weapon upgrade.

What I did was to copy the files:

AbilitiyMissileBarrage
BuffMissileBarrageFire
BuffMissileBarrageHit

And changed them into:

AbilityGhostBarrage
BuffGhostBarrageFire
BuffGhostBarrageHit

Next, I went into AbilityGhostBarrage and changed

"buffType "BuffMissileBarrageFiring"" into "buffType "BuffGhostBarrageFiring""

and then into BuffGhostBarrageFire and changed

"buffType "BuffMissileBarrageHit"" into "buffType "BuffGhostBarrageHit"".

Now to change the effect I want to change. In BuffGhostBarrageFire I made this change:

    weaponEffectsDef
        weaponType "Missile"
        burstCount 3
        burstDelay 0.080000
        muzzleEffectName "Weapon_TechCapitalMissileHeavy_Muzzle"
        muzzleSoundMinRespawnTime 0.100000
        muzzleSounds
            soundCount 1
            sound "WEAPON_TECHCAPITALMISSILEHEAVY_MUZZLE"
        hitEffectName "Weapon_TechCapitalMissileHeavy_Hit"
        hitHullEffectSounds
            soundCount 1
            sound "WEAPONIMPACT_MISSILEHEAVY_HITGENERIC"
        hitShieldsEffectSounds
            soundCount 1
            sound "WEAPONIMPACT_MISSILEHEAVY_HITGENERIC"
        missileTravelEffectName "Weapon_TechCapitalMissileHeavy_Travel"
        missileStartTurningDistance 300.000000
        missileSlowTurnRate 0.708997
        missileMaxSlowTurnTime 4.000000

To:

    weaponEffectsDef
        weaponType "Missile"
        burstCount 3
        burstDelay 0.080000
        muzzleEffectName "Weapon_PsiSpirit_Muzzle"
        muzzleSoundMinRespawnTime 0.500000
        muzzleSounds
            soundCount 1
            sound "WEAPON_PSICAPITALSPIRIT_MUZZLE"
        hitEffectName "Weapon_PsiSpirit_Hit"
        hitHullEffectSounds
            soundCount 1
            sound "WEAPON_PSICAPITALSPIRIT_IMPACT"
        hitShieldsEffectSounds
            soundCount 1
            sound "WEAPON_PSICAPITALSPIRIT_IMPACT"
        missileTravelEffectName "Weapon_PsiSpirit_Travel"
        missileStartTurningDistance 300.000000
        missileSlowTurnRate 0.708997
        missileMaxSlowTurnTime 4.000000

Lastly I went into the String folder and into English and made these changes and additions:

NumStrings 5361 => NumStrings 5363

StringInfo
    ID "IDS_ABILITY_GHOSTBARRAGE_NAME"
    Value "Ghost Barrage"
StringInfo
    ID "IDS_ABILITY_GHOSTBARRAGE_DESCRIPTION"
    Value "Bombards the area with ghostly energy, dealing damage to all objects within the blast radius."

Ofc I added them in the alphabetical correct place. To finish I opened: CAPITALSHIP_PSIBATTLESHIP and changed this:

ability:0 "AbilityAntiMatterDetonate" => ability:0 "AbilityGhostBarrage"

To my knowledge this should have worked. However now my game minidumps on start up. As soon as I remove these changes, it all goes back to working as it should. What am I doing wrong?

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Nothing about what you posted immediately jumps out as wrong (assuming you have all those effects, as it would be looking for those file names).

Open up your user.setting file (in the Setting folder, same path as the mod), and at the end set showErrors to TRUE. Load up your mod again and when it crashes it will now give you a more detailed error message: file name that caused it, line number, and a short blurp on what the problem on that line is.

Feel free to post that error here, too.

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Hmm it looks fine to me but im not exactly the modder in the world.

You did make the new partical and sound effects PsiSpirit Impact muzzle and put them in the partical and sound folder right?

The string looks fine but did you change the ability string ID from IDS_ABILITYMISSILEBARRAGE_NAME to IDS_GHOSTBARRAGE_NAME and DESCRIPTION cause that might be the probleme.

hope that helps

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Quoting Gameguy11,

reply 2

Hmm it looks fine to me but im not exactly the modder in the world.

You did make the new partical and sound effects PsiSpirit Impact muzzle and put them in the partical and sound folder right?

The string looks fine but did you change the ability string ID from IDS_ABILITYMISSILEBARRAGE_NAME to IDS_GHOSTBARRAGE_NAME and DESCRIPTION cause that might be the probleme.

hope that helps

No I made a new entry

I enabled ShowError and got:

Failed to convert 'BEAMPSI' to an enum value.

Entity Ref not found: AbilityGhostBarrage

I suppose this would mean it cant find the file. However there is a file in the Gameinfo called: AbilityGhostBarrage

This makes no sense to me

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The BEAMPSI was a miss type in my modification to the Advent Starbase. Dont mind that one

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Is it AbilityGhostBarrage, or AbilityGhostBarrage.entity? You need to have the .entity extention in the file name.

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Its and entity file yes

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Okay I found out that you need to enter the name of the ability in the file: Entity.manifest
Now thats working, however now I get a new error:

Failed to find StringID: 'IDS_GameStat_CreditsLostToStarBaseUpgradePurchase'. NOTE: Any following StringID failures will be supressed.

Any suggestions?

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Finally I made it work without dumping. I used the wrong String copy (I used the one from the normal game, and not Entrenchement)

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