Hi there...

I was using this editor today and changed some text on a weapon I had modified and when I went into the game the text was changed alright but there was "code" all over the equipment room screen when I went to view my text changes. When I scrolled down in my ship's weapons until that weapon was gone then the "code" across the screen was gone. What did I do wrong? The correct text appeared in the correct place wher it was suppose to be but all the other bracketed code was all over the screen. How can I get rid of it. I do not even know what file to replace to restore to the original, nor do I have a copy of it. What do I do now?

Ok... I found out what I did. I had saved the ids_info text as the ids_name text. That is what made it write all over the screen. After I changed it (deleted it and re-imported a blurb from another weapon and then overwrote that text with new stuff) everything was A-OK. I have now been able to create some new weapons and save them in their own .ini files which load from Freelancer.ini. I am also using a blank DLL file to assign new numbers that I got somewhere here from a tutorial about making new weapons. Works great now that I know more about what I am supposed to do.

If I may be so bold, I would strongly suggest going with the newest version of FLMM and get away from manually editing dll files forever

All you do then is in your ini file you put something like this:

ids_name = 0 ;GENERATESTRRES("Basic Scanner"
ids_info = 0 ;GENERATEXMLRES("<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"?><RDL><PUSH/><TRA data="1" mask="1" def="-2"/><JUST loc="center"/><TEXT>Basic Scanner</TEXT><PARA/><TEXT> </TEXT><PARA/><TRA data="0" mask="1" def="-1"/><JUST loc="left"/><TEXT>This is the basic scanner for use in all ship classes, it has minimal range and scanning capabilities.</TEXT><PARA/><TEXT> </TEXT><PARA/><TEXT>Detection Range: 2500 </TEXT><PARA/><TEXT>Cargo Scan Range: 1000 </TEXT><PARA/><TEXT> </TEXT><PARA/><POP/></RDL>"

Yes, you want the id number to be zero. And then in the mod's script.xml file you add these two lines (with the right filename):

<data file="data\equipment\misc_equip.ini" method="copyfile" sourcefile="data\equipment\misc_equip.ini" scanfile="true">
</data>

You only need to list each file once in the script, and only the files with the resource generation functions in them need to be listed. So, for example, you list misc_equip.ini once in the script file and them you go in the actual misc_equip.ini file and make all of the changes you want.

Now I only dig around in the original dll files when I need to copy some text.