Thats the conclusion I came up to also..but he would never let me build the ship since each time I would hover over the vessel...I would get more than 2000 (litteraly...it would go on indefinitely) messages telling me Entity Ref not found: AbilityDeployCombatTurret..

Weither thats develloper.exe screw ups (what it appears to be), the problem has been taken care off and I'm off to finally make the mod independant (still miss half the ships but the core vessels are in)!

Reason I use develloper is I can work on it and change stats instantenously with my logs and schematics right beside in notepad. I dont have to save, close, twink the files then reload..and see what the changes look like.

Anyhow thank you for your immense help!! Weird you were helping from your job..I dont know where you work...but to have enough free time to help someone for an entire afternoon! I WANT YOUR JOB!!!!!

Thanks 1 000 000 000 times Annatar, for your help, your perseverance and kindness! I bow to you

Justin S.

That's really the only time where it pays off to use it

Glad you got stuff rolling again, and you're welcome

:)  Glad you got it up and running, Congratulations!! 

Take care and good luck with the next part,

-Teal

Which seems to be strictly administrative..I mean adding like +100 in string file,etc...well its mostly copy/paste with a slight change can't be that complicated!

Adding the images will be a drag though!!

But what the hell, the end result will be worth it 200%..at elast for me it will

:)  Anyone who has every tried to mod, will certainly realize how complex and long it can be to get it together, and to work. I appreciate it. They would too.

-Teal

WELL IM OFFICIAL FUC.ED!!

I created my own race..worked fine! It appeared in main game race selection window. Then tried to change all PHASE names into NEPHIL names, must have forgotten something cus now I mini-dump EACH TIME the mod loads!

Which is a drag 'cus I cant do SQUAT anymore and its killing me!! I DONT WANT TO START AGAIN!!!

So question is..heird is soo many times but it didnt apply at those times...were do I go to enable minidumps to give more complex error logs... the place were I need to set TRUE, or somehting like that! PLEASE

I'm going in mental melt-down..all this work for nothing!

  Justin S.

I found the place...put it TRUE! BUT I still don't see what the error is...all I get is

SAVED MINIDUMP

C:/users/owner/appdata/local/temp/sinsdump/Sins-v.1.1-2008-11-25-20-49-29-4440-792.mnp

For what its worth

Minidump won't do any good, only IC can make sense of it. Take a deeeeeeep breath, and post what you did between the mod you uploaded and now

I took a deep breath and went through EVERY file I worked with today and finally discovered that the last files I opened (IE. the most important playerPhase entity), had a few errors in it causing automatic minidump.

So I rectified that mistake and now mod is back up 75% (only 75 cus to do the change I had to erase the Nephilplayer entity file).

But now im facing a dilemna, what do I do now...do I continue codding my ships using PHASE data as starters, or do I immediately try to extract what I've done so far and make Nephils independant (if so I need walkthrough in order to avoid getting a crapload of minidumps )?

Any idea, o great master of SoaSE knowledge

Justin S.

I would start working with your new race. You'll of course use existing files as templates, but start naming them and sticking them into your player entity file right away. If you do everything systematically, it will naturally fall in place by itself which will be much better than trying to straighten and rename everything at the end

This answer I was fearing..thats how I got to screw up my data in the first place

Ah well guess Ill go through all my entity files and take out all the ones that have any link whatsoever with the Nephil. Its gonna be hard, long and possibly extremely frustrating so I'm keeping it and I'll start it tomorrow morning.

Any tips you can give me on how to best avoid minidumps and errors, like start with player.entity or tot he contrary go through all files in alphabetical order and in each one that has a link with Nephil, change it's name ...or something like that!

 Time to kick ass and chew bubblegum!

Justin S.

PS: you might see a huge spam of insulting messages tomorrow on forum...DONT PAY ATTENTION! LOL

Pull out all the files that are specific to your race and put them in a separate folder. This way you'll avoid all the junk from vanilla and have a much smaller set of files to get lost in. Then start from the player entity and work backwards. Look at the frigate ship list and make sure you have all those entity files. Look into each of those entity files and make sure you have entities for all those abilities, so on so forth. Do not use anything from the vanilla. You're making a new race, which I assume won't be using the same ships and abilities (at least in name) than any of the existing races so there's no reason to keep anything existing in the files to mess you up. It's better for most stuff to be blank (like a completely blank frigate list if you don't have any frigates for building) than to confuse yourself between what's in your race and what's in the vanilla game.

If you're spawning ships, make their entities unique to your race, too. Don't spawn FrigatePhaseHeavy, spawn FrigateNephilHeavy, etc. This makes your own race clean and prevents you from messing up anything that already exists because you never have to worry about modifying it since you're always making copies first.

That's about all the advice I can give

Well thats some pretty darn good advice Annatar!!!

So tomorrow, first thing when I get up (after usual run with dogs,etc...) back into this! I'll gather a 6 pack of pepsi..should last the whole way!

 but for tonight im calling it a day! I think I've done more today than in the 2 months I've had this game!

hmm that interesting Annatar11; as it seems to pertain to my own issues with things not working that I think should.

Perhaps this hints at some issue with the engine itself when we modders start messing with the files; that its possible to get the engine, or something, into a 'state' that interfers in some way with custom files. Obviously its not wide spread; but now and again someone bumps against something the game would rather we didn't - or I'm just seeing shapes in the mist

Hang in there Justin!! 

Thanks Annatar for all your help, always you are great to us new modders, thank you!!

-Teal

I'm hanging Teal..more confidant and determined than ever!