forum.starcraftai.com

So I've recently gotten into Starcraft modding, of course, and I've hit a few roadblocks and I'm wondering if anyone has any solutions to the issues I'm having.

1. I've gotten the SCV to build a "start location", but the game crashes when the start location is destroyed, probably because the death sprite for the unit is undefined. I can't find the definitions for something's death anywhere in DATEdit, so does anyone know where that can be changed?
EDIT: Fixed this one, the start location needed a "Death" sequence in the iscript.

2. I've turned the Independent Starport into a sunken colony clone (that doesn't require creep), and I've given it buttons for attacking buildings. But whenever I tell it to attack something, it ignores the command completely. It will only attack automatically, and never listens when you specify a target. Is there any solution to this?
EDIT: Fixed this one too, it was in the orders tab. "Tower guard" and "Tower attack".

3. I've made the supply depot able to train civilians, and that's working great. Only problem is I can't properly assign a rally point. Once again, it's ignoring the command. Also other unit-creating buildings have the ability to set rally points while being constructed, but still not the supply depot. How do you change a unit's button set for an incomplete building?
EDIT: Fixed, for the most part. "Allow all buildings to rally" option enabled the option, but the "Use units.dat group flags for factories" (which enables rally by right-click) crashes the game frequently, and the option is still not there for an incomplete building.

4. I've created a kind of "Universal peon" unit which can gather resources and create buildings from any race... It will gather resources and move around, but when I tell it to build anything (I reused the original peon units' button sets for this) it, once again, ignores the command completely.
EDIT: Fixed. Add the new peon to the "Drone start build" "Drone build" "Build1" "Build2" "Build3" and "Build4" orders.

5. With DATEdit I've moved each race's buildings to some of the unused upgrade slots (so those unused upgrades will now upgrade the building's armor), and tried to add the ability to upgrade them to the supply depot, pylon or hive. I also changed the upgrade properties in DATEdit so the max value for them is 3. But the buttons never even show up. This is strange, because I successfully added the ability to upgrade another unused upgrade to the refinery, extractor or assimilator. Anyone know why it's working for some and not for others?
EDIT: I did a complete redo of everything involved here and it wants to work now. So I guess that's fixed too.

6. I've turned the marker units (Terran Marker, etc.) into beacon clones, but units can't walk across them like with the regular beacons. Any way to fix that?

So I suppose most of my problems relate to FireGraft, or more specifically, the game ignoring the things I do in FireGraft. Anyone know of any solutions to these issues? If anyone would like the FG EXE to take a look, I can upload it somewhere (but this might be of questionable legality).

And if this is in the wrong place or forum or anything, feel free to move it. Or if I'd be better off on another website please let me know. I'd love to get this garbage working!

Just taking a stab at some of these.. would need to open up some of the modding tools to better answer you.

I've turned the Independent Starport into a sunken colony clone (that doesn't require creep), and I've given it buttons for attacking buildings. But whenever I tell it to attack something, it ignores the command completely. It will only attack automatically, and never listens when you specify a target. Is there any solution to this?

might check the orders tab in fgrat. might have to assign that.

3. I've made the supply depot able to train civilians, and that's working great. Only problem is I can't properly assign a rally point. Once again, it's ignoring the command. Also other unit-creating buildings have the ability to set rally points while being constructed, but still not the supply depot. How do you change a unit's button set for an incomplete building?

there's a "rally exe edit" that was one of the 1st new exe edits added (by mauron). check to see that it is enabled as supply depot is not a default rally building.

4. I've created a kind of "Universal peon" unit which can gather resources and create buildings from any race... It will gather resources and move around, but when I tell it to build anything (I reused the original peon units' button sets for this) it, once again, ignores the command completely.

check orders on firegraft. there's a "is harvester or something like that" that needs to be assigned. This allows peon to build/repair if Irc. Also check iscript for "building" if your unit isn't using a "peon" sprite.

6. I've turned the marker units (Terran Marker, etc.) into beacon clones, but units can't walk across them like with the regular beacons. Any way to fix that?

check datedit for the unit and see what their elevation is.

And if this is in the wrong place or forum or anything, feel free to move it. Or if I'd be better off on another website please let me know. I'd love to get this garbage working!

