Wow I had no idea there were others also trying to help...thanks krautbernd! And thank you for asking the questions I didn't dare ask!
Reading this now makes me appreciate Meridian's work even more...like I know I'm a beginner modder but I had no idea I was
this bad hahaha.
As you said, it's a mess, the mods are not standalone... I didn't fix that.
I assume the original authors made them standalone, but Thirsk probably messed with them and made them the way they are (sorry if not true).
Yep, that was definitely me. Uh sorry for the headache guys...I can't really tell at this point if it was all entirely me, because back then all I knew how to do was download a bunch of mods on this site and attempted to balance them, before eventually building the courage to occasionally add in my own personal (and clearly destructive) touch
The mods were definitely standalone to begin with.
They were defined in other mods, I fixed the other mods (many just by adding metadata.yml) and that fixed it.
Oh I had no idea metadata.yml was even a requirement! I guess because the older OXCE+ didn't show any errors, I just never thought to add them in.
I fixed sprite numbers on some smaller mods, especially Unconventional Weapons, which was using indices over 100000 (SadFace).
It is inherently bad and it wastes a lot of memory.
If you have a mod with one sprite and you give it index 100000, OpenXcom will actually allocate all the 100000 slots even if they are not used.
DON'T DO THAT.
Every small, medium and large mod should only use indices below 1000.
Huge mods (e.g. piratez) have the option to allocate more than 1000... but even piratez for example doesn't use more than 4000 today I think.
I didn't fix Equal Terms indices, because there were lot of them.
I just increased the reserved space for this mod to 55000, which is a terrible waste of space, but I was not in a mood to play with numbers.
And the author should fix it anyway, not me, so that everybody can benefit from it.
I wish I knew if this was me or not.. but it was probably me. Because only now have I discovered that there was actually a ruleset definition webpage to consult so it was probably me just playing with the high numbers in hope of avoiding two mods conflicting with one another. I think perhaps I could have downloaded a ruleset that had initially high numbers to begin with and assumed it was ok to copy them?
First off, how did you go about fixing this mess?
And finally yes, I fully admit this was a complete mess hahaha. I'm pretty sure most of the errors were my fault. To both of you, I'm so sorry to have wasted so much of your time! But I am so ridiculously grateful that you did, because I would never been able to fix this on my own nor ever learnt what I did wrong. A very big THANK YOU again to Meridian!! Hopefully someday I can turn this hot mess into something worth uploading!