Hello,
I've recently tried to customize one of the ships in a mod I played to be more to my likings, but cannot figure out how to get the changes take place in the game, besides trying quite a lot of things (which I will list below). I run a game with the Exerelin mod and also Hiigaran Descendants ships, as well as Interstellar Federation. The ship I tried to modify is the Titan Class of the Interstellar Federation. I custom modded my whole installation quite alot, e.g. only having 1/4th of the standard supply costs while maintaining the standard logistic (total shipcount) boundaries, which had me adjust ship data too. Yet, all these ship modifications only ever took place in the ship_data.csv of the game or the mods, which have been easy to modify in Excel (and there I already changed the design name to "Ocean" - less pompous).
This time I am just dissatisfied with the turret loadout of the design, as it is by default highly assymetric with for example 3 large turrets facing right and only 2 facing left, but then 5 little turrets on the left too that aren't on the right. Assymetry works for agile ships, but this one is probably the slowest, definitly the least maneuverable of them all in the whole fleet list, and also I am kind of OCD order fanatic about symmetry.
- So I looked into the ifed_[class name].ship files with notepad++ and after some time found how to adjust turret count, position, arc and orientation there. The problem is though that those changes don't take effect in the game for some reason, not in loaded save (where I figured an older image of the mods' core data might be loaded), but also the changes don't show up in class previews of the game menu codex.
- Then I found the variants that give every raw hull in the game an actual armed model to work with. So I thought maybe the game automatically backrolls a design plan If it finds it incompatible with the raw hull design - small chance, but had to be tested. So I changed that in Notepad++ as well to fit the new turret setup, but it failed to result in game change too.
- Next idea was that maybe the Exerelin mod, which requires compatibility adjustments for each ship mod to be implemented, had a straight copy of the original data somewhere which would override all my customization. Sadly, the only notes that directed to Interstellar Federation were only little things like a list of the allowed ships, folder direction notes, AI and naming conventions etc., so that is out too.
- Then I figured that maybe the Notepad++ edit, though usually extremly robust, wasn't safe enough here and would cause the program to fall back on save data when a file was corrupted. So I learned to use the shipedit program that flies around the forum here, but even though I could replicate my custom layout in the editor (and also the corresponding variant), the saves from this program didn't make the situation any better.
- Following intuition, I now completly deleted the *.ship and *.variant entries of the orginal, and yes, even after that the original data was still up and working, as I could see the ship in the codex and savegame. That all sounds as if the Starsector keeps around its own copy of the mod hard data
somewhere, because how else would it know of the original data if it was overwritten or deleted, right? There are two options for this, either a hard copy in some folder (maybe in completly different and bundled data format too), or it could be integrated in a savegame, where maybe the game automatically restores stack data from the last active save or something.
The last one I could exclude, as even when I replace the save the codex still stays complete. The first one I will never be able to fully disprove, because who knows where and how data might be stored or encoded here.
I however did not find anything in the usual computer archive, not in appdata, and also not in the game folder itself (searching for "titan" and anything "ship", but here it might disguise itself).
So that is where I finally gave up and seeked forum aid. How can I get this done? Is it really some encoded data image? If, then can I edit it, or if not, do I have to un- and reinstall it all just to make this little adjustment?(but how could modders ever deal with that...) Or am I on a completly wrong track? I could imagine there is another controlling file that keeps check of how many turrets and where individually for each ship, just like the *.csv files before, but besides turning every stone in the mod folder, I could not locate such an archive.