Spring RTS Engine

I spent a few hours today trying to get the Xect to work with spring. I managed to do the following:

-unpack the UFO

-unpack gaf files into bitmaps

-make modinfo and sidedata files from scratch

-put it all in sd7 format

All the resulting mod does is break the client, or prevent spring.exe from doing anything at all.

I'm kind of at a loss in terms of what to do next. Any advice from Gnome or others who have converted OTA mods?

I'm a total modding newb, but I can usually follow simple instructions. How can I get the Xect to work, and eventually add them into XTA?

Honestly saying what you did doesn't do much good when trying to troubleshoot something of this scope. We (or at least I, I can't speak for the others here) need to see your current progress to try to see what's wrong.

Here's a link. The mod DOES NOT work. If you start the lobby with the file in the mod directory, you will probably have to delete and reinstall.

http://blancandrin.dyndns.org/~foe/Xect.sd7

Giving it a quick once over now, then I'll begin more in-depth peering:

Your "anims" folder is totally unnecessary. None of those gafs are needed.

Same with your "bitmaps".

Download TDF structure looks fine, nothing looks wrong there.

Features\corpses looks fine. Possibly crashes because you are missing the trees/geo/etc data from stock Spring though. Try extracting the entire features dir out of XTA and dropping it in with yours for now. Or just depend on XTA if you want to make the test quick. In fact, I bet that's your major mod-killer right now.

"xenos.tdf" needs renamed to "sound.tdf" in the gamedata dir otherwise your unit click, attack order, move order, etc sounds aren't going to work. Spring will also bitch, but not crash, if you don't rename it (I know that from personal experience). Sidedata looks fine.

Your "guis" folder is also unnecessary unless any of those contain build tree information (doubt it, since there are TDFs) or if one of them is a nuclear-style weapon. Didn't open them to take a look yet to see if that's the case, just judging by the filenames there.

Don't see any immediate errors with the 3DOs. I don't know if Spring likes the ^ symbol, but it appears those are backup files which are unused anyway. You might try renaming them to use an underscore instead of a carrot just in case, but I'm not sure it's a problem. I'm guessing you're going to run into "Missing 3do 1x1c" and errors like that in game, unless the whole of the Xect race only uses three different rubble piles (one would need to check in-depth into the corpse files to know that). However, those particular missing 3DOs wouldn't be game enders, just console errors.

Script names look fine. I see one with a carrot, again you might rename it to use an underscore just in case. Not going to decompile any at this point.

Sounds appear to be fine. You don't have the hardcoded-into-spring sounds there, but your modinfo depends on the file that contains them so you're fine there.

Your textures are wrong. In TA the folder is "textures"; in Spring the folder is "tatex", which itself is in the folder "Unittextures" which goes in the root of the sd7 (so the textures are in Xect.sd7\Unittextures\tatex\*.bmp). You also need a tatex.txt file there, which defines teamcolors; smoth made a topic asking about that recently and I spilled the details of that file's structure, so go dig that up to learn how it works.

Unitpics looks fine.

Filenames in the units folder look fine.

And... same with the weapons.

Modinfo looks good (except for that stuff I mentioned above about features--of course, that just depends on how you go about attacking that problem). I recommend putting the version number in the "Name" field as well, so it is easier for battleroom players to figure out if they have matching versions or not.

That's all at a quick glance, of course. If you still have problems after you fix what I mentioned above, just try to be as specific as possible when describing the problem and what you did to get it.

I've made the changes Gnome suggested. Still no luck. Spring.exe does nothing, and the client gives errors:

Access violation at address 7C91142E in module 'ntdll.dll'. Read of address 3D6C6174.

Access violation at address 7C91142E in module 'ntdll.dll'. Read of address 3D6C6174.

Cannot assign a nil to a TComboBoxStrings.

Access violation at address 00544473 in module 'TASClient.exe'. Read of address 00000000.

Access violation at address 005473CD in module 'TASClient.exe'. Read of address 00000000.

I'm pretty clueless here. I can folow simple instructions, as long as the words don't have too many syllables .

The file is available at http://blancandrin.dyndns.org/~foe/Xect4.sd7.

Nice to see that your working on it.
I hope I can help you with it a bit.

Hehe, that's a coincidence.
I started working on it just yesterday.
I got the Xect commander walking around (the walk script doesn't seem to work though ), but the build times are completely screwed up, I think, since building takes a LONG time.
I haven't tried Mynn yet, though.
EDIT2: Mynn seems to be working quite well.
I'm uploading my version to FU as I speak.
EDIT: and here it is

hey michilus do u need some peeps to test the mod as i am willin

i already dled it and am gonna try but on question

is arm mynn or other way around

Arm is Xect, Core is Mynn.
The Mynn is somewhat playable, but the Xect need some taken care off.
Feel free to try it, just don't expect a refined Spring mod.
Also, I have virtually no experience in TA/TA:S modding, but I plan on learning some of that on the way

You can rename the sides to Xect and Mynn in the sidedata file without hurting anything.

Michilus_nimbus i have some bugs to report if u want i can pm u or spell em out here