stellaris [mod] [Stellaris] Vanilla Framework

[Mugginnato]

12 hours ago, darthvaapad said:

is there a version of this that doesn't have the new races join the random species pool?

I'm a little unsure on what you mean. By new races, do you mean the dlc species (plantoid, lithoid, etc), or do you mean you play with the vanilla portraits and want the VF portraits to not be random?

There isn't a version of either but it's possible to do, just different amounts of work.

[KingSuperJam]

On 7/13/2022 at 7:08 AM, Mugginnato said:

Another test you could do is the steps outlined above, but drop this file into species_classes before testing._100_VF_Aquatic_classes.txt. If the aquatics show up, then it means that it was crashing because of a missing graphical culture and/or audio file. I've made similar files like this to address the issue but even though people download them, no one gave feedback so I couldn't confirm.

Hope this helps.

i mean i can let you know after i test it but it might be awhile since i use irony and merged my things so it'll take me awhile to run my test plus atm i dont have alot of time 

[Smutley]

Don't suppose anyone knows how to make Robophilia and VF play nice with each other? I have difficulty understanding the species_classes editing.

[Mugginnato]

15 hours ago, Smutley said:

Don't suppose anyone knows how to make Robophilia and VF play nice with each other? I have difficulty understanding the species_classes editing.

Don't worry, it's quite easy to do. Just open the Robophilia species_classes file in something like notepad and scroll down to "ROBOT", and you'll see the 5 sets that the mod adds to the game. With VF, Machines and Robots have separate class files, so you'll just need to open both. Then all you have to do is copy and paste the section from the Robophilia file to the VF files, either in the the "portraits" (they all begin with sd) or the "custom_portraits section (contain RF01, RF02, etc). I'll add a screenshot of what I mean and hopefully that will help.
Also, whenever you see the # symbol in front of a portrait name, that means it's disabled/ignored by the game. So now you can enable/disable sets as you like. I could make a patch for you but I've no idea what other mods you might be running.

[Smutley]

3 hours ago, Mugginnato said:

[wall of text]

 

It worked, dog bless.

[Draknowin]

I know for a fact this would be a bunch of tedious work but what are the odds of getting a patch that integrates the Sexy Xenos into existing Species Classes instead of their own SSX class?

[Mugginnato]

5 hours ago, Draknowin said:

I know for a fact this would be a bunch of tedious work but what are the odds of getting a patch that integrates the Sexy Xenos into existing Species Classes instead of their own SSX class?

I've toyed with the idea of creating a re-class patch that take custom species and distributes them into the relevant ones. Now that you mention it, SSX hasn't had an update in just over a year. I'll ask Toronam for permission to integrate the SSX sets into VF, but not the events. Pretty sure LV would be doing that, also if something breaks then I wouldn't know how to fix it.

[Armchair]

Could you give a short explanation why it would be advantageous to add a custom portrait set to an existing species class instead of implementing your own species class?  I've started making my own portrait set and I was under the impression that it was better form to use your own classes wherever possible to mitigate the potential for conflicts with other mods.  I've observed a lot of portrait mods colliding with each other with the machine/robots definitions and assumed that was just born out of necessity of integrating mechanical pops into the game in appropriate contexts but that otherwise it was better to keep your classes separate so that you wouldn't step on anyone else's toes.

 

I understand that vanilla framework went out of its way to redefine the existing default classes as a way of replacing all of the default portraits, but outside of that context I'm not seeing what the advantage to adding a species to an existing species class instead of a custom class.  The ability to swap portraits via advanced gene-editing?  I'm not criticizing the idea, I'm just curious to see what I'm overlooking.

[Mugginnato]

15 minutes ago, Armchair said:

Could you give a short explanation why it would be advantageous to add a custom portrait set to an existing species class instead of implementing your own species class?  I've started making my own portrait set and I was under the impression that it was better form to use your own classes wherever possible to mitigate the potential for conflicts with other mods.  I've observed a lot of portrait mods colliding with each other with the machine/robots definitions and assumed that was just born out of necessity of integrating mechanical pops into the game in appropriate contexts but that otherwise it was better to keep your classes separate so that you wouldn't step on anyone else's toes.

