[mod] Vanilla Framework Continued

[Roonai]

I can't seem to activate VF portraits, the launcher is telling me that the descriptor is invalid or missing

[ModderWhoModsThings]

4 minutes ago, Roonai said:

I can't seem to activate VF portraits, the launcher is telling me that the descriptor is invalid or missing

The VF Portraits zip file contains a folder called VF Portraits, and a MOD file called VF portraits. Both of these should be in your stellaris mod directory. I can't find any problem with the descriptor on my end, so please check if the MOD file is in your mod directory.

[Kgnash]

14 minutes ago, ModderWhoModsThings said:

The humanoid, mammalian, and reptilian images are now stored in the VF Portraits submod as Vanilla Framework has gotten too large to be uploaded as one file. Simply install and activate VF Portraits and the images will be working again.

 

Sorry for the confusion in the past hour, I update the mod description before uploading new versions, and right when I had the new version tested, compressed, and ready to upload Loverslab tells me that the file size is too large, so I had to scramble for a solution (which ended up being the VF Portraits submod).

I am having the same issue, but it's because I can't get VF Portraits to work properly. I'm downloading it same as any other mod, and I got the new Vanilla Framework to work just fine, just with empty spaces for the 3 from VF Portraits.

[hatease]

i appear to be having this issue as well, visual file attached, the .mod for the directory is in the mod folder.

Edited May 9, 2024 by hatease
fixing brutalized formatting

[hatease]

2 minutes ago, hatease said:

i appear to be having this issue as well, visual file attached, the .mod for the directory is in the mod folder.

i have found what appears to be the issue, the 'VF Portraits.mod" file has the wrong file path, likely the same as the one on the mod author's computer. so it is misdirecting the launcher. attached below is the incorrect file path.

[ModderWhoModsThings]

7 minutes ago, hatease said:

i have found what appears to be the issue, the 'VF Portraits.mod" file has the wrong file path, likely the same as the one on the mod author's computer. so it is misdirecting the launcher. attached below is the incorrect file path.

Yup, that would do it. Thanks for finding the issue, I just uploaded a new version of the VF Portraits mod that should work for everyone, not just me. This is the LAST TIME I use the stellaris launcher to create a mod file.

 

Please delete your comment if possible as I prefer to minimize the amount of personal information associated with my loverslab account, including the name of my windows user account.

[ModderWhoModsThings]

3 minutes ago, Kgnash said:

Also, I'm not great on internet etiquette or programming, but isn't it not great to put out someone's actual computer username?

I'm not happy that I accidentally published that bit of information on this website, but there's not much to be done about it now. Please delete your comment if you can as it contains a a quote of the other comment. I appreciate hatease's help, as it likely would have taken me a long time to figure the problem out, as well as your concern for my privacy.

[Kgnash]

5 minutes ago, ModderWhoModsThings said:

I'm not happy that I accidentally published that bit of information on this website, but there's not much to be done about it now. Please delete your comment if you can as it contains a a quote of the other comment. I appreciate hatease's help, as it likely would have taken me a long time to figure the problem out, as well as your concern for my privacy.

Done. Thank you for all the quick replies, releases, and fixes. We're all out here hastily scrambling to get this functional again to appease our horniness, and it'd be completely impossible without your effort.

[Roonai]

Thank you for the quick fix, love the mod and you too!

Edited May 9, 2024 by Roonai

[ModderWhoModsThings]

There's been a lot of activity today, so I'm going to summarize what has happened up to this point for clarity. Yesterday I pretty much finished the new update, and today I did testing to confirm it was working. To my surprise, everything was running well so I announced that I was going to publish the new update early. I changed the mod description to fit the new update, then I started uploading the new version. It turns out, the few additional portraits added this update put us just over Loverslab's file size limit.

 

I had just told everyone I was publishing the update, and already changed the mod description, but I figured that nobody would check the mod within the next 15-20 minutes it would take me to restructure and upload the mod. So, I changed the description a couple times while I figured out how to make the mod work, and settled on putting a bunch of image files in a separate submod. Apparently everyone was sitting at their computers refreshing this page since Stellaris updated two days ago, and people were all confused about why the old version was still up after I updated the description. I explained the new update and things moved on.

 

Then, people started reporting that the submod wasn't working, which was weird because everything was running fine on my computer. It turns out that when you use the Stellaris launcher to make a mod, it creates a version that can only be used on your computer by putting your exact mod filepath (C/user/documents/etc) instead of the proper relative filepath (mod/LV Portraits). Not only did the submod not work on anyone else's computer, but it also contained my computer username. I've since published a fixed version of the LV Portraits submod.

