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Author Topic: Prune-blue after trying to make blue-prints work  (Read 580 times)

Vandermeer

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Prune-blue after trying to make blue-prints work
« on: February 12, 2022, 08:10:52 AM »

Hello forum,
I have recently set out to make this old (and spectacular) Interstellar Federation mod work again in newest version and have largely succeeded:


(yes, I realize someone has already attempted it, but he cut out half the ships, all the weapons, probably the hullsystems, and then even renamed all the remaining hulls like they were his models while changing nothing about them. Open license, fine, but respect for the artist and work should still exist. Oh, also, while the original artist released the mod as "interstellar federation", the updating modder re-released it as "[my name]'s ship pack".
..Not illegal, but clearly bad manners as I see it)


Anyway, so far it seems that all the hulls, weapons and new shipsystems are working as intended, so the mod is working in its old state from before 0.9 already. On top of the ships being summonable in console however (which is what I currently have to do to get them), I also wanted the mod to adapt to these modern times and have the designs be hidden in random salvage so you could legally produce them. However, despite my best efforts, I couldn't get the new blueprint system to do its work. I followed the intro to blueprint modding wiki section which would have you believe that the game will automatically generate the blueprint items and recognize the intended effects once you take these steps defined there. Either there is some glaring oversight by myself, or that is simply not the case, for I can't get the blueprint items to show up even after following this, and also pretty much copying the setup I saw in the Hiigaran Descendants mod.
Additionally there are some other shenanigans that just don't make sense to me which I will explain below. So since I am pretty much at the point where the logic of the system has become unclear to me at the root, it is finally cheaper to just ask, and hopefully someone here can see through whatever went wrong when I show how I set it up so far:

First you design the special blueprint items that would hold the weapons and hull you want to be distributed.
Hiigaran mod for comparison:

Mine:

I tested whether there were issues with the "order" number, or accidental hidden characters in the id, but nothing.

Then, since I shopped together a custom graphic, I link that to the blueprint.
Hii:

Mine:

Here I suspected the long folder name might be an issue for some reason, but then recognized that it wasn't since all the other image linking (hulls, weapons, fx) went through the same process and worked perfectly fine.

Then you use the blueprint plugin params as the reference tag in the weapons and hulls you want to show up.
Hii:

Shii:

(rarity increased for testing purpose)
Now here comes the weird part. I initially had the ifed_ship_bp2 prepared to have some upper designs, like Montana, Auria and all the "mk0" designs be part of a separate blueprint package. ...But having them like that made the whole model illegal for the game, meaning if I used the "allblueprints" console command, they would not show up.
Why that is I simply cannot fathom, since they just ran under exactly the same setup, but with a "2" at the end. Also, if the blueprints don't work at all, because...

...they don't show up in the game anywhere, and therefore weren't generated, then how does the blueprint system even matter to the legitimacy of the hulls in the first place?
Anyway, the current "rare_bp" ones actually worked without the "ifed_ship_bp2", and are only carrying those temporarily because I wanted to test whether the tag was broken itself and could somehow delegitimize a running design. ..It did not, the ships are still there, but ships that only have "ifed_ship_bp2" are stricken from the records for some reason.

What is weird is that Hiigaran and other mods like Musashi or Star Federation have the very same setup with sometimes even more custom blueprint package categories, and for them it all works just like this.

With the weapons it appears to be same. I have found a rare_bp weapon blueprint of this faction already, but not the defined package, which is unsurprising seeing how it doesn't exist as an item.


In the beginning I even had my own procgen drop_groups file that added lines so these modded blueprints should have dropped with higher likelihood than all others. When it became clear that something was scrambled, I already simplified it and deleted the procgen accelerator, but the issue was apparently not in the drop rules.


Anyway, I hope someone can help, because as far as I understand it, I can't learn more from reading wiki or analyzing other mods. If I carbon copied but renamed one of those mods, probably some blueprints still wouldn't work, or at least that is how it looks like to me at this juncture. Obviously an error or something missing must be afoot, but I have lost too much time looking for it in vain.
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Vandermeer

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Re: Prune-blue after trying to make blue-prints work
« Reply #1 on: February 13, 2022, 09:05:03 AM »



Question closed, I managed to clear it up by starting the csv from scratch again. Who knows what was wrong inside, -my tip is still on some unknown hidden characters somewhere-, but now that I did everything without resorting to much copy-paste, it is fixed.

Edit: Oh, and the issue with the "bp2" not working correctly was an issue with the console commands mod, not the others. When I add bp2 manually, I can get the blueprints, even when for unknown reasons they still don't appear through the "allblueprints" console command.
« Last Edit: February 13, 2022, 09:11:32 AM by Vandermeer »
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