 

I understand that vanilla framework went out of its way to redefine the existing default classes as a way of replacing all of the default portraits, but outside of that context I'm not seeing what the advantage to adding a species to an existing species class instead of a custom class.  The ability to swap portraits via advanced gene-editing?  I'm not criticizing the idea, I'm just curious to see what I'm overlooking.

Well, if I'm gonna sweep all the vanilla portraits off the table, I'm still gonna have the definitions for Humanoids, Mammalians, etc, so why wouldn't I use them when what I'm doing is replacing them? If I was going to add a properly custom species with its own rules and defs, then sure I'd I'd keep it separate. Also, I don't have to worry about any code updates messing with how they function.

Part of it is also trying to reduce clutter, at least that's how I view having 3~6 different species that should really just be under the X species heading. I also wanted VF to be a relatively easy mod to work with, if there's a conflict, you just add the portraits to the relevant VF class files.

 

In summary, I'm not currently doing enough with VF to justify making it all custom species, it's very unlikely to break with updates, and it's very straightforward to address conflicts. I should also mention that my knowledge of events isn't great, so I'm also hedging my bets against random events calling for specific species.
I hope this enough of an answer for you.

[RizaPascal]

Since the Dev was asking for suggestions/requests, I would like to see "fury lite" versions of some sets where the character is mostly human with like just the ears changed or what ever is appropriate for the species, as long as the face and body as much as possible are human. In particular I would like to see this for the "cow" group where it is limited to girls with the ears, horns, tail, and big breasts, but the body and face are human with no udder. Sorry if that a tall ask i don't know how hard it would be to find enough images for this and i realize how furry something is, is a bit subjective. Finally i ask this only it it wouldn't be a lot of work but would it be possible to have a pensis-less version of the mod i understand that you cant accommodate everyone's preferences but id though id ask      

[Mugginnato]

23 minutes ago, RizaPascal said:

Since the Dev was asking for suggestions/requests, I would like to see "fury lite" versions of some sets where the character is mostly human with like just the ears changed or what ever is appropriate for the species, as long as the face and body as much as possible are human. In particular I would like to see this for the "cow" group where it is limited to girls with the ears, horns, tail, and big breasts, but the body and face are human with no udder. Sorry if that a tall ask i don't know how hard it would be to find enough images for this and i realize how furry something is, is a bit subjective. Finally i ask this only it it wouldn't be a lot of work but would it be possible to have a pensis-less version of the mod i understand that you cant accommodate everyone's preferences but id though id ask      

It's come up before, I do plan to add demi humans but the problem is where do you put them? In humanoids or their relevant species? Chances are I'll just make them a custom species, but it's always good to get feedback.
As for you second request, probably not, sorry. Way too much work (roughly 1000 images), but you you can always edit/crop/resize the files yourself with something like GIMP. 

[Armchair]

On 8/5/2022 at 4:17 PM, Mugginnato said:

Well, if I'm gonna sweep all the vanilla portraits off the table, I'm still gonna have the definitions for Humanoids, Mammalians, etc, so why wouldn't I use them when what I'm doing is replacing them? If I was going to add a properly custom species with its own rules and defs, then sure I'd I'd keep it separate. Also, I don't have to worry about any code updates messing with how they function.

Part of it is also trying to reduce clutter, at least that's how I view having 3~6 different species that should really just be under the X species heading. I also wanted VF to be a relatively easy mod to work with, if there's a conflict, you just add the portraits to the relevant VF class files.

 

In summary, I'm not currently doing enough with VF to justify making it all custom species, it's very unlikely to break with updates, and it's very straightforward to address conflicts. I should also mention that my knowledge of events isn't great, so I'm also hedging my bets against random events calling for specific species.
I hope this enough of an answer for you.

Thanks.  I think that answers everything.  In short, it's a difference of mod objectives and that a generic portrait mod doesn't need to put its new species within an existing species class if the objective is simply to allow the player and random AI nations to have access to the portraits.  If the portrait being in a custom species class breaks eligibility to partake in some esoteric event chain, then that probably doesn't matter in 99% of playthroughs.

 

 

Meanwhile VF has a larger scope to its goals.  I was a bit confused as to why you'd go through the effort of adding even more species into the default classes when you already had species there to avoid breaking some esoteric event chain, but personal organization preferences explains that.

