Wow. Those smartass programmers and their annoyingly and unnecessarily difficult programs!

I'll copy what you wrote into notepad and save it for later; never know when something absolutely disastrous will occur. But I'm mostly using the Command Prompt for this one thing; in my nearly two decades of using Windows, I've never needed this or even actually known about this. This is a pretty big shock, learning that I can run everything manually. Ack.

It's fine; I was at fault for being woefully ill-informed and lazy. Thanks for taking the time and entertaining my ignorance!

You don't actually need to do this for the changes to take affect. The game can read files in either bin (AKA binary, what you called "Coded") or txt (text, what we can read). The reason the game and some mods use binary is because it results in smaller file sizes, which are more efficient. However, if you're just playing with stat changes for your own use that is complete overkill to convert them back to bin.

If you did want to go back to bin though, just replace the txt at the end of the parameters list (or in the .bat file) with bin.

It is depreciated from the Skirantra's Microphasing Aura ability. Yes you're free to rename it/use it for whatever you want, in fact I'm surprised you didn't know of this Lavo. It has been one of those secret modding tricks for a while now. 

Ok, quick question.  Anyone know why having multiple instantAction "PlayPersistantBeamEffect" to RandomMesh points in a single buff causes the game to crash?  I was playing around with trying to make a "tractor beam" effect by have half a dozen or more beams attach to multiple points on a target.  But if I do this in the same buff file the game crashes when the buff is supposed to end (works fine until the timeElapsed finishCondition is reached).  If I create a buff chain it works but there is a noticeable delay between effects even if delayTime is set to 0.  On a related note, anyone know what "CenterOffsetBySpacialRadius" is compared to "Center".  I couldn't tell a difference between the 2.  I did try removing everything but the actual "beam" effect from the extra instantActions so as not to have an issue where the same muzzle/impact/sounds are trying to play simultaneously thinking that was the problem but no dice.

Thanks for any insight.

The center offset thing is mainly used for planets (look at raze planet)...basically it has the effect play at the radius of the object, something useful if you are trying to imitate bombing effects on a planet...

So.....

Anyone know how to get "moons" to orbit planets?  Getting the moon to spawn is easy enough (I'm using the asteroid def), but it just sits there and rotates about itself (just like asteroids and the like do), it doesn't rotate around the planet...

I know there was a planet mod that succeeded in doing this but I don't remember which one...

I thought maybe I could try moving the center of the mesh to some outrageous point far away from the rest of the mesh, then set the radial distance to 0 in the asteroid def...this isn't working out for me though....any ideas would be much appreciated...at the very least, if anyone remembers which planet mod successfully accomplished this....

These are the things you can control in AsteroidDef

 cluster
  meshGroupName "RandomSpherical"
  asteroidCount 50
  minDistance -1.2
  maxDistance 1.0
  maxZOffset 1.0
  minAngle -10
  maxAngle 10
  minAngularSpeed 0.2
  maxAngularSpeed 0.35

Now, the mod I'm thinking of (and can't remember which one) had its moons at min/maxDistance of 0...this implied to me that the "center" of the mesh was really really far from the "rest" of the moon, so when the mesh rotated about its center, the moon would orbit around the planet (rotating at same rate between min/maxAngularSpeed)...as you can see, there is no tangential speed because they didn't really intend this for orbiting objects (just still objects that rotate in place)....

Unfortunately, I've tried giving outrageous values to the "center" point in the mesh file, but it hasn't accomplished anything...

I've run into an odd problem. Somehow my mod has broken the factionRelationsModifier for all races, despite not changing this section of the player entity files at all. I.e. everyone has a faction relations penalty of 0, even the TEC Rebels which usually have that -10 penalty to all non-TEC factions.

Hello sins community

Can someone please so kindly help me with an ability that will increase ships fire rate?

What I’m looking for is an ability , that consumes antimatter and gives bonus rate of fire for all weapons on ship that uses it when enemy ships are nearby.

