Suggestion For Component Sorting

[Atrocities]

Like many of you I find the scrolling for components to be a real disorganized frustrating waste of time.

I suggest, not knowing if it is at all possible, that we change the name of all components. I suggest this because it would seem that the component list is sorted alphabetically.

Here is my suggestion.

All required components, like Bridge, Life Support, etc, be renamed A. Bridge, A. Life Support, etc.

Other main components would then use different letters, Engines could be B, Sensors and ECM's could be C, Weapons could be D, and so on.

What this would do, hopefully, is sort these components alphabetically, thus organizing them in such a manor as to facilitate a less frustrating hunt and search method.

Will this work? Is it practice? And what would be the draw backs?

[Suicide Junkie]

Just turn off the alphasort.
Settings.txt has the default, and empire options has the per-game preference.

With alpha disabled, the components are ordered the same as they are in the text file, which is just like SE4, and way way nicer.

[Atrocities]

Oh really, I did not know this. Thank you SJ. See you learn something new each and every day.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Turning off the sort is the easiest way to get the effect you are after. That option is in Empires --> Display. I did implement a sort based on technology level in the SFTC so yes what you are describing is possible and worked very nicely I might add too. For Stock though I don't feel good about the idea. It would require a lot of work every time a new patch is put out that updates the Components.txt file. Also I think most people are used to the current sort options and finally we would need to come to an agreed upon standard that would allow new components to get sorted. In other words what makes a component an "A" or a "B", etc.

[Fyron]

It wouldn't be very hard to merge updates to the file in an automated fashion. You can use programs like WinMerge (http://winmerge.org/) to automatically see all of the differences between two versions of a file. All you have to do is compare the stock 1.20 file with the stock 1.25 file to see every single change, then copy the changes into your custom file. WinMerge is especially great for keeping your mod's Settings.txt file up to date. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

But if all you are doing is reordering a component file based on certain criteria, a quick program/script could be written to do it automatically once the criteria are determined.

[se5a]

BM of course has this OFF by default.

[President_Elect_Shang]

That's a big help Fyron, wish I had known about it earlier.