 

On 8/6/2022 at 9:40 AM, RizaPascal said:

Since the Dev was asking for suggestions/requests, I would like to see "fury lite" versions of some sets where the character is mostly human with like just the ears changed or what ever is appropriate for the species, as long as the face and body as much as possible are human. In particular I would like to see this for the "cow" group where it is limited to girls with the ears, horns, tail, and big breasts, but the body and face are human with no udder. Sorry if that a tall ask i don't know how hard it would be to find enough images for this and i realize how furry something is, is a bit subjective. Finally i ask this only it it wouldn't be a lot of work but would it be possible to have a pensis-less version of the mod i understand that you cant accommodate everyone's preferences but id though id ask      

Perhaps I can help for the 2nd request.  I share a preference for the female form, and I edited my personal copy of VF to remove the male and hermaphroditic portraits.  Or rather, I removed the references to the male portraits.  My quick and dirty solution was to take advantage of the fact that Mugginnato utilized consistent naming schemes when naming each of the portraits for each species.   I busted out Notepad++ and a few choice search/replace commands later and I had redefined every instance of a male portrait to point to its equivalent female portrait.  For example, the portrait for 01AquaM1 was redefined to point to 01AquaF1.dds.

 

There's a few quirks though.  The characters are still male as far as the game is concerned, so you might see some leaders with male names and female portraits.  Some female portraits are more common than others since some of them only get referenced by a single definition while others get referenced multiple times.  That same problems persist on a larger scale for the robot pops since at the time I thought it would be easier to just remap the "manbot" and "futabots" to use the "synth" portraits since I thought that the naming schemes between the three of them looked most similar.  Consequently the synth portraits appear much more frequently than fembots or gynoids.

 

All that said, despite being a quick and dirty hacked together solution, I think it fulfills your goal?

 

This is my first time uploading any files here, but just install vanilla framework and then overwrite the text files in "Vanilla Framework/gfx/portraits/portraits" with attached replacements.

portraits.zip

[darthvaapad]

On 7/20/2022 at 5:52 AM, Mugginnato said:

I'm a little unsure on what you mean. By new races, do you mean the dlc species (plantoid, lithoid, etc), or do you mean you play with the vanilla portraits and want the VF portraits to not be random?

There isn't a version of either but it's possible to do, just different amounts of work.

I mean not adding the portraits from this mod to the main game races random pool or having them show up randomly at all. I like building my own races with the portraits and having them show up often as other races just kinds of bothers me and I've not found a quick and easy way to prevent them from spawning. (also sorry for the delay in response I've been busy and forgot I posted here.)

[Mugginnato]

52 minutes ago, darthvaapad said:

I mean not adding the portraits from this mod to the main game races random pool or having them show up randomly at all. I like building my own races with the portraits and having them show up often as other races just kinds of bothers me and I've not found a quick and easy way to prevent them from spawning. (also sorry for the delay in response I've been busy and forgot I posted here.)

No bother, it's a pretty straightforward thing to do. Go into the classes files and/or patches for VF, then add "randomized = no" to the portrait group, or change it from 'host_has_dlc...' to '= no'. The example below shows what I mean.

You can also decide which sets you do want randomized vs not by making more custom portrait sets:

custom_portraits = {

        randomized = yes/no

        portraits = {

                 portraits here

        }

}

 

You'll also want to remove the non-random sets from the pre-sapients uplift list (it's in their class file).

[darthvaapad]

48 minutes ago, Mugginnato said:

No bother, it's a pretty straightforward thing to do. Go into the classes files and/or patches for VF, then add "randomized = no" to the portrait group, or change it from 'host_has_dlc...' to '= no'. The example below shows what I mean.

You can also decide which sets you do want randomized vs not by making more custom portrait sets:

custom_portraits = {

        randomized = yes/no

        portraits = {

                 portraits here

        }

}

 

You'll also want to remove the non-random sets from the pre-sapients uplift list (it's in their class file).

thank you

[Armchair]

These frog-face looking people have managed to infiltrate my current game.   In my previous game the Geico Gecko looking dudes managed to sneak in.   The frogmen are a fallen empire but the geico gecko people in my last game were just an ordinary nation.   Do you know which of  the files that I should be investigating to try to discern why they slipped through the cracks?  I have a handful of different portrait mods installed.   VF isn't my bottom mod in the load order, but as far as I know it is the bottom-most mod that interacts with species portraits.  Aside from these outliers, VF seems to be successfully replacing vanilla portraits in 99% of cases.

