FTL Captain's Edition 1.308/Inf 1.301b/EL 1.308

[kartoFlane]

@knyx13
I tried reproducing the issue using the steps you've listed, but I had no success. Adding more crew members to the ship should not cause any problems.
I think it could be an issue with mod order; CE requires the CE Resource Pack to be patched in before the CE itself. Or it could be the elusive bug that causes ships to randomly crash the game, that's been around for some time, but I never managed to figure out what causes that...

[knyx13]

so if I wanted to add in a new ship to enhance the game then I'd still have problems.

In general there are no problems with adding ship mods to CE. The problem most likely is related to that specific ship mod, specific changes you made or indeed related to Superluminal. I'm not the author of Superluminal and I have not the slightest idea of what really causes the problem, so again, I can't really help you there. Also donating to my Patreon does not entitle you to anything beyond Patreon rewards, which are symbolic to begin with. You can't buy support from me if that is what you are suggesting. Especially as I'm not really in the position to render any support here anyway.

I don't get the point of getting all snippy and condescending. The problem is how the two mods are interacting. Whether it's more Superluminal's problem or your problem I don't know and don't really care from an end user perspective.

I brought up Patreon because I wanted to give you incentive for doing a good deed for the community. Like buying someone a beer for a job well done. I didn't necessarily expect you to be able to fix it, but by looking into the problem maybe you could diagnose it and I could take that information back to the Superluminal creator in hopes he could fix it.

[knyx13]

@knyx13
I tried reproducing the issue using the steps you've listed, but I had no success. Adding more crew members to the ship should not cause any problems.
I think it could be an issue with mod order; CE requires the CE Resource Pack to be patched in before the CE itself. Or it could be the elusive bug that causes ships to randomly crash the game, that's been around for some time, but I never managed to figure out what causes that...

Awesome, thanks for looking into it. I'll see if I can repro it other ways and post what I come up with.

[knyx13]

Figured it out, not very interesting though.

The problem is that if you ever patch the game with CE installed, Superluminal will read multiple versions of every ship (one which has warship in the description and one that has pirateer). No matter which one you pick it'll lead to visual glitches and potential crashes once you attempt to patch with that ship.

Only way around it is to uninstall FTL, reinstall, use Superluminal to create a ship before patching CE (using Slipstream), and essentially make patching CE + your ship the very last thing you do. Then don't attempt to load that ship again - in my case after I have patched and go into Slipstream again I see 3 different Mantis 2 ships.

Sorry for the trouble and thanks for the help kartoFlane.

[Shrooblord]

From reading the spellchecking gitHub collective's readme, I can see that adding texts to the database is actually pretty dangerous as it may crash the game if not done properly. Kay. Won't bother with that then, since I don't know how to avoid crashing the game (yet).

It doesn't matter if you make the changes through github or simple xml editing, the risk of causing instability is always there but the github readme addresses how to mitigate it. In any case I won't integrate spell checking if it is submitted as raw xml files, so I'd suggest using the github repository. Revision control is there for the exact reason of mitigating instability risk, as It allows me to easily review the changes you make before integrating them.

Oh yes of course - I was planning on uploading my revisions through a gitHub fork (I've already created one). No upoads for you yet since I'm testing my changes to see if it crashes the game or not.

EDIT:
I'm a bit disappointed with this spellchecking endeavour not being able to increase the number of characters that were in the original text. There's a couple of dozen of descriptions I had altered, adding periods (.) and apostrophes (') or correctly spelling words that simply needed more letters in them, but it seemed to crash my game that way.

The nature of the crash was this: I could load up the game fine and choose my ship, I read the intro text but as soon as I hit 'continue', all input and animations froze, though the music would still play (though I know from experience that music can keep playing even though a game has properly crashed).

So I'm (sadly) reverting all my changes where I increased the length of the original text by adding characters... but that undos a lot of corrections. You'll be able to compare what I did in my gitHub history once I merge my branch with yours. Maybe you can figure out a way to add my first version's changes to the mod without crashing the game. I assume you have more knowledge over why the game crashes when too many characters are entered than I do. Back to work...

PS
Seriously though. Why does the game crash when you add a simple character like a dash (-) or change the spelling of the word 'of' to 'off'?

EDIT2:
Honestly I don't really see the point in spellchecking if I can't rephrase things like "one shot, deals 2 damage" into "one shot that deals 2 damage" and "with good chance of fire" into "with a good chance of fire". I'm not knocking your original language, by the way. I'm just wondering if it's any use me going through all the XMLs if I can't correct the grammar if that means it'll need more letters than the original. That's quite a limitation.

