Subset Games Forum

Any idea why my layout does not line up with my ship graphic? All I did was change the 2nd system repair drone to a defense drone on the Engi B.

A few pages back someone else posted an updated version of the program that wasn't on the homepage for this editor or mentioned on the front page of this thread.

https://github.com/Darkfrost/FTLEdit

It did get the ship graphic lined up with the framework layout. However, the shields, weapons, etc. were still wonky. Looking forward to a version where I can change a couple numberical values and not have it throw a dozen unrelated things out of whack...

Dreamstorm wrote:My previous post was deleted? Why?! I'm asking for help!

Long story short, ftldata has been run and the resource.dat and data.dat folders haven been linked under 'Options'. Now what?

http://i.imgur.com/1F8bu.png

Well, what is that error message telling you? It's telling you that it can't find a file at "C:\Program Files (x86)\FTLShipEdit\data\\data\blueprints.xml". And I suspect that's probably pretty accurate. Try looking in that path with Windows Explorer and see what's up. If, for example, there's blueprints.xml at
"C:\Program Files (x86)\FTLShipEdit\data\blueprints.xml"
(i.e. there's one "data" too many in the error message), then you need to change the directory where you've told FTLEdit to find its data to be one level up. (And probably similarly with resources.)

OnyxShadow wrote:A few pages back someone else posted an updated version of the program that wasn't on the homepage for this editor or mentioned on the front page of this thread.

https://github.com/Darkfrost/FTLEdit

It did get the ship graphic lined up with the framework layout. However, the shields, weapons, etc. were still wonky. Looking forward to a version where I can change a couple numberical values and not have it throw a dozen unrelated things out of whack...

If you want to change numerical values, I'd really, really recommend you just manually edit the blueprints.xml.append file. FTLEdit doesn't work very well to tweak the base game ships, especially just numeric tweaks. It's much more useful for designing your own ships.

Thanks for the tip. I'll try that out.

Edit: Changes to blueprints.xml didn't do anything.

alextfish wrote:

Dreamstorm wrote:My previous post was deleted? Why?! I'm asking for help!

Long story short, ftldata has been run and the resource.dat and data.dat folders haven been linked under 'Options'. Now what?

http://i.imgur.com/1F8bu.png

Well, what is that error message telling you? It's telling you that it can't find a file at "C:\Program Files (x86)\FTLShipEdit\data\\data\blueprints.xml". And I suspect that's probably pretty accurate. Try looking in that path with Windows Explorer and see what's up. If, for example, there's blueprints.xml at
"C:\Program Files (x86)\FTLShipEdit\data\blueprints.xml"
(i.e. there's one "data" too many in the error message), then you need to change the directory where you've told FTLEdit to find its data to be one level up. (And probably similarly with resources.)

I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing.

The game's data.dat and resource.dat files can be found on my laptop under
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FTL Faster Than Light\resources
Both are listed as unpacked, whatever that means.
I fire up FTLEdit, click Options and set paths to
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FTL Faster Than Light\resources\data.dat-unpacked
and
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\FTL Faster Than Light\resources\resource.dat-unpacked
I close the Options window and press create. Error window. Same for the other buttons.
I open up Options again and BEHOLD, all links are for some reason reset to
C:\Program Files (x86)\FTLShipEdit\data\

Every time I close the Options window, FTLEdit resets the settings. Brilliant. What now?

Unpacked means they're already extracted. So don't click extract, just close the options window, I should probably have made that more obvious

Kieve wrote:When the editor outputs your ship's blueprint, it does something a little naughty you need to fix.

Code: Select all

	<health amount="0"/>

That's the default hull strength - in other words, you're starting in a ship that's already dead. Set it to 30 (which is the correct hull for player ships).

..Ah crap, I did that?

...Whoops, I'll fix that in a couple of days (Sorry, been at my parents house for Christmas, back at home on sunday)

Even though I'm very interested in creating my own ships, I'm finding it rather draining to fight with the numerous issues present in the ship editor. I'll try to be constructive and post them all:
1) Inability to recognize folders for the game's resources other than in the default routes expected by the editor; changing these routes does nothing. Forces to copy the extracted resource dirs where the editor is.
2) Inability to load .ftl files, only being able to read separate xml and .txt files.
3) When reading an xml.append file, always fails to find the corresponding xml and txt files for the ship, let alone the png for its graphics. Each and every time one wants to open a ship, you have to decompress it (if you haven't yet), load the .append file, load the ship's xml, load the ship's txt, load the ship's graphic (which is positioned randomly, not using the offsets int he file), and load the floor plan (same). Often, to boot, rooms seem to be moved.
4) When saving a ship, the "save to .ftl" file is next to useless, as we need an uncompressed copy of all files (as mentioned above) to reload it, and also, it doesn't include the ship's graphics, even when we have selected them.
5) Since save to .ftl is no good, saving to each individual file is the way to go. Unfortunately, this is rather tedious, as it means manually having to save each file. In the case of the .append file, the default extension is .xml, making overwriting the .append file even more cumbersome. Definitely not the same as having a "save all" button, like in most programs.
6) Inability to move the ship's graphic and floor graphic separately.
7) Perhaps worse of it all, and even though the tutorial says otherwise, the editor does not save the graphics' offsets (correctly or at all), leading to manually having to edit them using guesswork. Each try to center them wastes upwards of 1-2 minutes, between editing, saving, recompressing, renaming to FTL, running Grognak's mod manager, then loading FTL and opening the ship to see if it's correct. Repeat this for the number of tries needed to get the graphics in their place (which can be a long time, made shorter only by measuring pixels manually). This is an exercise on frustration that has made me give up on four different occasions.

Seriously, I'm about to give up on this altogether. Sorry for the negativity, but I can't see how anyone can use this and not be extremely frustrated. For the record I'm a software engineer with 13 years of work experience, so it's not like I'm an inexperienced user exactly; I can't imagine what the average user might think.

Weltall Zero wrote:Seriously, I'm about to give up on this altogether. Sorry for the negativity, but I can't see how anyone can use this and not be extremely frustrated. For the record I'm a software engineer with 13 years of work experience, so it's not like I'm an inexperienced user exactly; I can't imagine what the average user might think.

I haven't even been able to get it working AT ALL due to lack of a decent tutorial. Any alternate mods you can suggest?