Transdate, the TDB, Debugging, and other related issues.

[PKodon]

Okay, before someone says it, what I'm about to propose has nothing to do with "base modding" as a practice, but rather to doe with common sense debugging practice and consistency in the way Transcendence handles files, not to mention less clutter.

Until last night, I did not know that when Transdata "decompiled" the TDB, the files it extracted were not usable as is.

I was told that one needed to move those files to the main Transcendence directory for it to even see them, and then that the TDB had to be deleted, as it had priority over the xml.

Now, until someone suggested that I fix a bug in the Korolov.xml in RC5, all I used the source for was for reference on how to do things. So, thinking I was doing the right thing, I edited the Korolov.xml file in the TranscendenceSource folder, and assumed I had "fixed" the problem.

Now I learn that I did nothing but corrupt my reference files.

I have two solutions to this problem (and it is a problem, as others I've talked to had no idea it did this):

1 (The direct method) Have Transcendence consider that files in the TranscendenceSource directory (if present) override the TDB.

2 (Indirect, but safer) Have Transcendence continue to ignore TranscendenceSource, but allow for copies of source files found in an Overrides directory take priority over the same file found in the TDB.

This would allow those of us who are doing beta testing and debugging of the new releases to do minor repairs, without cluttering up the main Transcendence directory with xml files.

[Prophet]

Very sneaky, I was wondering why my changes had no effect!

If we had the ability to use the <TranscendenceModules> we could plop the desired source xmls into the Extension folder like a regular mod.