Modding tips and tricks
 

Now that I've gotten back into modding I see that one sometimes manages to reveal a random piece of modding knowledge when trying out stuff.

If you also hold some fruit of usable modding knowledge, please share it. I'll add them to the list on this post.

- When starting on your first mod, it is very helpful to copy as much as you can from nation mods that already work. Sombre's mods are considered highly in this area.

- You can use #onebattlespell with custom spells with this minor hack. Copyspell a orginal dom3 spell (use a spell that is not likely to be used as a #onebattlespell itself) and alter the orginal spell to your liking. Remember to clearly document what vanilla spells you have altered.

- Did you know that to make a pure holy divine (aka school 8) spell, you need to #copyspell a excisting holy spell to make it visible in the scripting screen?

- You can #onebattlespell summoning ritual spells. Doing this will create a "cloud" that will spawn units from the ritual spell at the start of each combat turn. The graphical effect for this cloud is the poison cloud from the C'tis poison slingers, but it can be changed by #selectspelling the ritual summon in question and giving it different #explsprite. You can also get the same effect by using a spell with effect number over 9000.

- There is a bug with giving forts to a new nation: See this useful post from Jazzepi for details.

- Pure holy ritual spells cannot be monthly casted, doing so will crash the game. Pure holy rituals are also buggy and seem to crash the game on turn generation from time to time. Globu has reported getting a holy ritual work under certain circumstances, but I'd recommend to just forget it, since even he can't monthly cast it.

- If your spell uses #flightsprite that takes effect on the caster, make sure that spell doesn't have huge range. Althought there is no missile sprite, the game will stall until this invisible "missile" hits the target. Very annoying.

- #older accepts negative value, making units younger.

- When using #nextspells, make sure that the #nextspell is researchlevel 0. Apparently the game will not cast the nextspell unless you have it researched! I don't know if this is the case for vanilla spells, but I got hit by this when using my own modded spells. You could also use this to your advantage and make a spell that gains #nextspells as you advance in research.

- Here are some tips from Endoperez on how to easily make good looking new unit graphics.

-See also my guide on the matter of sprite editing (or frankensteining as it known on some circles) in here

- Weapons and spells use same explosionsprites, but you can't use weapon #flysprites with spells nor can you use spell #flightsprites with weapons. These sprites have also been mapped, see this thread:


- Item Modding is quite limited in 3.23, but here are some tips from Psientist on how to work around the limitations.


- You can assign boots of the planes to an Indy commander and have that commander show up in a random other Indy province during game play. (From Psientist)

- If you create a unit with NO magic paths, and give it a magic leadership, it will still not be able to lead magic units. However, if you give it a #magicpath X 0 (a level of zero in that path), it will then be available for leading magic units in the Army Setup menu. (From Psientist)

- You can assign a #watershape (and probably a #forestshape, etc) to a unit in addition to a #secondshape... but the #secondshape must be the last item listed in the series inside the mode file, and the #watershape only is activated when the unit changes provinces. (From Psientist)

- Did you know that the pictures on magic sites are based on path & level? esd29a has mapped them, see this post for details


- There are some mystic bugs regarding PD. See this thread for details.

-The spell effect "polymorph" (number 54) allows for different #damage values for different shapes. However, it seems that the transformation spell does not accept damage values over 1000, perhaps because the spell then adds caster level for damage? Giving values over 2000 seems to result in monsters with monster ID under 1000.

-Also, kennydicke noticed that the Ritual of Rebirth can also be modded by changing the #damage value to revive the hero in another shape than the basic mummy.

-You can give a piece of armor negative encmumberance to make it actually reduce encumberance, for example if you have a unit with a -2 encumbernace shield and 3 base encumberance + 1 from body armor and the -2 from the modded shield it will have a net encumberance of 2. (Thanks to Swan for finding this)

-Here's a modding trick by Sombre:

You have a recruitable commander, let's say a "Royal Guard Captain". The recruitable form of this commander comes with a summon5 and a domsummon of "Royal Guard Infantry". It also has a firstshape pointing to another instance of "Royal Guard Captain" which does not have these summons. Now when you buy the Captain, you get some free troops with him, in a limited supply, without the drawbacks of onebattlespell combat summons or endless streams of summon allies or autosummons.

