Basic questions

[Panther_Gunn]

I guess this is the best forum to ask about stuff like this:

I'm sure this is probably rather simple stuff, but can someone explain to me why in FFEdit that melee powers have a Min/Max range of 1/5, while ranged powers have 0/1 (or sometimes 2, for long range)?  To my way of thinking, it should be the other way around.  I'm having a hard time trying to understand what direction they came at this from.

Also, for any characters that I've added to the .dat, if they have a space in their name, I know to add a _ instead of a space, but I don't want it to show up that way in-game.  I'm supposing that a line in the strings.dat would solve this.  Should I be looking through my strings.txt for FFX examples of this?  I wish I knew how IG got their stuff into the game without any _ placeholders for spaces.

[Lunarman]

I have a feeling you have to have the _, it's a requirement so as not to confuse the game. Besides, it's standard coding proceeder. You have to add something to the strings dat, here's an example:

the char name was joey_besucho

joey_besucho_01, Joey Besucho
joey_besucho_DESC_01, Brawling Besucho brother, bursting with brawn!
joey_besucho_DESC2_01, The Besucho Brothers are the sons of an international crime king. Born in Patriot City....

sry I have no idea about those melee ranges, perhaps melee ones are in feet and the ranged ones are in metres. Who can say..

[Epimethee]

To expand on Lunarman's explanation, as computer need absolute rules, the comma and space characters are used as separator between the code name (joey_besucho_01) and the display name (Joey Besucho). The display name can't be used directly for a few reasons, for example translation requirements.

As for the ranges, it's been years since I've checked it, but IIRC, the range for melee is indeed in in feets or something simlar. I used to give Mentor Enegy Slash a range of 100 or so; made him a weeee bit more effective. Ranged probably refers to a distance correspondance table: 0: short, 1: medium, 2:long, 3:infinite, where 'short' corresponds to an arbitrary value. Though I vaguely seem to remember trying out negative values there.

[Panther_Gunn]

While waiting on replies, I did figure out the entries for the strings.txt......mostly.  I've still got an issue or two, possibly related to what I put into the strings.dat, possibly located somewhere in FFEdit.

Let's say I've got 9 different versions of Hand ninjas.  4 with swords, 4 without, and one female.  For the display name for every one of them, I just put "the hand" (minus the quotations).  That seemed to work fine, but not all of them showed up in-game on the Villains list; I'm missing 2 of them without swords.  I mostly did the entries with cut & paste, so I made sure each entry was correct, with no typos, and also made sure to mark each template as a generic minion.  I also made sure to give each of them the same AI type; still no go for those two, and the other two without swords that *do* show up, just stand there, as if their AI was blank, or something that doesn't work right (I think I used ThugGren for all 8, ThugGun for the female).  Is it possible to have too many characters with the same display name?  In-game, it does add a parenthetical number after every one after the first one.  I tried changing the display name for the female, but no additional ones showed up.

The only other problem I seem to have with that is when they die in Watch Mode, it says "Team x (x=appropriate team #) lost" and uses the character name, not the display name.  It doesn't do that for the IG characters that have _'s in their character names (like blue_darkman).

As for the ranges, it's been years since I've checked it, but IIRC, the range for melee is indeed in in feets or something simlar. I used to give Mentor Enegy Slash a range of 100 or so; made him a weeee bit more effective. Ranged probably refers to a distance correspondance table: 0: short, 1: medium, 2:long, 3:infinite, where 'short' corresponds to an arbitrary value. Though I vaguely seem to remember trying out negative values there.

Now, *that* explanation makes some sense.  I just wish it were consistent between the two to cut down on confusion.

One other thing I've noticed that didn't make sense to me.  Why would some meshes *need* a mass entry in the Template tab to keep them from being too light, and some others don't?  Without any entries, the AIM mesh showed up in-game as 170 lbs, while the old TDANinja showed up as 100 lbs.  Is there some kind of coding on the mesh that specifies whether it's a male or female?  :wacko: