Greetings and plea for assistance
 

Hi everyone,

I am new to Dom3 (never encountered Dom2 either) and have been interested in the modding capacities of this fine game.

I attempted to use llamabeast's Perl script to merge all the mods I wanted to play on a large map, but apparently I am ignorant of the limitations on things like number of nations in an age or whatnot.

I have downloaded and read all the community-made and official modding / mapmaking / DB documents.... but I am still a bit puzzled, seems much of the documentation available assumes that the modder know some basic stuff about the game engine's capacities or something...

If anyone would be willing to help me out, I'd really appreciate it.... I have some ideas for mods / maps, but running into game crashes when using simple mod mergers, I fear I am not prepared for such a thing.

Some of the questions on my mind:

1) On a map, can each province have specific troop types / recruitment options available?

2) Custom magic sites for gameworld flavor? How difficult is that?

3) My biggest fear is that I am realizing the depth of my ignorance here (understandable since I just started).... and I may have deep misunderstandings about the capabilities of Dom3.

My mods shouldn't be horribly radical, I may not even make new gfx for units unless I have to. However, not knowing things like engine limits and such .... you probably get my drift.

Thanks in advance,
Monkeyvich

(private email me if you feel you can get me up to speed)

Re: Greetings and plea for assistance
 

Yes. There is a long list of "poptypes" which are numbered and you can set it for a province using
#land (prov number)
#poptype (poptype number)
(land wipes the province clean and poptype reset the natural population recruitables

For units that are not in the poptype you can add them to the provinces recruit list by using a "magic site" there. You can even have it include new monsters you made up.

Ive been told that its really easy but Im more involved in the map commands than the mod commands.

Other than something automated (like LlamaBeasts script trying to add many other peoples mods together) I would be surprised if a new modder exceeded the limits anytime too soon. Most of them are sky-high to the point that only the most dedicated seems to ever approach them.

Re: Greetings and plea for assistance
 

A new modder could fairly easily run out of nametypes.

Custom magic sites are well documented in the modding and mapping manuals. They're easy.

Re: Greetings and plea for assistance
 

Yes but "documented" is usually improved by "examples".
What mods do a variety of magic sites and maybe is even annotated?

And I guess nametypes could stand to be extended. What are there? two slots?

Re: Greetings and plea for assistance
 

A pretty good example of magic site modding would be endoperez' collaborative magic site mod here.

And yeah, there are only a very small amount of nametypes available for modding.

Re: Greetings and plea for assistance
 

The modding documents were made by the developers, and only recently reorganized when they decided to make Edi's unofficial reorganization official. Sometimes the developers forget that they haven't told us things, and every now and then they even forget some of the things they put into the game.

The limits of spesific types of modding can cause problems. If something isn't mentioned in the modding manuals, it's probably impossible. As an example, you can change which nations build which fortresses, but not the fortresses themselves, and you can't change poptypes directly but you can change the units that are recruited from them.

There are few workarounds, so it's worth asking about your problems here, but those are often very situational. If you give a little more detail on the mod you're planning, you'll get much more detailed answers on whether it's easy or not and what to look at to see how it could be done.

Re: Greetings and plea for assistance
 

Hey Monkeyvich,

Which mods did you try to combine with my script? If it doesn't work, I should easily be able to make it work if I know what went wrong.

Re: Greetings and plea for assistance
 

Let me attach the two mods I tried to create using your Perl script ... It's been a busy family centric week (three kids visiting, all under 5) but I got some crashes upon starting a game.

I'll try to attach the files. I added all the interesting-sounding mods into the Early age (without falling to the temptation of using the "every age at once" mod).... my choices were all of the Warhammer ones (although table top wise I am a 40K fan all the way), the Kalevala (for one of those sweet '67 Sampos with the leather interior), Urdheim, and perhaps one or two more? (New Crobuzon? Hellgate? also Mytheology 3 and llama's extended banners. Files to follow.

Thanks!
Monkeyvich

(always guilty of overwhelmingly ambitious mods -- I had a prototype PW for NWN that had .hak files exceeding 1.5 GB ... needless to say that project sort of imploded itself ... I have less ridiculous plans for Dom3 :D )

Re: Greetings and plea for assistance
 

Monkeyvich:

Your questions have already been answered but my last advice it to do this: take a well made, mod with most sorts of modding involved and open that and just keep it next open when you mod. Also open the modding.pdf file of the latest version (do update to the newest version, no risks there) and then just try what you want, look it up in the "example" mod and then check it with the doc file.. most mods don't use all commands but most things not used are specific abilities for troops which are just #****** and that is all perfectly clear from the manual.

My advice would be to take Sombres Skaven mod (it's the one I used) as example, I know all sorts of modding is in there and it's organised in sections (weapons, armour, troops, commanders, sites, general nation commands) clearly so you can easily find what you are looking for (scroll through it a few times). Most of the stuff is clear when you've seen it once. Copying something and then changing it to whatever you want is possibly even easier (my first two mods started with copying Sombres lines for the start of the mod, nation settings (which are most annoying at start and then just deleting his describtions etc.. those mods all use the skaven color since I usually don't bother to change it :D) then copy a random troops and just change his stats, same for commander. If you wonder what a certain command is for (though it's usually very clear) look it up in the .pdf file.

There are multiple strange things you can encounter but I don't know them all and it's not that big of a deal if something doesn't work then just come back to ask about it. The strange stuff isn't in any of the basic stuff you need to get a mod working though, creating a mod, starting a nation with some troops and costum weaponry should work (if you copy correctly)

Good luck.

Of course this has nothing to do with combining mods... I never do that :D, I just make one big mod from scratch. (Check out my sig, dom 3K for a sort of wh 40K experience, if you want to help on an over ambitious mod there is plenty of stuff to do :D)