Anyway, now that I've shared my pain, it's time to get back on the horse.
Basically I would like a few of you to review the ideas behind some of the mods I had done and advise me as to whether I should bother doing them again.
--- Kytryn Launcher Extension ---
Firstly, I had a Kytryn launcher extension that introduced a new virtual unknown - including 26 new unknown names... amorphous, ephemeral, variegated, zoolitic... to think I backed them up so nothing would happen to them - next time I should back them up to a disc and not another folder, huh?
...Sorry for that little tangent.
Anyway, rather than link them to the Plasma Pods - which would have ended with unknown ammo being loaded into the launcher - I linked them to a new &it, a Kytryn launcher magazine. To load (i.e: Invoke), the mag, you had to have an installed Kytryn launcher. Doing the Invoke created 12 Plasma pods using the Chief's previously established 'ammo box' global and did an objSetKnown on the 'box' to identify it.
As for buying the items, I had to change the Ringer Shipyard a little. I group chanced the launcher with 2d2 (2-4) boxes with a 40% chance (10% lower than the Transcendence.xml), so that if the launcher was available there would always be ammo for it, and gave an 80% chance of another single box.
Except for the change to stRingerShipyard, the extension would have created no conflicts with other extensions.
--- Absolute Sorting Extension ---
This was a fairly big extension that I was only about 20% of the way into. It isn't called that out of some sense of grandeur, but simply so that it would load pretty much first (unless somebody had a mod like: Aaron's Wonderful Ship), so that any other extensions would just replace the items in question without conflict.
I had it set up for example:
010.Gun.020.Laser, Fast-firing
Where it equalled:
Main Sort - 000 Quest tems like the Stargate Control Rod
010 Weapons
020 Ammo
etc.
Sub Sort - Gun
Gun_need_Ammo
Launcher
Level - 010, 020, 030, (you get the idea)
Final Sort - Alphabetical
I will probably do something like this anyway for myself, but I figured of asking if anybody wants something like this and if so, whether they have any suggestions. For instance, I was thinking of sorting the weapons by damage type (according to the shield/armour logs) between the sub-sort and the level.
--- NAMI Mine Launcher Invoke ---
I wasn't having any luck creating a mine launcher to change from shooting forwards to backwards and the reverse. You can easily have one start that way with <Configuration>, but with an Invoke... Any ideas?
--- Debugs ---
Finally I had my only little debug items as do we all. All with their own debugOnly tags so that they would only load with the /debug switch as a command line parameter. In my case it was:
A 'Quarantine Zone' database - a mnemonic cube that was a 'depository for all the data collated by the Luminous AI since its inception'. It was there simply for me to place on my Debug Ship to learn the stats and descriptions of any unknown items for whatever reason.
Yes, my beautiful Cometfall with which I tested so many things. Like trying to take on the Iocrym Command Ship with an Enhanced Penitent Cannon... it worked marvelously on the shields, but after that... I think you know the result.
Finally, and worst of all, I had entered in EVERY b#$*dy item in the game into a revised version of the DebugDepot to facilitate testing my new sort patterns. Aaaaaaargh!
Calm now.
Sorry for this long winded post. Thanks for letting me vent.
I hope for some mutually beneficial return posts.
P.S: And yes, before anybody says it first - I will be backing up to disc or CD!
wasn't logged in properly above...
I'm not doing my master's just yet - got the A-levels to finish first - but I've still got a fair deal on. I'm taking tomorrow off - I decided that when I can't actually think longer then 5 seconds before I sneeze or cough it out, it's probably best to stay at home. Thanks for the support.