[ModderWhoModsThings]

So basically I had the new update all ready to go, then the golden rule of the wasteland kicked in:

 

[Kgnash]

33 minutes ago, ModderWhoModsThings said:

So basically I had the new update all ready to go, then the golden rule of the wasteland kicked in:

 

You may have underestimated the Stellaris Thirst Brigade XD. I was indeed refreshing this thread once I saw that the download was still old. Considering I can no longer get ANY of the "additional portraits" mods to function, I expect you'll be seeing even more influx of mod users looking for their xeno-sex fix.

[ModderWhoModsThings]

19 minutes ago, Kgnash said:

You may have underestimated the Stellaris Thirst Brigade XD. I was indeed refreshing this thread once I saw that the download was still old. Considering I can no longer get ANY of the "additional portraits" mods to function, I expect you'll be seeing even more influx of mod users looking for their xeno-sex fix.

If anyone wants to update a portrait mod themselves, you just gotta copy the species from the class file and copy them into a portrait set, then make a portrait category to connect that portrait set to a species class. It's a bit more complicated than it used to be, and I don't fully understand how it works yet, but you can look at the files in Vanilla Framework for a working example. Just some tips for anyone who want to fix their mods.

[Xx_ShadowQueen_xX]

I seem to be having issues installing VM portraits

[Trigoniris]

Using "vf_" in front of portrait sets, like "vf_humanoids" seems to make this incompatible with other (non-full replacer) mods that add their own portraits. If the portrait categories get overriden by any other mod that wants to add even just one portrait set to that category, vf portraits won't load. Tbf, portrait categories incompatibility seems to be inevitable now that paradox broke seamlessly using several portrait mods at once, but since VF is base-game replacer anyways it'd probably help with compatibility a bit to remove vf_ from portrait sets.

 

Also, sunbuilt uplifters preset empire still shows up so probably ought to slap empty "86_machine_age_prescripted_countries.txt" into pre-scripted countries.

[ModderWhoModsThings]

1 hour ago, Trigoniris said:

Using "vf_" in front of portrait sets, like "vf_humanoids" seems to make this incompatible with other (non-full replacer) mods that add their own portraits. If the portrait categories get overriden by any other mod that wants to add even just one portrait set to that category, vf portraits won't load. Tbf, portrait categories incompatibility seems to be inevitable now that paradox broke seamlessly using several portrait mods at once, but since VF is base-game replacer anyways it'd probably help with compatibility a bit to remove vf_ from portrait sets.

 

Also, sunbuilt uplifters preset empire still shows up so probably ought to slap empty "86_machine_age_prescripted_countries.txt" into pre-scripted countries.

Thanks for the tips! I hadn't considered that categories could be overwritten, I was too busy figuring out how to make the new system work to think ahead like that. VF removes base game portraits by overwriting 00_portrait_categories and 00_portrait_sets with blank files, then adds its own portraits in using portrait sets starting with "vf_" (except for machines and special things like presapients and crisis, which are overwritten). If I'm understanding correctly, your suggestion is to remove the "vf_" from the portrait set names so that they overwrite base game sets, then portrait mods that keep the base game sets would add the VF portraits into the categories as well.

 

I came up with an alternative solution of adding "vf_" to the start of the portrait categories, so other mods shouldn't overwrite them. If my understanding of the new system is correct, then all portrait mods should use uniquely named portrait categories and portrait sets to prevent them from overwriting other mods. Does this sound right to you? I'd like to get a little feedback before I publish these changes in case it doesn't work the way I think it does.

 

The upcoming patch will include the pre-scripted country being removed, I don't have the machine age DLC yet because I'm not interested enough in the content to pay full price for it (I'd like to be able to accommodate ALL DLC in this mod but I'm sure everyone can understand that I don't want to pay $40 so other people enjoy my porn mod slightly more). This obviously makes it a little hard for me to work on machine age content, but thankfully I have some partners that have the DLCs to help me.

[ModderWhoModsThings]

3 hours ago, Xx_ShadowQueen_xX said:

I seem to be having issues installing VM portraits

Where are things going wrong? You should be able to just download VF Portraits from the Vanilla Framework Continued page, unzip the file, and place both the MOD file and folder into your stellaris mod directory. There was a bug in an early version of VF Portraits, so try deleting the folder and MOD file from your mod directory and installing the mods recent version. If you are having trouble downloading the file in the first place you'll have to contact someone from Loverslab for support.

[Trigoniris]

46 minutes ago, ModderWhoModsThings said:

I came up with an alternative solution of adding "vf_" to the start of the portrait categories, so other mods shouldn't overwrite them. If my understanding of the new system is correct, then all portrait mods should use uniquely named portrait categories and portrait sets to prevent them from overwriting other mods. Does this sound right to you? I'd like to get a little feedback before I publish these changes in case it doesn't work the way I think it does.

