melting pot

[lockdown]

How do I reset the defaults in melting pot?

I renamed all the .bak files in the orion2 directory to .lbx but the images are still showing up as the babylon 5 ones that I was picking earlier. Help?

[Zoetrope]

(1) Which LBX files did you replace? Should only be RACESTUF and one or two others, as best I remember. (I'm under a MOO2 ban from playing it too often.) However:

(2) I don't recall having a problem with the pictures. Melting Pot stores races and their pictures in separate files; so to get a race back, start MPot, select the desired RAC file, and load it into any slot. (I do like having lots of races to select from.)

(3) Doesn't MPot automatically choose the large and small pictures of the same name?

[lockdown]

Hey.
I replaced the files that were named .bak... I copied them into .lbx files. Maybe the .bak files were messed up to begin with.
Anyway it's moot now, I just deleted everything and reinstalled moo2 and melting pot. This time I backed up the race*.lbx files and estrings.lbx my self.

On totally unrelated notes:
I am guessing you are the guy that runs the zoetrope ftp site? Quite a good selection of files but an index might be useful so that you know what all the different utilities are.

[Zoetrope]

Thanks, lockdown. Yes, the site has been needing an index since it was established. Where to find a willing worker? Semester started this week, so any indexing will progress in glacial fashion.

Btw, i only find a minority of the utilities to be useful, but people sweated to write them, so someone needed to preserve them. I've collected all the editors i've found there, except one program that was several megabytes but only did a poor imitation of PickHack.

There's just one editor that eluded me, the mythical "AngryAnts", but i'm beginning to wonder whether that was vaporware. OTOH, i recently realized that the published info on the saved game format indicates entries for the Antaran attacks, which would seem to allow the creation of a simple editor for increasing the ferocity of the Antarans. Though, except for scenarios, i think that would be better done in the executables so that they can be scary (and/or delectable) all the time.

Incidentally, a fun thing to do with a map editor is to change one or more homeworld stars to "black holes". In MOO2 these actually function more as white holes: once out, ships can never get back in. So such systems can never be conquered. The idea is to create scenarios in which (specified) races cannot be completely eliminated (unless they surrender).

Hmm, i wonder whether Navigators nix that effect? I don't recall trying to visit a "black hole" even with a navigator on board, but i guess it cannot be done. Pity, though, as i'd like to see how Simtex would have represented the close-up view of such a system.

Another question arises: can a race with a homeworld orbiting a black hole, see their home system? In particular, can they use colony bases?

Oh, if only i hadn't vowed not to touch a computer game until my thesis were completed!

[lockdown]

nice reply
i like exaustively collecting things...

I am currently fighting a sickness so I've been sitting around playing moo2 and browsing the web for info. I actually have a kali account but haven't ever played moo2 on it because I couldn't find the channel where it was supposed to be happening (someone gave a chatroom number but it either didn't exist or was something else).

Anyway since I'm bed-ridden I will make up a basic index.html for your site. I have already leeched all the files from your ftp so it shouldn't be too much trouble to document it all. Oh and I hex-edited the racestuf.lbx files and posted links in another thread, maybe you should add them to your ftp (though it's nothing you couldn't do with PickHack). Sometimes people just like the simple way of doing things.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=128828

[siron]

We are on CHATserver 246.

http://photos1.blogger.com/img/258/1643/640/kali.1.jpg

Look at the red arrows in this jpg: 1st click at chat servers (left side). 2nd click to sort the servers. And finally: Double click at server 246: Official Master of Orion 2 Server!

When there is no 246 (this rarely happens) try to "Update Server List" (Right Click on Chatservers).

[Zoetrope]

lockdown, i've downloaded the two zips containing modified copies of racestuf.lbx and their respective readme.txt files. When i get home i'll upload them to the zoetrope site at sff.

As for me, i find PickHack to _be_ the easy way: it is intuitive, comfortable, flexible, compact, simple, quick, powerful and forgiving. That's the way everything intended for public use should be.

[Alexander D]

I have some questions about the *.lbx files MPot modifies. The editor readme says it modifies estrings.lbx, racename.lbx, and racestuf.lbx. It does create *.bak files for race.lbx too. But as soon as it is used to insert/modify another race I can see some other files being modified as well.

The list of files with its date modified is: Estrings.lbx, racename.lbx, Races.lbx, racesel.lbx, Racestuf.lbx, ShipName.lbx, and StarName.lbx. Is this supposed to be that way?

I noticed the original ShipName.lbx and StarName.lbx are replaced by some other files that are somewhat smaller in size.

What is in this diference is, what I believe, the reason for after applying OCL to create something that will crash the game.

I had to restore the original ShipName.lbx and StarName.lbx files from the CD to see . Did anybody else had experienced the same problem as me?

Is there any incompatibility issue between Melting Pot and OCL?

Greetings

Alex

[Zoetrope]

MeltPot has extensive capabilities, so it may well need to change those other files, in which case amended docs should be published (by us if the author cannot be contacted).

I haven't tested both OCL and MeltPot together, but you've noted which files MeltPot changes, and by testing OCL separately we should likewise be able to observe which files it changes. If the two sets of files intersect, I agree there could be trouble. Otherwise I'd find a collision between them hard to explain.

Do you recall what OCL changes preceded the crash?