How to change a faction's name

[Thundercraft]

Question: Is there an easy way to change a faction's name? Perhaps a chat command?

 

I really disliked how "The Pirates of Tloeciiyi" was the name of the faction that I started out 100% relations with in my galaxy. So, I looked for a way to change it.

 

Not finding anything, I looked in my game files. And I found a factions folder in my galaxy's folder:

 

C:\Users\ [username] \AppData\Roaming\Avorion\galaxies\Zerkov\factions

 

There were several .dat files and I opened each, one at a time, in a hex editor and I searched for "Pirates" and "Tloeciiyi". I found a file with both. So, I made a backup of the file. (This is important!) And I changed "Tloeciiyi" to "Tagolian" and I changed "The Pirates of %s" to "The %s Federation".

 

I started Avorion and tried to load my game, which seemed to take forever, and...

Connection Lost

Connection to xxx.x.x.x:xxxxx failed: Server unreachable

It gracefully gave up and returned to the menu.

 

Copying over my failed attempt from my backup, I tried again. This time I changed "Tloeciiyi" to "Tagolia" and changed "The Pirates of %s" to "The Republic of %s". I tried to load it and... it failed.

 

By this point I figured it would only work if I replaced each part with a name of identical length.

 

So, I tried once more by replacing "Tloeciiyi" with "Zeitgeist" (both 9 letters long) and "The Pirates of %s" with "The Planets of %s" (both 17 characters long and nearly identical). I tried loading this and...

SUCCESS! ;D

 

Now, I know that I wasn't replacing any special characters or anything. Using a hex editor to edit something can be tricky because, for example, what appears to be a [space] could actually be a number of different ASCII characters. But I was careful and the original file used hex 20, which is identical to the keyboard's [space]. As such, my experience suggests that, when replacing the faction name, the length must be the same.

 

But... why? Is the length of the faction name encoded somewhere in the file? Or, are these binary faction files of a fixed length? Would merely changing the file's length prevent the game from loading them?

[Sable Phoenix]

I'd really like to see an answer on this from the dev team.  Better yet, I'd like to see a way to edit them directly from the game menu.