Need help with equipment editor

[speedythefreak]

Hello all

I've got some issues with the latest version of the equipment editor due to my lack of knowledge on how to use it. Basically I'm trying to add a new unit in the Elite units mod, a 44 Fallschirmjager, with an hard attack of 8 to reflect the use of panzerfaust as AT capability from January 1944 and make them some kind of an elite unit. I've made a copy the Elite unit mod and renamed it 1.22, used the editor to create my unit that was assigned a number by default, even if I loaded my mod through the mod manager (the official one) I cannot see my newly created unit. So what I'm trying to do might seems quite simple for most of the modders but it looks that there is something that I do not get or do properly. As a old time newbie, any help would be greatly appreciated since I'm stuck at this point and would like to go further on the path of modding like adding a couple of variant of the Sd.Kfz 250 like the SPG one with the short barrel 75mm or the one, I think it's the /10 with the PAK 36 as a heavy recon unit. Any help would be really appreciated on how to use the equipment editor properly.

Thanks in advance

[dalfrede]

In " Panzer Corps : Scenario Design" there a section called "Tools and Guides for Modding (New Sticky)".

Read "Guide: How to add new units" by Nico
and "What You Need to Do for Creating a Custom Unit" by Kerensky.

I use a Mac and edit the equip file using Open Office Calc. Excel should work the same.
I copy equipment.pzeqp and rename as equipment.pzeqp.csv , .tsv may also work
I open equipment.pzeqp.csv with only tab checked as the delimiter.
I make additions and or changes, save as .csv file.
I rename equipment.pzeqp as equipment.pzeqp.old
and then copy equipment.pzeqp.csv and rename the copy as equipment.pzeqp .

If necessary I edit efx.pzdat with TextEdit [WordPad].

Word, Excel, and Open Office file formats have hidden formatting which can [will] screw up PC files. So only use a text editor like WordPad.

When I tried editing efx.pzdat with Open Office Calc it added extra tabs at the end of the lines which hosed up the file.
I suspect that the equipment.pzeqp file was expected to be edited and that the code for reading it is more robust.

Note: I recommend using a standalone scenario from one of the main campaigns to test each mod.
When you save your game it saves the equip file as part of the save game.

[speedythefreak]

Hello dalfrede

Thanks a lot for the tips. I've read the guide from Nico, but I was trying to go around it to avoid those files with messy columns and everything in order to find an easier way through the equipment editor that I've never got to work properly, so finally I went on with the file editing way, so basically I open the equipment file with notepad++,copy and paste into Excel, so I get clearly delimited columns, make the changes or additions and then paste my new entry into notepad++ and it seems to work fine, I do the same with the efx file. So now I'm on for hours of unit modding. Thanks a lot for your help

Speedythefreak

[tenshin111]

Word, Excel, and Open Office file formats have hidden formatting which can [will] screw up PC files. So only use a text editor like WordPad.

No, you can still use Excel or Google Spreadsheet (which I do) to edit the files. All you need to do is make sure you EXPORT them as tab-delimited text files. There's one more trick to that (at least with Google Docs) - the exported text files uses simple ANSI (1 byte) character encoding so you need to re-open and re-save them with Notepad++ for example and change encoding to UCS-2 Little Endian if memory serves me right. Otherwise the game will not recognize the file.