Subset Games Forum

My apologies, I shouldn't have created another threat, please ignore this one.

You'll probably want another answer from someone more experienced than me, but glad you decided to try out modding! There are a ton of tutorials on here that could help you out. Try checking the "Master Mod List" in Working Mods I think they are all listed there. Ship modding can be a lot of work depending on what you are trying to do. To make a ship look more FTL like if you are not an artist you could try splicing other ships together to make it look like what you want. I use Gimp, but it's probably not the editor of choice for most successful ship modders... Not all the ship mods look like actual FTL vanilla ships though, so as long as it looks good you should be OK. Just make sure that if you post it here its not a copyrighted image or something.
I first started with superluminal by watching Vanguard of Valor make a mod on youtube...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A31U0CtvU0w

As for events modding, its pretty simple but one wrong symbol can make something not work, cause weird behavior, or cause the whole game to crash... A common theme with programming. To prevent this from happening you can try using the FTL error checker tool. Can't really say exactly what you did wrong without seeing exactly what you changed. If it's code related you can copy-paste what you did here and enclosing it in tags.
Maybe what you did wrong is you did not put it in the correct file structure in the .ftl file? You should have *Mod name*.zip. Inside that should be a folder named "data" (because that's where the events file is located in the game's file structure), and inside that should be your edited "events.xml.append" file. (You should probably use a .append always) (match the name exactly to what it appears a in the game files, including capitalization). Then you can rename the .zip to .ftl and load it into Superluminal.

Otherwise all I can suggest is do what i do and stare at it for a looooong time, read it over and over again, consult a very basic tutorial for something you thought you already knew how to do, and then finally realize you forgot to close a tag somewhere or something. Also, keep in mind that several things in this game are hardcoded so that may also be a limitation. Editing the Start Beacon text should be fine though.

The best way to learn modding is looking at what others have already done. Download both simple and complex mods and look in those folders to try and figure out everything they changed. The fact that you know how to change the file extension from .ftl to .zip, and how to unpack the game's files means you've already come farther than a lot of people. And look at all the games files to, you'll start to figure out how it all works together.

That's all I have to say really, hope I helped you out somehow. Welcome to FTL and welcome to the forums. Happy Modding!!!

Thanks man, so much useful info in there for me, I really appreciate it. Basically with the events, I just wanted to see if when I alter something, it will actually show it ingame before I start trying to properly write events, haha. This is exactly what I did:

1. I opened FTL Unpacker and located data.dat under D:/program files/steam/steamApps/common/FTL Faster Then Light/resources/data.dat.
2. I unpacked it to my desktop.
3. I opened the folder "data" which had all the different events and blueprints etc etc inside it, and opened/edited the xml files "events".
4. As a test, I edited and saved to 5. I chose the pack option on FTL Unpacker, located "data" folder on my desktop, and packed up the folder back into data.dat.
6. I then right clicked on data.dat and chose the winrar option to "archive" it, and selected zip. This changed the file to data.zip (I also tried just renaming the data.dat to data.ftl, renaming data.dat to data.zip then to data.ftl, none of them worked (unless they did, but I just stuffed up somewhere else.), I also tried changing the events.xml to events.xml.append and running that into slipstream, didn't work.)
7. I renamed data.zip to data.ftl and copy and pasted it into my slipstream mods folder
8. Opened slipstream mod manager, enabled mod, and launched game.

I'm not sure what I did wrong, if anyone could help me that would be great.

Ok well 1-4 is fine. You didn't do anything wrong there.

Personally I have never edited the game's files directly with the unpacker, I always use Slipstream so I'm not sure if you did something wrong there or not. I would highly recommend just using Slipstream to install any mods you make or download though, rather then repacking them manually. It is MUCH simpler. So you can just skip 5 & 6.

If you have questions about Slipstream you could probably ask on the Slipstream thread, more people might be able to help you there.

I don't think it really matters what program you used to edit the files... I assume it was Wordpad, Visual C++, or something similar.

Here is what I do when editing the files:
But first... You are on windows correct? You will need to allow file extensions to be seen when renaming things if you haven't already.
Here's how to do that (this is taken directly from Microsoft's help website):

To show or hide file name extensions

Open Folder Options by clicking the Start button Picture of the Start button, clicking Control Panel, clicking Appearance and Personalization, and then clicking Folder Options.

Click the View tab, and then, under Advanced settings, do one of the following:

To show file name extensions, clear the Hide extensions for known file types check box, and then click OK.

To hide file name extensions, select the Hide extensions for known file types check box, and then click OK.

Ok, if you follow these steps exactly everything should work fine:
1.)In the file you are editing Delete everything except for the one event you are actually changing to simplify things. So the only thing that should remain in the file is what you posted above. (That way Slipstream only has to replace one event rather than all of them with an exact copy) (It is also good practice for when you mod more complicated thing later on. You only want what you're actually changing in the file.)
2.)Save the file as a NEW "events.xml.append" anywhere, temporarily on your Desktop is what I recommend. If you have to just manually changing the extension by renaming is enough.
3.)Create a new folder named "data" You can just right click on your Desktop and create one there using New....
4.)Place your new "events.xml.append" file into the "data" file.
5.)Create a new Compressed (zipped) folder in the same way as (3).
6.)Rename that folder to whatever you want to call your "Mod"
7.)Either copy and paste or drag the "data" folder into the Compressed (zipped) folder.
8.)Manually change the Compressed (zipped) folder's extension from .zip to .ftl by renaming.
9.)Place the Compressed (zipped) folder into the Slipstream Mod Manager's mod folder
10.)Run Slipstream's "modman.exe" and your "Mod" should appear in the list. Select it and press Patch.
11.)When you run the game you should see your change.

If this doesn't work there has to be something wrong with Slipstream which isn't unheard of. Try reinstalling it or try asking in the Slipstream forums.

I wish you the best of luck. I had a really hard time starting with modding this game, but once you get the basics down you get the hang of it and it's really fun.

IF YOU HAVE ANY OTHER QUESTIONS JUST SEND ME A PM.

Thanks so much! It's all working now, I'm so happy!

Arctanas wrote:Thanks so much! It's all working now, I'm so happy!

Well that makes me happy too! I hope you become the greatest modder on the forums one day. Send me a PM if you have any other questions about anything. I'll try to help you out with whatever I can or at least point you in the right direction. I know about a variety of modding topics and I'm pretty active on here. I check at least once a day.

So what's the event idea that you had?
You know about the Captain's Edition mod right? Well if you have a good, well thought out, lore friendly, event idea you want to add in the game you can post it in this thread and it might get added to the Captain's Edition! Especially if you make all the necessary edits to the .xml files yourself.
http://www.ftlgame.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=16726