Changing order of Minor Races in UE

[Captainobviousau]

Hi all

I'm the creator of the Ferengi-Dominion Alliance mod, and after a long time away have been working on improving it recently. What I want to do now is add the Gorn and Orion's in place of the Chalnoth and Ktarians.

The problem is, the game doesn't seem to go by the alphabet when listing minor races.

I know UE can change the order of ships in the game but that option doesn't appear to exist for minor races.

So to my question - is it possible to change the order, and if so, how would I go about doing it?

Thanks in advance!

[Flocke]

Welcome back!

The problem is, the game doesn't seem to go by the alphabet when listing minor races.

I know UE can change the order of ships in the game but that option doesn't appear to exist for minor races.

So to my question - is it possible to change the order, and if so, how would I go about doing it?

UE I fear doesn't help you much in that regard. But that's a feature worthy to add indeed!

While I havn't tested this, what you definitely need to edit to move one race to another slot, is:

1. race.rst for the names, which you can either edit in UE one by one or use some hex editor. ( With other files in the past, I used HxD to copy and align lines so each entry has exactly one line, then copied the written hex values to VSCode or some other text editor, moved lines and copied it back )
   
   Note that moving the hex value entries should not be messing with the race description texts, because when moving the lines, the stored description text offsets remain in place. And the file race.rst file itself luckily has no file offsets stored to mess around with.
2. aiminor.wtf for the race behaviour, which might be done the same way
   
   That file is a bit trickier to hex edit, because it is structured in 3 sections: settings, race names & AI values. But you can leave settings alone, copy the latter two sections and then edit these separately. The values there are just a list of 8 byte double values of num minor races (30) * num settings (7) = 30 * 56 bytes = 1680 bytes = 0x690 in hex.
   
   Given it doesn't have any offsets stored, that should actually be easy to hex edit as well.
3. edifice.bst for the required local system population of all the building structures, which has a messy file structure and therefore I think best is done either one by one in UE or by import/export with latest yet unreleased UE, which can be built from the source :
   https://gitlab.com/stbotf/ultimate-edit ... gfx_export
4. shiprace.sst, shiptech.sst & shiplist.sst for the ships, which I think you do best one by one in UE after having edited the other files, but luckily in vanilla there aren't that many minor race ships

But just untested theory and I bet I missed some files and stuff to care about.

Good luck!

[thunderchero]

I'm the creator of the Ferengi-Dominion Alliance mod

If so you need to recover your original account you developed your mod with "Darth_Windu"

The problem is, the game doesn't seem to go by the alphabet when listing minor races.

other than issues/edits Flocke listed

changing minor race id is not suggested, there are too many unknown locations that some races use special minor*.tdb files.
example;
minor5.tdb is used by Anticans
minor6.tdb is used by Pakleds
minor7.tdb is used by Selay
minor8.tdb is used by Sheliak
minor9.tdb is used by Tamarians

so if you change any of these races or any id's of of minors, the edited minors will use wrong tdb files.

EDIT; if you have not seen them already, I collected a complete set of improved textures for FDA mod.
they can be found in this topic collecting 512 textures in the "new 512 gifs.zip" download link

[Captainobviousau]

Ah thanks Thunder! I did try the reset my password options however none received an email, so I wonder if my Darth_Windu account is linked to an email address I no longer have access to.

Thanks for the info re the minors, will just have to figure out another way.

I'll take a look at the textures, I appreciate the link!