Of course it eats an extra unit slot, possibly two, per commander you use it on. But then you wouldn't use it on every non mage commander. Just some of them. The 'free' troops are a compensation for hiring a non mage commander

He (Sombre) tested this with lizardmen and you don't even need to differentiate the summoning form from the normal form, because when you recruit them, this happens before EoT, as does the summoning of their troops, so they summon the troops, then they change shape and become normal. In other words, no delay between hiring them, them summoning and them turning into the normal version. So you can literally just put in the description that when you buy them you get X free dudes

-Here is my hack that gives a commander a "battleshape" that it turns into at the start of each battle. Useful for making mages that get weaker in combat, for example.

- If you have too many #tags on a monster, some of them might fail to work. Kennydicke has reported #shape tags being ingored just because of having too many tags on the monster.

- Here is my report on some spell modding test results.

- Popkill and leper only work on commanders. (by Soyweiser)

- A pretender with the changeshape commmand needs a higher monsternr for his second shape. Or it will not show up in the pretender list (by Soyweiser)

- #nobadevents - tag works on troops. I tested with a troops that had 100 bad event prevention and my single province did not a single bad events during 40+ turns in turmoil and misfotune 3.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

That ritual with onebattle spell gave me an interesting idea: a lightning strike that chained a spawned creature.

And I've been bit by that holy spell not showing up in scripts. Wondered what caused it/how to fix it.. thanks burn.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Might be interesting for Skaven to have a cloud that spawned vermin every turn as a onebattlespell of a hero or something.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Well, I haven't tested this very throughoutly, it was just something I figured out by pure accident. I don't know if the cloud stays when the caster dies or flees.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

You don't need a ritual to get a cloud effect. The value of #effect just needs to be over nine thousand, like in Twan's "Mists of Deception" fix:

#selectspell "Mists of Deception"
#effect 9043
#damage 695
#nreff 2
#nextspell "Phantasmal Warrior"
#end


Seriously speaking, adding x*1000 to #effect value will make a cloud that lasts for x rounds.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

... trying to resist the urge to comment ...

Come on, that was on purpose! :p

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

I actually wrote it that way before I noticed the meme. But I chose to leave it in and to emphasize it. :D



Here are some modding-related tricks:


Sprites. Download an AllView map, download the sprite compilations, try out the different nations. When you have an idea about what you want, go through the game and try to find a sprite that has something you want.

Let's say you want a forest ranger. Tir Na Nog and Tuatha have green-garbed infantry sprites (some of them are units, some commanders) who start all battles with glamour. As long as your rangers don't have glamour, you're fine.

Take a cavalry unit and make it infantry. You'll only have to remove the horse, and do a bit of trickery with the legs. My furman avatar is a Horse Brother.

On the other hand, you can also take an infantry unit and give it a mount. Attach anything on a Wyvern and most people will see a wyvern-rider instead of Tuatha-commander-on-a-wyvern.

Mage sprites follow a formula. There's the robe, hands down and up, bearded or beardless face, and perhaps some ornaments. You don't have to follow the formula, but it's not hard.

Similar sprites are interchangeable. In my Kaleva mod, I used sprites from both Vaetti (MA Jotunheim) and Bakemono (MA Shinuyama). They are small and wear furs, and that's close enough.

Use attack sprite for base sprite, and base sprite for attack sprite. Easy way to make a "new" unit, especially if the original sprite is from a unit that's not too unique.

Changing colors is easy, and will make a huge difference. As an example, if you need to create a female sprite, look through the three ages of Arcoscephale (Priestess, Oreiad, Sibyl), LA Pythium, LA Ulm (Fortune Teller), MA Ashdod and LA Gath (it's easy to resize giant sprite to human-size), MA Machaka (Sorceress), the amazon tribes... The chances are that one of those sprites is close enough, and then you can edit and recolor it and (because Kristoffer is really good at sprites) it will look good.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

So this is might be a FAQ, but how do you get a copy of one of the in game sprites to edit. I haven't figured it out yet.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Sombre -
AFAIK you can't #onebattlespell a custom spell, it has to already be in the game. Maybe you can #selectspell mod an existing one to assign to a commander unit in-combat.