EDIT3:
Ok don't really get what the problem is here. This time, I reverted all the texts back to their original but kept the ones that were the same length as the original or shorter, but now the game crashes as soon as I press 'Start' in the hangar. I can't even get to the intro text now. I'm not sure what the nature of the crash is, if not text length, so I'm gonna go ahead and merge the branches now so that you can take a look at it.
The only files I changed were the Readme.md and the Blueprints.xml.

[Sleeper Service]

I'm a bit disappointed with this spellchecking endeavour not being able to increase the number of characters that were in the original text. There's a couple of dozen of descriptions I had altered, adding periods (.) and apostrophes (') or correctly spelling words that simply needed more letters in them, but it seemed to crash my game that way.

The nature of the crash was this: I could load up the game fine and choose my ship, I read the intro text but as soon as I hit 'continue', all input and animations froze, though the music would still play (though I know from experience that music can keep playing even though a game has properly crashed).

So I'm (sadly) reverting all my changes where I increased the length of the original text by adding characters... but that undos a lot of corrections. You'll be able to compare what I did in my gitHub history once I merge my branch with yours. Maybe you can figure out a way to add my first version's changes to the mod without crashing the game. I assume you have more knowledge over why the game crashes when too many characters are entered than I do. Back to work...

So the readme was probably a little misleading in that regard, although your crashes might indicate that you indeed exceeded FTLs ominous character limit at some point. But more often than not a few additional characters or words won't matter, as long as the text wasn't too long to begin with. I rephrased that point in the readme:

3. Too long texts can cause instability. If you rephrase things, try not to exceed the number of characters the text originally had by too much, specially when the text was already pretty long. A few additional words won't matter if the text was sort too begin with, but somewhere beyond 250 characters the game gets iffy. Also tooltips and weapon description are often deliberately as short as they are, so don't extend the by too much or else they won't fit the UI.

Your crash might also be related to stray characters, but you have to push your changes or link your profile for me to be able to see your changes.

[Shrooblord]

I didn't push my changes? Thought I had. Anyway, here's my profile in case I screw the git side of things up again
https://github.com/Shrooblord/FTL-Captain-s-Edition-Spellchecking-2015

OK the character count of 255 is a guideline I can work with.

Please check my pull request or profile for the changes I made. The Master branch is the best, but if that's not implementable, then use crashTest1. However, on my side, both crash the game...

[Sleeper Service]

Got you pull request now, but I not sure what is causing the problem there. One possibility is that special characters like
, ; -
when used in blueprints. I think I had a few problems related to those. If you want to play it safe I recommend checking which conventions vanilla tool-tips follow. If you don't use any characters that aren't used in the specific vanilla context then things should generally work.

OK the character count of 255 is a guideline I can work with.

This character count isn't really exact though. It's a rough estimation but it's pretty safe. At some point I just limited myself to what appears as three lines max in gedit standard text size and that prevented any problems so far. I think the actual physical length of the text in question as it appears within in-game windows is what really causes problems. I think research into what amount of characters really is the threshold was inconclusive. There are a few events where texts then act extra weird. For example the game start tips, they seem to have a much smaller threshold, probably because they appear in the same window as the game start text, although as a different text ID.

[Shrooblord]

Got you pull request now, but I not sure what is causing the problem there. One possibility is that special characters like
, ; -
when used in blueprints. I think I had a few problems related to those. If you want to play it safe I recommend checking which conventions vanilla tool-tips follow. If you don't use any characters that aren't used in the specific vanilla context then things should generally work.

Hm. I've been adapating inconsistent descriptions to match the style of others. I didn't "invent" any formatting myself; I chose what fitted best grammatically but was also used most throughout blueprints.xml. In general, that was the style
"Deals one damage; ignites fires; causes hull breach, which means oxygen drains."

But okay. I'll... go through the files and see if I can have my game not crash when I remove special characters...? I dunno. Weird.
I'll also do a round of CE-only testing. So far I've only been testing with Insurrection also installed. Don't know why I didn't think of deactivating that in my testings yet.

Have you tested the blueprints.xml yourself? Does it work on your end?

[Sleeper Service]

I don't know, I can only speculate myself. , and ; appears in vanilla blueprint tooltips, but I've never seen a - and FTL is weird, so that might be part of the problem. If you are using third party mods that that doesn't make things clearer either. I recommend you try whether your modified CE version works on itself first. I haven't tested your files myself and I probably won't have the time today. I appreciate your effort though, your stuff looks thorough.