Ship Design/Style Converter for GC2:TA?

from GalCiv2 Forums
Will there be a way to import older ship designs and styles into TA? I guess they'd need to have neutral rotation information added, but a small applet should be able to convert and move them. I have 7 custom races with ship styles, and the idea of hacking xmls or making all the ships again does not appeal. I'm not sure if DA ever got a tool like this. Perhaps the editors that TA comes with will be back-compatible with older designs and styles, and able to write them out as TA-compatible ones?

On a related note, will TA still contain the GC2 'vanilla' tech tree as an option for custom races? I have little interest in seeing my custom races shoehorned into the GC2 race-specific tech trees. Again, the editors may be able to provide this functionality (as well as the flexibility to create custom tech trees).
6,354 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
TA should have no problem with DA designs, or DL designs from at least 1.2 or 1.3 (whichever was when it was switched from .shipclass to .xml). No special convertor needed.
Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Really? Will I have to copy them manually to wherever TA looks, or will it natively read from DA sources? I dimly remember DL -> DA being quite a task for moving designs. The beta doesn't use DA designs natively at least. If they're supported, that's awesome.

Did they ever fix the 'style not working for player unless you do a bunch of hackish workarounds' thing?
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Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Yes, you'd need to copy them over to Twilight's folder under My Docs\My Games. Unlike porting DL designs, it shouldn't tkae any more than that. TA can still read the old format (you may note that TA doesn't have all the core templates redone, only the new terrorstar templates are to be found in it's Data\ShipCfg folder) and the styles haven't been redone again as they were from DL to DA.

The in-game style settings remain as they were, since making it for the player was never its intended use (rather, controlling AI ship appearances was).
Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
That's awesome news. Rebuilding 100+ designs wasn't my idea of fun, but I have plenty that could really benefit from the animation functionality. The changeover from the old system to the 1.3 system, being unsupported to my knowledge, was enough to put me off DA for months after I bought it.

Forcing people to use hackish workarounds to get the base three starting ships changed is pretty disappointing. It even appears to be a legacy problem (back from DL when it was just 'ship style 3' instead of custom styles). I guess they didn't make the game start splash text editable either, so all my custom races still have wholly inappropriate text from one of the base races? :(
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
guess they didn't make the game start splash text editable either
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Those are in the strings files, IIRC.
Reply #6 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
They *are*? Wouldn't changing them mess up the basic races? Anyway, thanks for the pointer: I'm off to dig around.