Burn - thanks for the notes. I had discovered most of those, and I think most are scattered in pieces throughout the forums... but I learned a couple and it's nice to have them in one place.

Here's a couple tips I've found...

1. I have confirmed that my little trick of assigning boots of the planes to an Indy commander CAN work, and have that commander show up in a random other Indy province during game play.

2. If you create a unit with NO magic paths, and give it a magic leadership, it will still not be able to lead magic units. However, if you give it a #magicpath X 0 (a level of zero in that path), it will then be available for leading magic units in the Army Setup menu.

3. You can assign a #watershape (and probably a #forestshape, etc) to a unit in addition to a #secondshape... but the #secondshape must be the last item listed in the series inside the mode file, and the #watershape only is activated when the unit changes provinces.

I have several other observations in an "item modding" thread somewhere regarding some of the things you can, and can't seem to get away with for crafting custom items.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Sure and copyspell it first so the original remains in the game. I believe that's the standard method.

I don't actually know for sure that #onebattlespell doesn't work perfectly so long as you /define your newspell first/. Someone should test that ;]

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

There's a complicated way to get the base sprite I came up for DomII, and then there's the easy way EricM used to extract all the sprites (with permission). Here's all sprites up to 3.17, and I think few others have done small updates to accomodate for later patches.

AllView maps are also great. There are few different versions floating around. Basically, it's a five-province map where EA Ermor starts with units 1-1000 in the first province, 1001-1500 in the second, etc. It's the easiest way to look for sprites if you know e.g. that you want a swordsman, but don't know what kind of swordsman.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

This whole thread would make an excellent sub-topic on the dominions wiki

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Decided to give this thread a small bump, considering all the new modders around.

If you know something cryptic modding knowledge which is not contained here, please post it.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

1st trick:

If you give a unit the #unique tag and set him recruitable from a magic site, you actually recruit the unique unit instead of a copy.

This means:

If you purchase him again from the site, he will be teleported there, experience/wounds to boot. If someone else conquers the site, they can steal him away from you by purchasing him. This could lead to some fun thematic sites with powerful summons that people fight over.

2nd trick:

Communicants! I read in another thread that the Communicant's "Communion Slave" ability is hard wired to the unit. So I did a bit of testing and it is hardwired to their index number which is 538.

You can #selectmonster 538,

Then set the stats/sprite to whatever you want. As was mentioned in the thread, the new monster will act like a communion slave, even if he is a basic unit with the exception of healing the master's endurance or incurring extra fatigue himself. But the unit will receive the self buffs from the communion master as if part of a reverse communion.

What this means is you can create cool themed units that get their power from their commanders by giving the commanders #onebattlespell "# for communion master".

For example, I used this trick to create the start of a nation of Slivers based off the monsters of the same name from Magic the Gathering.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Just found out something awesome. If you make a modded remote "Farsummon" by using effect number 10037, the game will automatically GoR one of the units summoned to act as a commander for this army.

Also, I managed to chain these spells with #nextspell. Meaning that you can do a remote summon that summons more than 1 type of units. If you make a remote summon just summoning 1 unit, the game will automatically GoR that one, so you could make a modded version of "Call of the Winds" for example (where the main spells summons bunch of hawks, and the next summons 1 big hawk). Althought one of the small hawks will be a commander too.

I'm going to use this trick to make a spell for bretonnia that summons some Questing Knights and Knight Errants to "Crusade" a distant province.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Also, if you chain some remote summoning spells to a teleport spell by #nextspell, the caster will appear in the remote province with the summons.

Also you can create summon spells that summon more than 1 type of unit by chaining them with #nextspell.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Your one big hawk would also have 1 big hawk as a troop under his command. There's no way to farsummon just 1 commander.


Here's a nice trick: I believe you can do commander battle summons with effect number 21. Using onebattlespell with this means you can have some commanders who turn up with other spellcasting commanders for the battle - say a 100% random path familiar or something.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Yeah the lack of ability to farsummon just a commander was a real pain for me.