 

 

If it's relevant, I do not have all species DLC.  Looking at steam, I haven't installed the Aquatics, Plantoid, or Anniversary portrait packs.

 

 

Thanks in advance,

 

edit:

I suppose I also can't completely rule out that I botched something in VF when I was editing the files to try to remove the male portraits.  That was a rushed job after-all.   I'm just not sure where I should be directing my attention.

Edited August 10, 2022 by Armchair

[Mugginnato]

1 hour ago, Armchair said:

These frog-face looking people have managed to infiltrate my current game.   In my previous game the Geico Gecko looking dudes managed to sneak in.   The frogmen are a fallen empire but the geico gecko people in my last game were just an ordinary nation.   Do you know which of  the files that I should be investigating to try to discern why they slipped through the cracks?  I have a handful of different portrait mods installed.   VF isn't my bottom mod in the load order, but as far as I know it is the bottom-most mod that interacts with species portraits.  Aside from these outliers, VF seems to be successfully replacing vanilla portraits in 99% of cases.

Hmm, it's possible that VF not being the very last in the load order could be the cause. It's also possible that one of the other mods affect empire generation, some fallen empires and the like get assigned either a specific species or a specific portrait set. I'll be looking into this again for the next update, there might have been additions/changes with the base game.

 

1 hour ago, Armchair said:

If it's relevant, I do not have all species DLC.  Looking at steam, I haven't installed the Aquatics, Plantoid, or Anniversary portrait packs.

I don't think it matters, the two instances seem to be related to Reptilians so I'll be double checking fallen empires and their classes files. I might remove the unused/disabled code sections as a more drastic step, but the only possible dlc related issue at the moment is crashing during empire creation (and that has yet to be confirmed).

 

1 hour ago, Armchair said:

I suppose I also can't completely rule out that I botched something in VF when I was editing the files to try to remove the male portraits.  That was a rushed job after-all.   I'm just not sure where I should be directing my attention.

Maybe, if a # symbol was removed or in the wrong place. If VF is the last mod to load, then I'd be reasonably confident that it was either an event or a missed file that I haven't changed yet. Anything that loads after VF could have made changes, but it's odd that it was only 1 empire that was vanilla. Fallen empires have their own file which VF should overwrite, so unless there's a new separated file, then I'd have to assume it was event related or another mods doing.

Hope this helps to narrow down things a bit. I'll get back to you with anything I do or don't find.

 

Edit:

It was a rather quick search, but fallen empires only call for random portraits, and system initializers (semi pre-scripted systems) don't ever call for Reptilians. I now doubt it's event related as this looks like a normal spiritualist FE, so this is probably related  to load order and/or other mods (and maybe your tinkering depending on what you did). I also suspect that the game could have called on a disabled vanilla portrait set, so going forward I just remove their code and hope for the best. Outside of this, I honestly don't know. Some peoples games can be finicky,  like with mipmapped images and the (unconfirmed) missing dlc issue.

Edited August 10, 2022 by Mugginnato

[Armchair]

Thanks.  I'll spend some more time poking around over the next few days to try to see what I can see.  At present, since I have altered some of the VF files and have other mods loaded, I'm assuming that the problem is something on my end rather than being a problem with VF.

 

In this case the faulty empire is a fallen empire, but the geckos from my previous game weren't a fallen empire.   The geckos from the previous game were a standard nation though.  I forget if they were a fanatic purifier or a devouring swarm.  They were kind of on the other side of the galaxy with massive negative opinion modifiers.   I didn't get involved with them until my doomstacks spent a few years wiping them off the map when they declared war on one of my vassals. 

