homestar colors

Anybody know? I'd like to know as well. My custom race is supposed to have a Blue home star, and I'd like to know how to change it.

While we're at it, anybody know how to name the other starting planets and not just base them on the name of the home planet?

I'm not sure how to change star colors, but it's possible to edit the names of the home planets from the Data/English/CustomPlanets file. As far as I know though, it's not possible to make these changes for a custom race unless you edit them into the game to replace another default race, as the CustomPlanets file only covers the 12 default races. More experienced modders, do let me know if I'm wrong!

Thanks, that works, but now we still need to know how to change the homestar color. So far, I've had no luck figuring that out.

Check out StarTypes.xml - if you give a custom star the same internal name as the race's star, you can pretty much set it to any of the defined colours.

You should find the default file in your Dark Avatar install folder.  You'll see that Sol is already set up.

Don't know about changing star colors.  Looks like Marvin has that covered.  Changing planet names is easy, though.  Just look at the other custom star systems to see the tags used to designate the planet name.  Just put those tags into your custom system with your custom names and you're good.

You can add more custom systems to the CustomPlanets xml.  I find it easiest to just cut-n-paste an existing one then edit to my desires.  For anyone confused about planet size, texture, etc, it's nice to know that values will be randomly assigned if you don't specify them.  So let's say you cut-n-paste Drengi, for example, but don't want a clone of the Drengin home system.  You can just change the planet names and delete all the texture, size, and other tags to get random values - instant custom system.  That way you can use your custom systems until you figure out more about the textures and such.  Also, planets can have either rings or a moon, but not both.

Aha! I knew that was there for a reason. Thank you. I'll try that out as soon as I get back to my Game computer.

Nah, it didn't work. I opened StarTypes.xml and added a new entry with the values I wanted, saved, then opened GalCiv and started a new game. Star was still yellow. I placed a copy of the file in the TA Data folder, then modified the vanilla StarTypes file the same way, and the result was still the same, yellow star. I made sure the star's name was exactly the same as the star in my custom system, which does work.

Okay then.  Here's an idea, try setting the internal name to 'CustomDefault' and see what happens then.

The player and AI star systems are set up in Data\English\CustomPlanets.xml, that's where I got that idea from.  So if you can't get the above to work, you may need to set it up in there first.

I can't seem to get it to work so, beats me if it can be done.

Perhaps it's the kind of hard-coded override that prevents you from making any planets in the home system have extreme environments.  It just goes through, sees a home system, and makes a yellow star with normal planets.