Editing Empire Descriptions?

[Hubologist]

Hello, I've recently purchased Space Empires IV, and have read a number of different FAQs about installing ship sets, customizing the game, et cetera. I want to replace most of the stock portraits and ship sets (instead of simply adding ship sets), and that's easy enough.

However, I haven't been able to figure out where the different race's descriptions (Biological Description, Society Description, General History) are located. I strongly suspect that these are part of the .EMP files, but I'm not sure how to view and edit the .EMP files.

Does anyone know what program(s) I need to properly view and edit the .EMP files?

[Suicide Junkie]

SE4 itself.

When you "Add New Race" (or load from file and then edit an existing one), one of tabs near the bottom is for the descriptions.

The Save button makes EMP files.

You'll probably want to download the SE4 shipset megapack:
(See Fyron's link above)
Thousands of shipsets in there to play with.

[Suicide Junkie]

Hang on a sec tho...

You should NOT muck with the stock files; that'll break most other mods.

Instead, create a modfolder.
If you have a \pictures\races folder present in your mod, then only the shipsets in there will show up as options in game.

[Hubologist]

Suicide Junkie said:
Hang on a sec tho...

You should NOT muck with the stock files; that'll break most other mods.

Instead, create a modfolder.
If you have a \pictures\races folder present in your mod, then only the shipsets in there will show up as options in game.



Ahh, okay; thanks for the tip, and the link.

I've found a number of different directories for ship sets already (and have been pleasantly surprised by how good most of them are), but a consolidated source should prove convenient.

[Suicide Junkie]

Shipsets will always be in pictures\races. Otherwise they won't work.

Each modfolder gets to have a directory tree which looks just like the stock tree. Although there are some minimum requirements, almost anything not overridden by a file in the mod will be loaded from the stock game.

[Hubologist]

Suicide Junkie said:
Shipsets will always be in pictures\races. Otherwise they won't work.



Oh, ah... by "directories", I meant the various different Web sites and such that host or link to various different ship sets. Sorry about the confusing terminology. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/redface.gif


Each modfolder gets to have a directory tree which looks just like the stock tree. Although there are some minimum requirements, almost anything not overridden by a file in the mod will be loaded from the stock game.



Yeah, I've been reading up on mod folders, and apparently everything but the Data folder can be loaded from the stock game.

A little more reading and tinkering around, and I shouldn't have any problems creating a mod with the empires I want to use in it. Although it's worth mentioning that the only thing I'd intended to tamper with were the race ships and portrait images (not any actual data or file names, just the visual appearance of images).

[Suicide Junkie]

The simplest thing to do is just have a mostly-empty \data folder, with just settings.txt in it. You don't need all the files.

BTW, you don't need to shop around for shipsets if you grab the shipset megapack linked below; it has hundreds and hundreds of them.

[Fyron]

Suicide Junkie said:
You'll probably want to download the SE4 shipset megapack:
http://bt.spaceempires.net/download.php?id=18&name=SE5_Shipset_Megapack_9_02_ 07.torrent
Thousands of shipsets in there to play with.



Presumably you meant to link this torrent:

http://bt.spaceempires.net/torrents-details.php?id=15&hit=1

[Rollo]

You can change the race description for randomly added races in this file: ../pictures/races/racename/racename_AI_General.txt