 

I'll double check what I can about reptilians in the next few days.  The mods below the VF in my load order are:

• Tech Tiers
• Detailed Tech Tooltips remastered
• UI Overhaul Dynamic
• A custom flag mod
• a loading screen mod
• a custom mod that makes lithoid cloning vats use food for upkeep (I thought it was dumb that it cost minerals when I'm using them to clone biological slaves)
• a mod that lets nerve-stapled pops be eligible for necrophaging
• clearer invasion markers

 

None of those should be applicable for messing with species portraits but I guess I should copy my current mod load order and try moving VF to the very bottom and then try starting a few new matches while using console commands to expose the galaxy.

 

 

It's weird that it's so rare since I did launch a few day 0 games where I inspected the pops in the galaxy and everything looked fine on a few of those day 0 starts.  Then I started playing the game and I bumped into some fanatic purifier geckos that wanted to sell me car insurance.  I wrote it off as a fluke and then I bumped into this fallen empire in my next game.  All of this said, I don't know if some event could have created the geckos after day 0?  They were on the other side of the map and looked well established relative to the other AI nations, but I wasn't aware of them until after the galactic community was founded.

 

 

Speaking of events that can cause vanilla portraits to appear, I did notice that the shroud tunnel changed one of my admirals into some ugly tentacle face thing mid-transit once.  I'm not that concerned about that.  I just save-scummed when that happened.

[Mugginnato]

5 minutes ago, Armchair said:

The mods below the VF in my load order are:

• Tech Tiers
• Detailed Tech Tooltips remastered
• UI Overhaul Dynamic
• A custom flag mod
• a loading screen mod
• a custom mod that makes lithoid cloning vats use food for upkeep (I thought it was dumb that it cost minerals when I'm using them to clone biological slaves)
• a mod that lets nerve-stapled pops be eligible for necrophaging
• clearer invasion markers

I agree, these don't look like they should impact things at all.

 

See Edit in my previous reply for my thoughts/findings.

 

You could try a round of testing, set up a few games (medium sized with max empires) then enter the Observe command and see if any more vanilla sets pop up day 1~20. Consistency could give us a clue, like if there's always 1 and if it's always Reptilian. I've done similar to test new sets and the like, but so far I never see vanilla stuff outside of the expected robots.

[Armchair]

I appreciate the feedback.  I'll poke around a bit later given the leads that you gave me.

 

Again, at present I doubt that there is anything wrong with VF.  I suspect that the problem is localized on my machine.  I'll share any new information that I find that makes me reassess my opinion.  I don't want to send you on a wild goose chase.  I just came here to ask since you have more experience with these files.

[Armchair]

I've got some more data points.

 

1:  I checked and I had some old saves from the game where the Geckos made an appearance.   I loaded up the save file, circa year 2208, and used the intel and communications commands to see the whole galaxy.  The gecko nation, and even their entire species, didn't exist at the start of the game.   By the time that I found them, they were one of the dominant powers of that corner of the galaxy.   They were fanatic purifiers and I guess that they were just steamrolling over the normal AI.  I didn't realize that an entire news species/empire could be whisked into existence like that on the other side of the galaxy and manage to become a significant player on the galactic stage.  I suppose I've witness the "Limbo" event spawn a new species, but they've always just been synths for me when I played that event chain.  I have vague memories of fallen empires being able to take the data and properly resurrect the Limbo species, but I thought that just turned them into zoo citizens for the FE?  I'm not sure what the deal is with the Geckos.  They simply didn't exist in 2208.

 

2:  I started a a lot of fresh games on large maps with 30 empires.  I then inspected the population of the galaxy with the intel/communications commands and the species tabs.   Over the course of about 40 games, I encountered four species that used vanilla portraits.   Two humans, one avian, and a third type of reptilian portrait.  I don't recall how the humans were configured the first time around, but the second time that I saw them I noticed that they were named "Terrans."  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe that the vanilla game ever refers to humanity as "Terrans."   But a custom empire that I played as once sure did.  It just so happens that these fallen empire "Terrans" had the same racial traits as that custom empire's species.

 

3:  I have three custom empires defined in my empire select screen right now.   The Terrans and one other are presently malformed empire definitions since they include some content from mods that aren't presently installed.  The second one doesn't even have an appearance defined whatsoever since they were using a custom species from a custom species class that isn't even present anymore.  Obviously I can't immediately play as either empire without rectifying those flaws in their definitions.  Likewise, that orange "Phoenix" button that lets you mark your custom empires as eligible usage by the AI are both greyed out for these two malformed empires.  But even if these empire definitions can't be used, the appearance of the "Terrans" as a fallen empire leads me to believe that there is logic somewhere in the game  to potentially pull the species definition of your custom empires for usage in a fallen empire even if the normal definition for that empire isn't eligible for usage as a standard empire.