 

That solution would mean no overrides with other mods yeah, but doing it like that would create new category entirely. you'd have to either use existing portrait category names which would lead to repeating of the same name in the event of that previous problem. Or add all your categories to the localization file, something like VF_HUM:1 "VF Humanoids". Which would at least make it clearer even if same name would basically still end up being there several times, just with prefix. Though I suppose adding new category name would end up looking funny if LV was the only installed portrait mod

 

Mechanically it works though. vf_lithoids for example is still a lithoid... though you have accidentally put lithoids in the species class of kemonomimi in current release of VF

[ModderWhoModsThings]

54 minutes ago, Trigoniris said:

That solution would mean no overrides with other mods yeah, but doing it like that would create new category entirely. you'd have to either use existing portrait category names which would lead to repeating of the same name in the event of that previous problem. Or add all your categories to the localization file, something like VF_HUM:1 "VF Humanoids". Which would at least make it clearer even if same name would basically still end up being there several times, just with prefix. Though I suppose adding new category name would end up looking funny if LV was the only installed portrait mod

 

Mechanically it works though. vf_lithoids for example is still a lithoid... though you have accidentally put lithoids in the species class of kemonomimi in current release of VF

I did some testing and I see what you mean by repeating names. So the class of the species are determined by their portrait set, and portrait categories are solely for the purpose of empire creation? This seems like a really unclear way of doing it, as that would mean the players could see several species categories for the same species class, and that the only way to tell what class a species is in would be to look at the overview page of the empire creator. It looks like the name parameter for species categories can take a string, so I should be able to simply set it to something like "Humanoid (VF)".

 

Since the empire creator no longer uses species classes to organize portraits, there doesn't seem to be a way to add all species of a class into a single species category without making patches for each case, so the solution that seems to maximize mod compatibility while keeping the empire creator UI looking nice would probably be to create new species categories and set their names to say which class they belong to and which mod they're from, such as the aforementioned "Humanoid (VF)" example.

 

Thanks for the report about the lithoids, next update will have that fixed.

[Xx_ShadowQueen_xX]

7 hours ago, ModderWhoModsThings said:

Where are things going wrong? You should be able to just download VF Portraits from the Vanilla Framework Continued page, unzip the file, and place both the MOD file and folder into your stellaris mod directory. There was a bug in an early version of VF Portraits, so try deleting the folder and MOD file from your mod directory and installing the mods recent version. If you are having trouble downloading the file in the first place you'll have to contact someone from Loverslab for support.

I never had the older file I think the same bug is happining i'm installing the mod all fine but it won't let me enable it in the launcher

[Xx_ShadowQueen_xX]

Alright I have since gotten it to work no idea what was wrong the first time around.

[Roonai]

Has anyone else had any issues with changing your machine portrait while in the species/robomodding menu? I can mod my humanoid species on a separate save just fine, but I seem to be unable to mod my portraits after I've switched over to them after the "Synthetic Fertility" event chain.

[ModderWhoModsThings]

22 minutes ago, Roonai said:

Has anyone else had any issues with changing your machine portrait while in the species/robomodding menu? I can mod my humanoid species on a separate save just fine, but I seem to be unable to mod my portraits after I've switched over to them after the "Synthetic Fertility" event chain.

This is the first report of this issue I've seen. I tested the mod and I can change both biological and machine portraits during species modification fine. Try testing robomodding with just VF and Lustful Void active to see if it is a compatibility issue. Also check the machine species category in the empire creator to confirm that all base game and VF robot portraits can be seen from there, if they are missing from the empire creator then you know there is an issue with the portraits/species themselves. VF currently overwrites the "machines" portrait set so issues will occur if any other mod uses that portrait set as well.

[Roonai]

I don't have LV installed yet (still waiting on a stable update), I see your VF portraits mixed in with the 'nilla ones so that seems to be working fine, I'm pretty sure I have all the tech researched for it too. I'll keep going and see if anything else comes up and test further.

 

Update: Weird, it's just my species, I can mod other species machines just fine, maybe it has something to do with being "Virtual" pops.

Edited May 11, 2024 by Roonai

[ModderWhoModsThings]

10 hours ago, Roonai said:

I don't have LV installed yet (still waiting on a stable update), I see your VF portraits mixed in with the 'nilla ones so that seems to be working fine, I'm pretty sure I have all the tech researched for it too. I'll keep going and see if anything else comes up and test further.

 

Update: Weird, it's just my species, I can mod other species machines just fine, maybe it has something to do with being "Virtual" pops.

The base game portraits are only present for machine species, right? Because if you are seeing base game mammalians and such something is definitely off. Could you try testing virtual pop modification without any mods installed? You can use console commands to give you unity for traditions and the technologies required.