We have new editors out there for modding the game. You'll find them here in the respective threads or inside bote installation files.

Copy the files to the corresponding location on your harddrive, where the *.data files are located if not already there.

You change a variety of things starting from plain translation stuff with the description of minor races, buildings and ships to the various fire&shieldpowers of the battlecruiser or whatever you like to have as ships in the game.

There are of course plenty of balancing issues here and we already have a pretty sophisticated tablature system behind those numbers currently used in the standard data files but you might wanna play around with those (I'd suggest plain "scaling" for starters so that the balancing does not get hurt too much). Scav and Mentat regularly release new test versions of their files so you might wanna check our german site for new files to download and work with.

Have fun with the tools and we all appreciate if you upload your work somewhere later on and link it here if it's not violating any person's or company's copyrights, also the intellectual property ones not to forget!

Some infos on modding ships from our chief tech engineer scav himself:

1. Weapon range (MK 5-X) must be 5 at least because the range is directly linked to the hit probability. The larger the range, the smaller you hit chanche/quota.
max range (MK) should be minimum 18-20, everything else wouldn't make any sense.

2. The torpedos all have fixed damage and certain additional properties.
The torpedo tubes however are just partly fixed in damage calc (every tube has a fixed hit quota), the reloading time and the number of fired torpedos vary from tube to tube.
You should stick to the race specific launchers instead of the standard tube.
If you mix torpedos and torpedo bays/tubes and mess with it, bugs will be the immediate consequence.

Furthermore parts of the hit probability of those torpedo tubes is directly changeable, shouldn't however go over 50% bonus because otherwise the torpedos will get too powerful.

The beam weapons, each type of weapons (name-dependant, either emitter, bank, array andsoon) has a certain bonus which is MODIFIABLE/WRITABLE under properties.

so there are the following things there: reload time of the weapons, fire rate, hit quota, range bonus.

It is possible to change all those values but one should here be particuliarly careful since there were minimum hit quota of the shiplist already put into the separate combat algorithm, so it expects certain numbers (stick to the smallest number and don't go below, that should do the trick).


Cloaking and sensors

a cloaked ship (cloak level 1) can be detected with a sensor strength of 20+1.
Cloak level 2 would then be 40+1 and so on..

Here we make a difference between passive and active cloaking.

Until Cloak level 3 we have passive cloaking (meaning ships are difficult to detect), after that (4-6) we have an active cloaking, i.e. ships try to hide themselves in the subspace.

Cloaking itself has a certain first strike bonus but it is not that decisive in combat.

the stats show the overall strength of a ship on a calculation scale of 100 calc units. This is to be taken with care cause some ships bring in a relatively high amount of firepower at once, but need long time to reload their phasers/tubes, others instead have weak offensive values but have some kind of "auto-fire" on their side.

The number of available weapons has an impact on the costs as well as the strength of the weapons.

The ship manoevrability is fixed from zero (for stationary bases) till 8 (for fast&furious ships, sorry couldn't help myself here )
The manoevrability has hit/run bonus and malus effects, this should be well-considered since it would be very stupid to give a big battleship a maneuvrability of 4 or higher..

basically all values can be edited at free will, one should just take care of a certain system one puts behind one's changes there.

Weapons are upgradable in range in-game depending on weapons' type.
Emitters for example from MK5 to MK12, not however the banks..


That's it for starters, the rest should be quite self-explaining. Have fun and take your time with it

_________________
If curtain falls
look behind
the evil's often kind
and the good are wary
Blended by the scenery
one does not recognize
true dramas
don't play within screensize

Scav aka: DBW Immartalis

I'm going to start playing with the building editor fairly soon. Is there anything that I should know first or should I just "jump right in" and see what happens?

No. But if you have questions, please ask. Try all the features of the editors. E.g. you can have more than one upgrade of a building, but you have to choose one (e.g. farm A can upgrade to farm B or farm C).

I'm getting an error with the building editor. I just downloaded and started it up. When I copied the Buildings.data file over to the proper BotE folder I got an error. The error is after the reace selection screen and basically indicates an invalid arguement.

Dumb question: Do I have to copy the building.data file from the BotE data folder to the building-editor folder, make my edits, then copy the building.data file back?

[Note I tried the above and it seemed to resolve my issue but I just want to make sure before I invest more time ...]

it's best to do the other way round. Just copy the Editor (!) to the corresponding data folder of bote and start workin there. If you want multiple instances of the buildings or ship editor workin at the same time, create some subfolders there and copy both data and editor files there.

But remember, you need to get at least the data file back at its original location or the program will kick you out (yes, after race selection ).