I looked at Tech anility Finest Hour and played with it , but adopting it to frigates made the game throw minidumps at me without the ability actually working. And I’m not even sure if it really changes the fire rate.

Q. So can ability like this be done on frigates?

Q. If yes can someone post what code should I change in AbilityLastStand and BuffLastStandSelf for them to work on frigates , but to get rid of all other buffs?

I added this new ability to entity.manifest file just in case. I can post my new ability and buff file here if needed.

What he said

So I am playing Armada 3 at the moment and I have noticed that the AI even on the hardest setting does not care much about military research like increased weapon damage and more hull/shields/armor. I would like to change that on my own rather than hoping the devs will do it some day. Where can I change the research behavior?

What GoaFan said is true, but not exactly precise. The AI is hardcoded to prioritize techs that unlock new ships and structures or are prerequisites to unlock techs, but that shouldn't stop the AI from researching other techs.

The issue I believe lies in the AI's "Research Check Frequency", which can be changed in Gameplay.constants. To confirm my suspicions, open up the mod's Gameplay.constants file in Notepad and scroll down to the line that reads "playerAISharedDef". Under that line, you'll see four sections, each starting with "table-"; (almost) all of these are "Check Frequency" values for the four AI presets. Choose up to three presets (you'll need an unchanged one for "control" purposes) and multiply the value next to "UpgradeResearch" by 10 or 100. Then, set up a game that has at least one changed preset and one unchanged preset and see if the changed presets are unlocking a lot more techs than the unchanged ones.

Based on my observations, the way AI does tech in Sins is kind of odd: every <time interval set by UpgradeResearch in Gameplay.constants>, the AI will run a "tech roulette" of sorts, where it will randomly select a tech from each tech tree (or only one tech tree at a time, I'm a bit unclear on this). It will then decide whether it wants to research that randomly selected tech or not based on calculations that I haven't discovered yet. The "tech roulette" isn't completely random though, since techs are weighted by their priority parameter (defined in the tech's .entity file) during the roulette: a tech with a priority value of 2 will be twice as likely to be selected as a tech with a priority value of 1, while a tech with a priority value of 0 will never be selected. Remember that the AI won't necessary want to research the tech it selects by random though, so increasing a tech's priority value won't make the AI want to research it more per say, it will just make sure that when the AI does want to research the tech, it is more likely to be selected. Oh yes, and this is all independent of any hardcoding: techs with hardcoded priority (colonization unlocks, interstellar travel unlock, wormhole travel unlock, ship unlocks, etc.) have their own little system that I haven't bothered to decipher in detail yet. This is why all hardcoded techs have a priority value of 0 in the unmodded game: since the AI is hardcoded to research the tech anyway, having it included in the "tech roulette" is a waste of space and inhibits the AI from selecting a non-hardcoded tech to research.

If you're interested in doing an AI modmod for Armada 3, even if it'll be for personal use only, I highly recommend you check out Section 3 of my Artificial Unintelligence post, which is essentially a giant collection of my observations about which game parameters affect the AI in what way.

...and this is mainly why it's better to know the underlying program and syntax than to blindly "use a bat file" for data conversion.

Anyway, the .bat file uses the program ConvertData_Rebellion.exe (or older ConvertData executables), which is located in your SoaSE base directory. It is a command line application, meaning if you run it manually, you must run it from command prompt. It's main syntax is ConvertData_Rebellion.exe <file to convert> <output name of the file (if it's the same as "file to convert", you'll simply overwrite the old file with the new one> <format to convert to (bin for binary, txt for text)>. If you are unfamiliar with the way command prompt works, there are millions of tutorials online; not all of them are good, mind you (stay away from video tutorials), but you should probably be fine.

If you're feeling up for some improvisation, you could edit your existing .bat files to use the new ConvertData .exe and it'll likely start working again (unless the syntax has also changed since you've last modded SoaSE, in which case you'll also need to fix its syntax).

for %%a in (*.entity) do ConvertData_Rebellion entity %%a %%a txt