The biggest problem for *starting* the modding of Dominions II is that one has to look through the manual, which is quite complicated at times, and does not have any reference to things like units' stats, spells' magic and research levels etc. As GREAT.WISE.MAN.TOLD.WISE.THINGS I decided to start a new thread and ask how much, if anything, people could do for a program that makes mod-making easier.
Code:
_________________________
|SPELL/| UNIT ABILITIES /\
|UNIT/ | ||
|NATION|[] [] [] [] ||
|STATS_|________________\/
|MODDED| |
|STATS | HERE BE DRAGONS |
| | So... what |
| | |
|______|_________________|
|__NEW______SAVE___LOAD__|
I am not very good at GUI, but can try to do my best.
I can only program Java, so if you don't want a Java jar someone else has to program it. However, after the general plan even people who can NOT program can take part in the project. Dominion II has many spells, many items and even more units. We don't know any way to take their information from the game, so we would have to write everything by hand.
After deciding how something should be written, just writing it should be an easy task. It might be like current modding:
#hits 10
#str 10
#att 10
etc.,
but it could also be like
10;10;10.
or
10
10
10
or almost anything. For units, all stats and abilities would have to be written down. For spells, school, magic paths (two for some spells) and fatique cost (which the program can translate to gem cost). For nations: recruit lists, starting sites, themes, heat preference and all specials which cannot be modded like Abysian death scale immunity, Ulm resource bonus and R'lyeh Hybrid spawning.
Some of the information already exists, like most of the nations' info my Nation Replica mod files and weapon/armor in Edi's lists.
Does anyone have Saber Cherry's Combat Simulator? I might have, but am not sure. It had all units' stats, I think. Well, all those that were present at the time she made it. Units' stats could be taken from those files.
That would leave spells. I know that someone (sorry, don't remember name atm) wrote mod that removes spells of spesific research level/school, and that the Grimorie has spell information in electric form. I have no experience making a program that reads information from files, but it is easy to do from simple text files. Maybe someone else knows how to read from excel/psp/... files, or how to convert them to text files.
The program can, if it is programmed to do that, launch Dominions with text files parameters. I don't know what are already present, but that probably allows creating a new game with chosen mods and chosen players/AI, maybe it even allows starting a game with 17 humans from which, say, 16 are turned into AI. I don't believe pretenders can be made through text parameters; if they could, the program could be programmed to launch DomII with better AI pretenders chosen for AI.
A similar program could also be made, or this one made even more complicated, to create map files. However, I have no idea about how to make a program that reads .tga files, so someone else would have to do that. BTW, that person could also make the unit screen show 1st sprite of a unit (Liga has them), the program to show mod's banner, etc.
Computer's clock here shows 23.51, so don't wonder if this seems like a dream. It probably will stay as one, as I'm not *that* good a programmer. However, parts of it could be done. A unit viewer from Saber Cherry's files alone would be a fine addition to modmaker's.
MOD.MAKING.PROGRAM
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