You're in a good place. Hercanic's modcrafters (tho new registration appears off), SEN (Farty, Heinermann), and CCreations.org all have a few veteran modders who really know their stuff. This forum isn't as active by THIS type of modding, but has capable members. Will check out some of these when get a chance... and by all means pls post your solutions as you find them as well.

bajadulce wrote:might check the orders tab in fgrat. might have to assign that.

Gah, there was plenty of things hidden away in that stupid orders tab. Seriously, that thing seems pointless. What's the point of regulating orders with this thing if you already have the button system on a per-unit basis? I guess it might help prevent exploits and hacking...

bajadulce wrote:there's a "rally exe edit" that was one of the 1st new exe edits added (by mauron). check to see that it is enabled as supply depot is not a default rally building.

The option is to allow all buildings to rally, and that did the trick. But the option to enable rallying by right-click makes the game crash a lot, and you still can't set the rally while the building is being made. So I guess that's as good as it's going to get right now.

bajadulce wrote:check datedit for the unit and see what their elevation is.

I did this, it's set to the same value as the beacons (0 - Below ground). Any ideas?

Oh, and does anyone have a download for TBLEdit or some other working strings editor? I can't find it anywhere and I really need to make some new strings, especially for my new upgrades...

Glad you were able to get most of this stuff straightened out and thnx for posting your solutions as well.

@ sprite to walk over:
compare iscript, dataedit, etc of beacon to your new unit. maybe beacons/markers etc use a different flingy control or way of displaying sprite. Might be able to help w/ this a bit later. My mind is a blank on this one atm.

@ tools:
just fixed up and pinned the old "modding tools" thread to the forum (must have got unpinned when it was broken). Almost everything you could ever need for modding you will find there.

For the beacon, try Datedit -> Units -> Graphics -> Unit Dimensions and zero out the values there. There might be a way to do that same thing using the iscript, but I have no idea how - I'm fairly ignorant of the iscripts workings.

MofoMan2000 wrote:Oh, and does anyone have a download for TBLEdit or some other working strings editor? I can't find it anywhere and I really need to make some new strings, especially for my new upgrades...

PyTBL from PyMS works pretty nice.

Myk wrote:For the beacon, try Datedit -> Units -> Graphics -> Unit Dimensions and zero out the values there. There might be a way to do that same thing using the iscript, but I have no idea how - I'm fairly ignorant of the iscripts workings.

The iscript works at the images.dat level. As soon as I tell the Marker units to use the flingy data for the beacons, it uses the same iscript entries as the beacons themselves. As for unit dimensions in the Graphics tab, that might be a viable workaround, though the original beacon units don't have those zeroed out. I really don't know wtf is going on here!

Myk wrote:PyTBL from PyMS works pretty nice.

I tried PyTBL but every time I tried to feed it an MPQ so it could find some FNT files it crashed, so it was completely unusable. I don't know if it was the version I had or what.

MofoMan2000 wrote:

Myk wrote:PyTBL from PyMS works pretty nice.

I tried PyTBL but every time I tried to feed it an MPQ so it could find some FNT files it crashed, so it was completely unusable. I don't know if it was the version I had or what.

I hope you didn't mean what you wrote here.

You want to open the MPQ with PyMPQ and then extract stuff, like say a tbl file which you can later open with PyTBL.

It seems pretty clear it wants to look in an MPQ...

"Load Error: Could not load FNT file 'MPQ:files\font\font8.fnt'"

Then it automatically pops up the "MPQ Settings" dialog, which is fine. But then I try to add an MPQ (for example, StarDat, where the FNT files are) and it gives a traceback.

"None
None
40770848
[Very long sequence of mostly hex numbers]
None

Exception in Tkinter callback
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "Tkinter.pyc", line 1404, in __call__
File "Libs\setutils.pyc", line 769, in ok
NameError: global name 'b' is not defined"

Oh, hah! I've clicked through, just OK'd through all of that so often that I forgot what the dialogs were whining about. It's not looking for the fonts in the MPQs at all, it has a font directory (under the PyMS dir, somewhere) where it's trying to load the fronts from (and failing to, obviously).

I see that it throws an error when I try messing with the MPQ order in the settings dialog; can you try just clicking 'OK' at each step and see if that works?

For question 6: try going in DAT editor, units tab, then Graphics sub-tab. Try setting its animation level to Below Ground or Air.

You could also try making it a Flyer.