Mod Problems

Kasdar

Warlord
Joined
Jul 29, 2006
Messages
268
Location
Minnesota
I have tried to use several custom civ's in my game, however most of them dont show up when chosing a civ. though I can choose them in the advanced menu, they only show up as TXT_**** , instead of the name of the civ.

I am guessing these mods arent upated to work with the current patch, My question is what do I need to change to get them to work properly, i.e. update them to work with the current patch.
 
I am guessing these mods arent upated to work with the current patch, My question is what do I need to change to get them to work properly, i.e. update them to work with the current patch.

Correct, they don't generally work with the current patch. And no, it's not an easy fix for you.

What's happening is this: if two things are trying to define the same text key, then the game USED to ignore the second one. Now, as of the March 1st patch, what it does is disable the entire file containing the second text key. The ENTIRE file.

So what's happening is that one of the text keys defined in that custom civilization's mod has the same name as one in another mod, or a DLC, or the vanilla game. For instance, let's say I wanted to make a Byzantium civ, but I wanted one of their cities to be Rome. Obviously, there's already a TXT_KEY_CITY_ROME (or whatever it is) in the core game. So if that custom civ also tries to declare TXT_KEY_CITY_ROME, the game sees it as a duplicate and disables all of the text keys in that file. The correct way to do this would be to simply not have that text key, and let the game use the one in the core game. (Alternately, rename it to something like TXT_KEY_CITY_MY_MOD_ROME to avoid conflicts.)

In other words, for an existing broken mod, you can't tell which text key is actually causing the problem. You can track it down by commenting out parts of the file and seeing when it starts working, but that takes time, especially if it's not your mod.
This issue affects custom civs far more than anything else, because of the sheer density of text keys added (all of the city names, for instance).
 
You can fix it pretty easily with what Spatz said if the only problem is just a text key conflict. Go into every file and do a replace all on TXT_KEY_ with TXT_KEY_<X>_, where <X> is just some string to make sure the names are unique.
 
If you have to go into the advanced menu to see the civs, the text conflict isn't the only problem, though.
 
If you have to go into the advanced menu to see the civs, the text conflict isn't the only problem, though.

yeah I noticed. I am not sure how some of these mods ever functioned at all, some of them are just full of errors, that should have made them not work right / at all, when they were first made.
 
I fixed a mod like this earlier this year. One of the main problems it was having was defining new colors for the civs. There is probably a correct way to do it, but it wasn't done that way. I just changed the colors to ones defined by default but unused. Once I fixed that, the civs showed up properly.
 
I am not sure how some of these mods ever functioned at all,

Many of them didn't. The upload feature to the mod browser has no checks of any kind for things like that; there's absolutely no guarantee that just because something is up there that it's functional. In fact, I remember a while back, someone on this board couldn't get their mod to work at all, so they uploaded it and then asked for help here (figuring that uploading it would make it easier for us to find). Obviously, there must have been some people who downloaded it off the browser unaware that it was nonfunctional.

It's for reasons like this that I don't use the in-game mod browser, and only download files from these forums directly. This allows me to read through the threads to ensure that the mod is functional in the latest versions. Many mods' original creators have moved on to other games, or gone back to Civ4, or just stopped caring about creating their own mods, so the number of mods incompatible with the latest game versions is fairly high.
 
Back
Top Bottom