Will it be possible at some point to have more than 5 playable races? It would be nice to play as the Tholians or the Breen.

*Reserved post. Potential good news is on the way.*

Yes. In fact, it's possible now.

I believe that also means we need structural images for all the possible races people would want to play as a major race? Minor races that were conquered or absorbed by diplomacy, adopted the major race's technology. Captain Bashir

Wait, you're serious?

I feel there will be even more new features....

Yes V, we are serious. I've actually already written a post on exactly how to do it, but I can't get it to work properly until we can trace the reason why my copy of the game won't load. That's why I reserved the post above. I've got it saved as a .txt file at the moment.

The change to the files that you need to make is actually really small.

thank you for your part (you and Mike) to let us know.

Mike had said that there was going to be a new game release in August. So it's August 21st.... News? Anyone... Anyone... Anyone? Please excuse my drool. Anxious Bashir

Like Mike said somewhere else, there's really no secret. Just set the race to Empire.
Of course, all the accessory stuff needs to be changed too, like longer description, and the data files should be changed to reflect the new race. It's not _that_ simple, but it's not that hard either. Not that I've tried it already though. So I should say, it shouldn't be that hard.

Vjeko just tested it since my files are messed up. It works in that the minors become selectable and an Empire. But when you actually select them, you start playing as the Federation instead. Odd.

I'm guessing because the data files weren't changed to reflect the new race. Notice that every table has an entry for all the empires. Not all of them have a Default entry though, IIRC. Default is what is used for minors I guess, and I'd venture situations like these.

Solved it.

Out of curiosity, what was the problem?

All playable Empires had to be defined before all other races in the Civilizations.xml I wasn't completely sure that that was the problem, so I didn't post it before, but now I am.

Proof:

The problem that I had was missing files. Vjeko had referenced some new planet textures that I didn't have.

As for the minor races problem, it was the ordering of the races, Mike. The Empires MUST be listed at the start of the Civilizations.xml file. You can't simply change a minor from a minor to an Empire, you've physically got to move their entry to the top of the file with the other Empires as well.

Edit - Vjeko posted whilst I was typing this. Even more proof:

Ah yes, that old rule. I'd forgotten about that. It was meant to be temporary just to make my life easier for a little while .

And using this page, you can give your new empires whatever color you want.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... olors.aspx

this will make modders very happy

I'm impressed that you found that . You should also be able to use the hex form that you normally use in HTML (#rrggbb). Technically you could also specify the alpha channel (#aarrggbb), but you shouldn't, and I probably override it to fully opaque anyway.

hehehehe, I wanted to suggest that to you. Cool.

EDIT: It's not that impressive, I have some experience in C# programming. I just recognized the colors used in the xmls and it was easy to find the list of them on the net.

Can we suggest the addition of a scroll bar if there are more Empires than can be displayed?

Yeah, but Microsoft uses those same color names in a few of their frameworks, and you just happened to stumble across the precise Color structure used in Supremacy (System.Windows.Media.Color).

In addition to the hex format, you can use ScRGB values (where the channels are normalized to values between 0.0-1.0). Just write it out as "sc#scR,scG,scB", where scX are each between 0.0-1.0 (and keep the "sc#" prefix as-is).

Matress, I hate you.

hehehehehehehehehehehehe, I was actually my experiment. Few more images of it:






That was I got to the conclusion that all empires have to be before other races in the Civilizations.xml

Hmm, looks like the contested territory coloring isn't working properly (or it looks stranger than I remember). I'll have to revisit that.

It would look properly if all the races had their own color. I wouldn't worry about it. I doubt that many people would come to an idea like this.


On the above image there are just too much races contesting over the same space, and only one of them is colored. Under normal circumstances it looks great.

You can hate me as much as you like Mike, just vent it into making the game even better.

...But Vjeko did make the image.

Ah, yes, that makes sense. I should probably only use distinct colors for the contested territory brush, i.e., filter out the duplicates. Easy enough.

If you hate Matress, you should have homicidal thoughts about me:

I'd be interested in seeing how abysmal the multiplayer performance is with 30 human-controlled empires...