Hey guys,
I’m relatively new to the GSB world, and I’m sure that by the standards of folks who make new races and such this is barely even “modding”, but: I poked at the .txt file for the Federation, and where it lists a bunch of names at the bottom (“Diego”, “Matt”, etc.) to use for “Oh crap, Matt just floated by…!” dialog options, I changed all the names. Now those dialog options don’t show up.
Does changing it somehow nullify them? Did I use too many characters? I would also like to add some more ship names so “ship_1493” and such don’t come up, will those work if I only edit the .txt files?
Thanks!
PS: Out of curiosity, has anyone ever made a mod where escape pods are destructible?
First of all, welcome to the GSB forums!
Now sadly, I can’t be of help regarding the race file names - I turned the comm chatter off a while back to get more screen space for ships made of explodium. 
As far as the ship names, adding more names to the end of the file works just fine (a common solution you’ll hear around the forums is to copy the entire list to the bottom, giving the game twice as many names to select before it runs out). You can also add entirely new ship name lists if you like, just use the same format for your text file and make sure it’s kept in the same place (Gratuitous Space Battles/data/shipnames).
Escape pods are, to my knowledge, an unmoddable portion of the game. You can turn them off in the options menu, but that removes them for all ships. Beyond that, they are what they are.
G’Day brigglywiggly
When you have a chance, post the modified Federation.txt here in the forum. We should be able to spot why the names are no longer displaying.
Never mind, either whatever needed to be fixed fixed itself, or whatever process generates those little flavor texts just didn’t show up whenever I looked. It’s working great now, though!
Figured out how to do the same with ship names; I was thrown at first because it seems like the Alliance and Federation use the same list of random names, but I just made two new files. Now the Alliance are more suitably alien gibberish, while I mixed the old physics pun names with a bunch of libertarian philosophers, business finance concepts, and other corporation-esque stuff for the Feds.
Thanks for all the help anyway!