There's also no way to chain to that new unit to kill it.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

That said, if you want to farsummon say 20 of 'Infantry A' with a leader of 'Commander C' and that's /all/ you want, there is a relatively easy workaround (In fact there's a workaround for almost any modding problem in dom3, it's just they aren't all particularly clean).

You make a monster for infantry A and give it shapechange to monster for commander B (commander C clone). Then you give commander B the #firstshape command pointing to commander C - at the end of any given turn Commander B will turn into C. Of course you make sure commander C doesn't have any command to turn him into either commander B or infantry A. So after summoning you can turn the commanderised infantry A into commander B, then wait a turn for him to turn into C and lose that whole 'shapechanging into the infantry guy' thing.

Messy but it works.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

That's a nice idea. It lets you use GoR to promote units to more advanced forms.

A random thought: If you GoR the unit 'caterpillar' and shapechange it to 'chrysalis', which has #firstshape 'butterfly'... If the unit is attacked in the turn you turn it into 'chrysalis', does it fight as 'chrysalis' or 'butterfly'?

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Firstshape changes take place at the end of the turn, or at the end of any battle.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Hmm. This gives me an idea or two - a summoned commander who can change shape to a (more powerful?) form at the cost of a turn's vulnerability, or alternatively a set of non-commander summons who can get better stats and equipment after being GoRed.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

I have a TC spell
Angel Incognito.. that changes them into Celestial Angel, with a second shape back to celestial master.

So essentially its only useful for the turn.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

How do you get a spell to change the caster's shape cleanly? The obvious way would be a kill self ritual to push them into a secondshape, but that would mean it could be triggered by otehr stuff.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

I don't know that its clean...

I do chain a "Kill Caster" after the Angels spell. I create an angel with similar paths to the caster to maintain the illusion.
And the spell hints that the caster must go incognito afterwards, to explain the name change.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Oh. Well that's more replacement than transformation, but works gameplay wise.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Hmm, interesting, how do you copy the paths?

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

He just made a unit with similar paths to the one that he thinks would be casting the spell.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

I just figured out something frigging awesome and need to share it now. I've modded this game for almost 3 years and still I'm learning new stuff, God I love this game!

The spell effect "polymorph" (number 54) allows for different #damage values for different shapes. How you can use this? Just attach it to some buffing spell as #nextspell and you can have spell that grants the caster the form of a dragon for the battle or something just as cool.

Also, kennydicke noticed that the Ritual of Rebirth can also be modded by changing the #damage value to revive the hero in another shape than the basic mummy. I'm not sure if it works with giant monsters, but I'll test that shortly.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Cool idea w/the poly - does it revert after battle tho? I thought polymorph was permanent (never cast it.)

The RoR alternate unit is actually mentioned in the "Black Book" spell modding thread (I'm using it in a personal mod I've been playing with for a while.) Unfortunately, it requires that a unit die AND go through the hall of fame to change unit types...

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

In my testing I managed to turn two runesmiths into slingers in the battle and they showed up as Runesmits on the strat map. In hindsight, there might be some cobblestones where this trick might fall flat. I'll report more once I get back home and manage to do some more testing on sunday evening.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Okay, I did some more testing. The thing worked like a charm, but the Polymorph effect is permament, the commander will not revert back after the battle. However, You can counteract this by giving the form they will transform into #firstshape. To make it a lot simpler, here is how the trick works:

You have commander A that you want to transform into unit B for battle. Create a custom #onebattlespell for unit A that transform it into unit B. Give unit B firstshape back to A, so that it will revert back into A after the battle. The dwarf mod is going to use this trick on two commanders to make them lose caster levels in combat.

Unfortunately it seems that the " Form of the Dragon" spell I advertised couple of posts ago is not possible though, since my trick is only going to work if you know what mage is going to cast the spell.

Anyways, below is the bare bones code for the spell. By casting the custom "Summon Earthpower", the caster is going to transform into a slinger (unit nmbr 50) and then transform into a battle vestal (unit nmbr 51) after the battle (because I edited the slinger unit to have battle vestal as first shape).

