Grognak's Mod Manager v1.7 (Updated March 6, 2013!)

[Grognak]

Having an odd error, everything works up to selecting the mods, then in the cmd txt box it says something close to "error permission to access data.dat denied", hard to tell the actual wording as it auto-closes soon after.

What operating system are you using?

Do you have the permission level to edit inside the FTL folder in the first place?

Windows 7 32 bit, yeah I am the system administrator (and only user) for this computer. I tried running the modman.exe as admin to no success.

I used screen cap to see the exact error since the cmd box was closing so fast, the line is: IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'data.dat'

Do you have the DRM-free version? Try making data.dat and resource.dat not read-only via properties.

Thanks Grognak! It's working great now!

Woo! I'm glad multiplat support works, my first time dabbling with that stuff.

This is really great. Thank you, Grognak.

And thank you for the praise.

[demonlink]

I'd been mucking about trying to get your mod loader and no fleet to work, and I'm feeling really stupid because of how simple the answer was. I'm using the steam version, that was the cause of my problem.
I was trying to create an entirely separate instance of the game in a folder not under my steam directory, and it seems that the ftl.exe relies on the files in the steam directory even if the entire game and resources were copied into a different folder. So I put your mod manager and mods into my steam directory and BAM it works perfectly.

This might be common knowledge for others, but is had me stumped for most of this morning. =<

[buzzyrecky]

How do I open the mod manager with a mac? I can't seem to locate the directory the main.py is in because its in steam, so theres spaces and all sorts of complicated stuff in the path bar

also, if you get to this quickly... how would I compress both the data and img folders into one ftl file? do i put them both in a folder and compress that, or what?

[Grognak]

I'd been mucking about trying to get your mod loader and no fleet to work, and I'm feeling really stupid because of how simple the answer was. I'm using the steam version, that was the cause of my problem.
I was trying to create an entirely separate instance of the game in a folder not under my steam directory, and it seems that the ftl.exe relies on the files in the steam directory even if the entire game and resources were copied into a different folder. So I put your mod manager and mods into my steam directory and BAM it works perfectly.

This might be common knowledge for others, but is had me stumped for most of this morning. =<

Sorry about your troubles! That was a pretty tricky problem. I updated the OP so hopefully no one else will have a problem in the future.

How do I open the mod manager with a mac? I can't seem to locate the directory the main.py is in because its in steam, so theres spaces and all sorts of complicated stuff in the path bar

Beats me! I don't have a Mac. Try Googling around for your answer.

also, if you get to this quickly... how would I compress both the data and img folders into one ftl file? do i put them both in a folder and compress that, or what?

Make sure both /data and /img is at the root of your archive.

[zabbo2]

Wow Grognak thanks man! That didn't take you very long, did it? Nice work..

[buzzyrecky]

Can someone explain how the append thing works?

Are we just supposed to put ONLY the changed/added stuff in there? And if so, how does it know where to put it in the actual xml

[blaeron]

Quick question. If I wish to add a custom weapon to the AutoBlueprints.xml list and use it as an .append, do I copy+paste the original list and add mine in somewhere, or do I copy+paste the original list and replace the entire list with just the custom weapons I want added while still retaining the ability to have the original weapons still exist?

Edit: Scratch that, .appends do not work very well with Blueprints.XML and AutoBlueprints.xml due to duplicates.

[Grognak]

Thanks, zabbo.

Are we just supposed to put ONLY the changed/added stuff in there? And if so, how does it know where to put it in the actual xml

A) Yes
B) It puts it at the very end, which should never be an issue (items at the end overwrite items in the first part with the same name)

Quick question. If I wish to add a custom weapon to the AutoBlueprints.xml list and use it as an .append, do I copy+paste the original list and add mine in somewhere, or do I copy+paste the original list and replace the entire list with just the custom weapons I want added while still retaining the ability to have the original weapons still exist?

You would add yours in, for example:

<blueprintList name="STARTING_DRONES">
<name>REPAIR</name>
<name>DEFENSE_1</name>
<name>COMBAT_1</name>
<name>COMBAT_2</name>
<name>SHIP_REPAIR</name>
<name>DEFENSE_1</name>
<name>MYCUSTOMDRONEHERE</name>
</blueprintList>

Edit: Scratch that, .appends do not work very well with Blueprints.XML and AutoBlueprints.xml due to duplicates.

Are you certain? There should not be any problems as long as you use the same name attribute.

[blaeron]

Are you certain? There should not be any problems as long as you use the same name attribute.

Using .append and the method you suggested

You would add yours in, for example:

<blueprintList name="STARTING_DRONES">
<name>REPAIR</name>
<name>DEFENSE_1</name>
<name>COMBAT_1</name>
<name>COMBAT_2</name>
<name>SHIP_REPAIR</name>
<name>DEFENSE_1</name>
<name>MYCUSTOMDRONEHERE</name>
</blueprintList>

It would end up like this.


<blueprintList name="STARTING_DRONES">
<name>REPAIR</name>
<name>DEFENSE_1</name>
<name>COMBAT_1</name>
<name>COMBAT_2</name>
<name>SHIP_REPAIR</name>
<name>DEFENSE_1</name>
</blueprintList>

*blah blah*

<blueprintList name="STARTING_DRONES">
<name>REPAIR</name>
<name>DEFENSE_1</name>
<name>COMBAT_1</name>
<name>COMBAT_2</name>
<name>SHIP_REPAIR</name>
<name>DEFENSE_1</name>
<name>MYCUSTOMDRONEHERE</name>
</blueprintList>

This does not really bode too well, since duplicates and such.

[Alblaka]

Duplicate = Last version will override all previous ones without any issues.


I've once again encountered the '-added-in-front-of-file issue. This time adding freespaces and/or comments in front of the file content didn't change much, though.
Messing around some, I noticed only one of my two append files had the issue.

It's file-coding. If I tell notepad to save files in UTF-8 formatting, it will cause this bug. Using the (Windows-)default ANSI coding works fine.
I suppose it's something OS-dependant, I occasionally have some interesting issues with that.
Whatever, figuring out I just leave my files on ANSI pretty much solves everything ^^