Everything seems to be working fine for me now. ... So far so good.

So far I'm very happy with the updates that I've done to industrial output and updates to industry costs of buildings. Of course this is really the easy part .... After some dry runs I'll let you guys know how things work out.

My hope is that you'll be able to build everything with at least some time left over between tech levels to create at least a few ships in your homeworld before having to move to the next tech level.

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One thing that is causing some difficulty in balancing is the output of universities. In order to adjust research rates it would be handy to have an idea of just how many research points are required for each field [including special research projects] for each race in order to advance.

Are those numbers posted anywhere or could I get them from somewhere? More importantly can those be modded with any of the tools available??

Needed researchpoints to reach the next level:

Bio: 2.5^currentTechlevel * 125
Energy: 2.5^currentTechlevel * 100
Computer: 2.5^currentTechlevel * 125
Propulsion: 2.5^currentTechlevel * 125
Construction: 2.5^currentTechlevel * 150
Weapon: 2.5^currentTechlevel * 150

That are the current numbers. I can change it easily. Perhaps we can use 2 or 3 instead of 2.5 as the base.

You are the man. I really appreciate the info.

Are these formula's from the code, and thus need to be changed by the devs, or can this be moded?

That's hardcoded. You can't change these formulas. But you can change the research-rate, when you change the research output of the buildings.

Thanks for the info. Nice to know.

FYI: That's one of the changes that I'm currently playing with. If you're interested in modding you can try the building editor. It's fairly easy to use and it should give you enough control to do most of the things that you'd like.

I took a quick look at the new building editor. I do have one request for the future. When you change from the primary to the secondary language I would like for the building names on the far left to be displayed in the secondary language.

I'll take a more in-depth look this weekend.

actually it works if you quick-save when changing. It has one big advantage to let them stay when changin and that is for us germans when we translate those buildings. We always have the german name on the left regardless which language is currently up .

With German-primary that does make sense esp. if non-native English speakers are doing the main translation work.

If you save with secondary language, than start the editor again, the primary language is the former secondary. I hope you understand me

not if the secondary has gone prime when the primary should have gone second .. eh

well that's what I meant with "quick-save". just quickly save when you switch languages and you have the "other-language-view" of the buildings

I believe that I understand what you're both telling me NP either way though.

I'm not sure if this was caught in the data file but UTOPIA PLANATIA should be a "homeworld only" sort of building. At this point I don't see a restriction on it ....

You can build it everywhere but only one in your empire. Check the min and max controls at the top

When creating a new ship how do you specify what pictures/graphics to use? I don't see anything in the ship editor that would seem to allow for that.

Note: This is just a "copy" of another ship so I would just like to reuse the elements that are already in the game for the original ship.

well it just takes the name and looks the graphic file up in the botf2\graphics\ships folder. since the name of a ship class is unique, that's the way to go !

Can you have more than 1 ship in a given class? That may be a better way to go for me but I didn't see how to do that per-se.

you do not create one single ship, it's always a full class (the classes are again categorized in types). so there are multiple classes per shiptype (destroyer, heavy cruiser, battleship, etc.) possible. Look again closely into the editor. It's hopefully relatively well-explained there!

Requests for future building editor:

-- Being able to select more than one building at a time would be nice for functions such as "copy", "delete", etc.

-- A copy & paste feature would be nice so that [if needed] I could easily update a building's stats with another buildings instead of needing to edit everything by hand.

-- Instead of saying that only one specific race can build a building OR that all races could build a building it would be nice if you could check off the empires capable of building that building. While not always useful some things may benefit like "subspace scanners" ; Private Farms ; Shield Generators ; etc.

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EDIT / 0323 ... Additional request for building editor

It is nice having color codes that match the major empires but Ferengi yellow and Dominion cyan (?) are very hard to read against a white background.

Anything done to change that would be awesome.

for all of you not knowing what those systems like ablative armor and hullpolarisation mean, check out the BotE internal weapon system wiki, the ship types of each era and basic ship values and the special ship assignments in BotE.

Useful stuff/desciptions for modders and ppl interested in getting to know the ship stats better are posted there.

okay folks, here in the Downloads section are some new editors for alpha4. check it out!

is there anyway to edit the game files so that you can increase build times or costs? There was in normal BOTF but i dont know if it would work for this.

If there are could you please tell me, it is for making the game a bit easier for me because right now i just suck at this even when i code it to easy diffuclity i still get beaten hands down by fleets i cant even see.

check the BABY setting.

also, check our boards (even use the search). There is a sticky thread under bote screens and plans named editing the game. you'll find every information needed there.

the editors are in the downloads section here on the site (a little "hidden").