Tweak-a-Ship in Endless Sky

[EneCtin]

After playing some 50+ hours Endless Sky, this little completely free gem of a game, I felt the need to tweak some ships, to make them more ponderous or formidable or under-powered.

Easily done, individually, with all the guides available, but I wanted to be able to modify the rest of the ships/systems/weapons according to my concept of how they should behave, without parsing a zillion lines of txt in ships.txt, weapons.txt and so on in the game's data folder.

Enter Tweak-a-Ship, 2 macro's embedded in the file that extract the information from ship.txt and put it in a table, for easy editing, and then puts it back in txt format

link v103:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0hHT3r___gxMU9NTmN6bjE5cmc
- Ignore the Google preview (weird looking), download the file.
- you'll need to install Libre Office, a free alternative to Microsoft Ofiice, to open , read the few instructions and run the file)

[Xaiier]

Nice, I'd been thinking such a tool would be helpful!

[comnom]

Does this overwrite the actual data file(s) or can it be used to save only the changes for a plugin? It'd be a pain to do a bunch of tweaking only to have it all wiped out by an update.

[EneCtin]

@comnom
I think an update will write over the new files, obliterating your tweak, if you play it in Steam.
The tool makes a new entire ships.txt file based on what it finds in the table. It is a dumb tool. You need to copy the new file over in the game directory.

I'm not sure what you mean by "save only the changes for a plugin". If there is a newer version of ships.txt (new ships or other values...) I could have my macro compare a master table (copied there by you) with the newly compiled table: for each cell of the 2 rows with the same ship name (Argosy, Bactrian...), it would copy over your "master" data over whatever data in the newer version (signalling with a color that this happened). Also, it could mark new ships by color for analysis. Would that be what you asked?

[EneCtin]

Sorry guys, I had published v101 with the second macro in "fast mode", short runs to check something. The output txt ended at row 150 instead of 2500.

Amended that in v103. New link in thread header (or here):
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0hHT3r___gxMU9NTmN6bjE5cmc

- Ignore the Google preview (weird), download the file.

[comnom]

Originally posted by bordmail4:

@comnom
I think an update will write over the new files, obliterating your tweak, if you play it in Steam.
The tool makes a new entire ships.txt file based on what it finds in the table. It is a dumb tool. You need to copy the new file over in the game directory.

I'm not sure what you mean by "save only the changes for a plugin". If there is a newer version of ships.txt (new ships or other values...) I could have my macro compare a master table (copied there by you) with the newly compiled table: for each cell of the 2 rows with the same ship name (Argosy, Bactrian...), it would copy over your "master" data over whatever data in the newer version (signalling with a color that this happened). Also, it could mark new ships by color for analysis. Would that be what you asked?

Sorry what I meant was, when you want to overwrite a data element in a plugin, all you need to do is change the specific value that needs changing. So if I wanted to change the Shield Beetle to cost 10 credits, all I'd have to do is:

ship "Shield Beetle"
	"cost" 10

But if it makes a whole new file, It can still be used for plugins, it'll just have extra information. All I'll need to do is drop the new file into a plugin folder instead. Thanks, I should be getting some use out of this soon.