 

4:  If the "Terrans" are being picked as a fallen empire, then is it sometimes picking the faceless empire?  I wonder if they're being picked and the game is just falling back to using the original vanilla appearances in this oddball case of trying to use a broken empire definition as a template for a fallen empire?  The species name of the faceless species isn't being used, but maybe it's just straight up too broken in too many categories?

 

 

 

I'm trying to think now about how to go about testing this.  I could delete/repair the malformed empire definitions, but the very low appearance rate of the bug would just have me wondering if I had fixed it or if I simply hadn't procced the bug a second time.  Maybe I can find the file where the custom empire definitions are defined, and copy the malformed ones a few dozen times so that there are more "broken" empires for the game to potentially pick?   Mod the game so that I can populate the galaxy with a very large number of fallen empires?  Together that might make the bug far more common.  If I can make the bug common, then I can have more confidence that the malformed empire definitions were at fault if the bug stops manifesting after they're fixed.

 

 

I still can't explain the geckos, but the "Terrans" making an appearance definitely has me pondering if I've simply stumbled upon some odd "garbage in, garbage out" style behavior.  The hypothesis that the problem is occurring for just the subset of empires that are fallen empires that are also inheriting a species definition from an improperly defined custom empire might explain why the problem is rare enough that I'm only encountering it once every 100+ species.

[Mugginnato]

4 hours ago, Armchair said:

1:  They simply didn't exist in 2208.

This sort of thing makes me think there's a file or files I messed that handles FE generation, though the FE file doesn't explain why it went for vanilla.

 

4 hours ago, Armchair said:

2:  It just so happens that these fallen empire "Terrans" had the same racial traits as that custom empire's species.

Well, at least it's a mercifully small appearance rate. Terranova is part of the random humanoids lists to Terrans might not be that crazy, especially if another mod added name files. Bit of an odd coincidence though. And just to double check, every instance was a fallen empire?

 

5 hours ago, Armchair said:

3:  I have three custom empires defined in my empire select screen right now.

 

4:  If the "Terrans" are being picked as a fallen empire, then is it sometimes picking the faceless empire?

Interesting theory, though I don't know enough to help prove or disprove it. If the other two customs are Avian and Reptilian, then I'd say you are definitely close to the mark. I don't have any customs empire saved at all, and I only ever have VF installed/active for testing, so maybe that's why I don't see it? Plus the low appearance rate. 

 

You could try removing the custom empires, or changing their portraits at the least, and maybe give them highly specific names. You can set them to never appear in game with the phoenix button, so if they do pop up again then you theory holds out. If a vanilla FE still pops up but isn't related to a custom empire, then we can try assign each FE a specific portrait rather than let it go random.

[Armchair]

So far the only empire with an unexpected portrait set that wasn't a fallen empire was the Gecko empire.  Their species didn't exist at the start of the game and apparently came into existence at a later point in time.   The only empires that have existed on day 1 with unexpected portraits have been fallen empire species.   The Gecko thing was weird but I'm putting them out of mind since I have no means whatsoever to try to replicate the issue.

 

 

I downloaded "More Galaxy Options" from the steam workshop so that I could saturate my galaxy with dozens of fallen empires.  I also made a few new custom empires with species names like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAATesting"   After spawning hundreds of fallen empires, I have the following observations.

• The "Terrans" are indeed my custom race Terrans.  They've appeared repeatedly with the exact racial traits as my terrains.  The "Faceless" faction (FWIW, they're named T-Dolls) also appeared a few times...with blank portrait frames.
• The freshly created "Testing" empires were never chosen to be fallen empires.
• upon editing documents\Paradox Interactive\Stellaris\user_empire_designs_v3.4.txt and redefining one of the testing empires to use an invalid value for a portrait, it appeared in the game as a fallen empire within a handful of galaxy generations.  Interestingly this time the species defaulted back to using human portraits despite not having been in that species class to begin with.   Not sure why they behave this way while the T-dolls are faceless.
• The "random" default portrait empires are not random.  After seeing enough of them, I eventually realized that they are alien species from the default empire set.  Perfect match of portrait set, species name, and racial traits.  Example:  The frogface men from the original OP are the Hazbuzi from the Hzbuzan Syndicate.  I saw the Voor, Kilik, Orbis, and Chinorr a lot.  I don't know if there is any kind of significance to those particular preset empires or if it has just been luck of the draw.

 

I don't know why, but currently it seems that there is a very small chance in my games for fallen empires to utilize either some of the preset empires or one of my custom empires with a malformed definition.

 

After dinner I'm going to try cleaning up my custom empires by removing all of the ones with malformed definitions.  I'm wondering if the preset empires will stop appearing as fallen empires once I do so?  I wonder if this is some weird garbage-in, garbage-out problem where the game just starts acting weird if it parses some bad input while trying to read your custom empire file during galaxy generation?

 

 

For what it is worth, I noticed a "spawn_as_fallen" property in the user_empire_designs file.  However it is set to "NO" for every one of my custom empires.  The fact that some of my empires appear as fallen empires despite it being set to no suggests that the game may just be bugging out under certain conditions.  Since that condition currently appears to be "the empire has a broken definition", that might explain why no one else has reported tripping over this bug yet.

 

edit:

removed all of the custom empires except for the correctly defined one that I'm currently playing a campaign with.  The Orbis immediately showed up in a 25 fallen empire game.  I guess I'll need to actually review some files later to try to learn exactly what happens during galaxy generation and the initialization of the fallen empires.

Edited August 12, 2022 by Armchair

[Mugginnato]

13 hours ago, Armchair said:

The "random" default portrait empires are not random.  After seeing enough of them, I eventually realized that they are alien species from the default empire set.  Perfect match of portrait set, species name, and racial traits.  Example:  The frogface men from the original OP are the Hazbuzi from the Hzbuzan Syndicate.  I saw the Voor, Kilik, Orbis, and Chinorr a lot.  I don't know if there is any kind of significance to those particular preset empires or if it has just been luck of the draw.

 

edit:

removed all of the custom empires except for the correctly defined one that I'm currently playing a campaign with.  The Orbis immediately showed up in a 25 fallen empire game.  I guess I'll need to actually review some files later to try to learn exactly what happens during galaxy generation and the initialization of the fallen empires.

I can't speak for the game incorrectly using customs for FE, but I do believe I've sorted out one issue. There are 2 new prescripted country files since I made the mod, and now I see that two existing ones have slightly different names now, so they don't get overwritten. Wanna guess what the country names are? I can make the fix later, I just hoped on to check for messages, but I had a quick look at some files based on your testing.

 

Edit: Okay, just delete all the files in VF/prescripted_countries then then extract these files there. As for the FE thing, maybe your custom empires are running on outdated code and you'll need to remake them? Just a thought.

prescripted_countries.zip

Edited August 12, 2022 by Mugginnato

[Armchair]

Haha!  I just compared the file names.  Did they seriously just swap an 88 and 89 prefix on two of the files?  Why would they even do that???

 

I just loaded your updated files and generated 100 fallen empires between a few games.   Everything looked as expected.  The pre-sets didn't spawn within those 100 FE's.

 

 

I guess that sums up everything.

• Default preset empires sporadically appearing as Fallen empires:  Fixed via updated prescripted_countries files
• Custom empires appearing as fallen empires:  Only "corrupted/malformed" custom empires were being spawned as Fallen empires.  IMO kind of interesting that the game behaves that way when the empire definition is broken, but the fix is easy:  The player just needs to update their custom empires with correct definitions.  Once corrected, they stop spawning as fallen empires.

 

Mystery solved I guess.  Except for the Geckos I suppose, but I don't think it's worth losing any sleep over anything that can't be replicated.  Like you said, there are a ton of events in the game and it's extremely daunting to try to figure out precisely what kind of curveballs any of them might send your way.  You pointing out those prescripted countries files got me searching my mods directory for anything else touching those files, and irony mod manager had a bunch in its fixes folder, so I went and cleaned those up.  Maybe they were responsible for the gecko in some way.

 

Thanks for providing those corrected prescripted countries files!