HELP please

[GAMEOVER]

WHats up everyone?
I just downloaded 2 factions for smac. the jedis and the dark side. the jedi worked fine and they loaded with no problems. The darkside htough i need some help with. It says to rename 3 spartan files to sith.* and this isnt possible. It then goes onto say to edit the alpha.txt and add the sith in place of another faction besides spartans. What exactly does all this entail? If someone could go over the renaming thing and what needs to be done specifically in the alpha.txt, i would really appreciate. In the mean time what i did was extract the files to the smac directory so the graphics for the darkside are fine, but they still have all the atttributes of the spartans. Please help.

[LoD]

I'm not sure of that, but I think that the author wanted to pit those two factions against each other in the game.
If that's correct, you only need to do this (I assume that for the Jedis, the faction filename is jedi, and for the Siths it's sith):

1. Open alpha.txt.

2. Find the "#FACTIONS" tab (it's almost at the end.)
You should see something like this:

#FACTIONS
GAIANS,   GAIANS
HIVE,     HIVE
UNIV,     UNIV
MORGAN,   MORGAN
SPARTANS, SPARTANS
BELIEVE,  BELIEVE
PEACE,    PEACE

3. Now, replace all the instances of SPARTANS into SITH. You should now have something like this:

#FACTIONS
GAIANS,   GAIANS
HIVE,     HIVE
UNIV,     UNIV
MORGAN,   MORGAN
SITH, SITH
BELIEVE,  BELIEVE
PEACE,    PEACE

4. Now, doing accordingly, replace any other faction (except for the Sith of course ) with JEDI. If you e.g. replace them with Morgan, this should be your output:

#FACTIONS
GAIANS,   GAIANS
HIVE,     HIVE
UNIV,     UNIV
JEDI,   JEDI
SITH, SITH
BELIEVE,  BELIEVE
PEACE,    PEACE

5. Load SMAC, start new game, pick the faction that you want to play, and enjoy .

Note: If you want to have only one faction in the game, and you want to play them, just choose the Load button on the faction selection screen.

------------------
LoD - Owner/Webmaster of
THE CHIRONIAN GUILD SMAC Site

[Xerxes2]

quote: Originally posted by GAMEOVER on 02-20-2001 12:33 PM Thanks but it didnt work. It says it cant find the file SITH, even though i know i ewxtracted everything to the games directory. Oh well, if anyone else has any ideas i would appreciate it, if not the graphics are cool anyways. 1

I think this is a case of - the faction file has a different name instead of SITH - You would need to edit the faction file to see/change this. I'm not sure but I think that you can have a SITH.txt file and if the inside name isn't SITH it won't work. (Voice of experience, here)

[LoD]

To clarify what Xerxes2 said:
SMAC requires from a faction file, other than a proper name, a keyword for that faction. For example:

;
; Sid Meier's ALPHA CENTAURI
;
; FACTION FILE: The Human Hive
;
; Copyright (c) 1997, 1998 by Firaxis Games, Inc.
;
; ALPHA CENTAURI reads the rules of the game from this file at
; startup. Feel free, at your own risk, to experiment with editing
; this file. We recommend you make a backup copy of the original.
;

#HIVE
Human Hive, The Despot, Hive, M, 1, Yang, M,  1,  1, 0, 1, 0,

The #HIVE tag in this faction file key. So, in alpha.txt, where you have "HIVE, HIVE", the first one is the filename, the second one is the key. What you need to do now is to see what is just after the first hash (#) sign in the Sith faction file. Then you need to copy that to alpha.txt instead of the second SITH (or you can replace that with SITH and have alpha.txt unchanged- whichever you want ).

------------------


LoD - Owner/Webmaster of

THE CHIRONIAN GUILD SMAC Site
[This message has been edited by LoD (edited February 20, 2001).]

[GAMEOVER]

Actually i did get it to work!!!! After a little tinkering here and there, it isn ow workin fine. Woohooo.

[GAMEOVER]

Thanks but it didnt work.
It says it cant find the file SITH, even though i know i ewxtracted everything to the games directory. Oh well, if anyone else has any ideas i would appreciate it, if not the graphics are cool anyways.

1