Hello,

so I recently tried to get back to the game and into modding.

Maybe you know that in order to find stats of game items one needs to extract these from the .cat files. Doing this and comparing the resulting tree structure with modding tutorials from the Egosoft forums I found out that there are differences, macros are not in the places described there but in different locations. For instance, some weapon stats are not in the assets/fx folder but in assets/weaponFX.

This confuses tools that try to read and make sense of the stats.

Question: do we know if the GOG ofline installation of Linux X4 3.30 Hotfix 2 has a differing tree structure in the cat files ? Has GOG for example changed the game data files ?

Thanks for any remarks

't was a false alarm from my side.

The reason why the extraction tools coudln't build the correct trees is that they use hard wired paths and filenames and mangle with upper/lower case. Thus they couldn't find some things. Background: windows filenames are case insensitive (couldn't believe that, it's so 1982, but they apparently are ...). Dev's relied on that in code and so it comes that file i/o under real OS's ;-) is messed up.

Good news: The user SirNukes over in the egosoft modding forum has made a tool named "X4 Customizer" and when hinted to the problem overworked it so that it reads and writes the correct fiiles. If someone else wants to get into modding, xml syntax, change game parameters and so on that tool is incredibly helpful for Linux users as well.

GOG, pls. try to avoid blanks in Linux filenames, they're hard to use in code, scripts and on the cl. They are meant to be delimiters. Use underscores, or others.

Just sayin', I know google and steam do it as well, it's just another bad habit.

Safe journey :-)

Very doubtful GOG reads this and I think noone from Egosoft ever visited this forum.

You could report it and supply the solution in Egosoft's forum as they do read it. Not sure if you should file it under Linux or modding.

When I first installed the game, it often refused to start due to problems of this or similar nature.

Yep, I wrote it over there, I think meanwhile Egosoft got sensitive and modders start to think about it as well.

Btw., the game got a little bettwer since i last ranted about it in here. And that tool X4 Customizer helps a lot tailoring it to one's preferences even under Linux. For those who don't don't want to dive into XML syyntax *shudders* ...

Safe journey everybody