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Um...the only thing I'll point out is that this could have some...interesting...unintended side effects in a communion.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Heh. True. I'm tempted to do a spell for Byzantine Pythium that turns the communion into Angels of the Host.

But yeah, with all those limitations it has to work with, I think that trick would be best as a way to give a commander #battleform, since the communion trick does not work if it is a #onebattlespell.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

This is very cool. Gets around the problems with using damage + secondshape.

I'll have to employ it in some of my mods I think. It could be excellent for any chaos themed mod also, for chaos spawn transformations. Imagine a version of bless that turns your sacreds into chaos spawn instead of blessing them. Fun right?

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

As long as the "destination" form is not overly powerful (like the dwarf units I believe Burnsaber was referring to.) You'd also be restricted to a single "destination" unit type, so no way (that I can see) to e.g. get a crossbreeding-type random assortment of mutated weirdos from your warping. *That* would be cool though :-)

Considering your bless caster is sacred too, don't forget the possibility of self-mutating (probably not a thematic concern for Chaos...)

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

I don't know, couldn't you do that with #nextspells? Have the bless #nextspell a basic chaos spawn form, and then do a few mr-negates, then maybe one that's mr-negates easily. That should give you a bit of a crossbreeding type effect.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

I used the RoR effect to create a Reincarnate spell for the pan. It was a blood ritual, which seemed to fit with the ancient druid theme).

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

This would be VERY cool for skaven, for bogarus with its emphasis on mythical units. I like this idea a LOT

HEY I wonder if the Bogarus Zmir would work if you had a screen of fire snakes.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

I used this for my arco changes; Arco had a spell dark rituals (actually several versions of it). Essentially what it did was add a blood random to an arco mystic - at the cost of an initiation ritual.

Dark Rituals I, II, III... each added effects.

I didn't say what the effects were.. and the unit had no discernable difference until it was damaged in combat... I dont think anyone ever figured it out...

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

I did more testing on the transformation effect and I now have a version of the dwarfs mod where both the Runemsith and Runelord get -1 to all paths in combat. However, it seems that the transformation spell does not accept damage values over 1000, perhaps because the spell then adds caster level for damage? Giving values over 2000 seems to result in monsters with monster ID under 1000. I counteracted this by overwriting some of the "empty" monster slots (2 is empty, as is 9) with the battleforms I needed.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Would also make sense to overwrite monster IDs used exclusively in other eras, if needed.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Burnsaber
Ah, I was was having the same problem with a similar spell I was working on but I didn't put 2+2 together, thanks!

Sombre
Is there an easy way to find out these era-exclusive monsters?

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Nope. But just take a stroll through the EA and MA versions of nations and note the differences.

Anything Marverni would be fair game, for instance, for a MA mod. Or the same with Machaka for a mod in the EA or LA.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Thanks, I have been. I just hoped somebody already had. ;)

I figured those and Bogarus would be the intuitive ones to use - I'd prefer less obvious choices, to avoid clashes, but I think I found some.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

i don't know if this something everybodi know, but i just discovered this yesterday:
when you mod a shield you can give it positive defence bonus by setting negative encumberance,
with this formula
defence= - #enc
parry = #def - #enc

example
#def 5 #enc -2 #prot 2
will traslate to a shield with
parry +3; +2 defense; -2 enc; +4 prot

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Wait, what. A shield with -2 enc?

I get that you can put in -2 enc as a value to get extra def, but the shield ingame actually has -2 enc as well? What does that do, reduce fatigue? Or reduce net enc?

I'm thinking a shield which reduces net enc could be a very cool new item, if that's really the case.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

it reduce encumberance, example if you have a unit with 3 base enc + 1 armor -2 shield it will ha a net 2 enc

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

Wow, that could definitely be used to add some interesting items and make non enc 0 thugs more viable.

Imagine if weightless shields reduced enc by 2 for instance. They'd be niiice on a mortal thug, or even a caster.

Re: Modding tips and tricks
 

what are the pratical differences between a -2 enc shield and a 0 enc 2 reinvigoration shield?