MOD.MAKING.PROGRAM

[Endoperez]

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.

[PrinzMegaherz]

I think I could write the program.
That would depend, however, how things work out in the next few weeks. If I don't find an new employer, there will be plenty freetime to spend on this project ;-)

[Leif_-]

I did some pondering on such a tool a while ago, but never got around to start on it. One thing that is absolutely essential for the useability of such a program is that it must be able to not only generate mod-files but also read them back in and allow the user to make new changes. Round-trip engineering as it's called.

[tinkthank]

That sounds great. I am sorry I cannot help you, since I have trouble just getting windows to run. But maybe you need an idiot for testing?

[Endoperez]

PrinzMegaherz: Great! Which language are you going to use?

Leif_-: Yep, that is also quite important.

Tinkthank: Well, I think you could do a great favour by *using* it after it is done... And testing it would be good, also.


I found Saber Cherry's combat simulator. This is an example of her units, and her notes:

//notes:
//stealthy=0 does not work
//chill numbers and heat numbers are made up
//fear is Dominions's fear plus 5 (so "lesser fear -4" becomes "fear=1")
//I need to add "mounted"

name=Blood_Slave hp=9 mrl=50 mrst=10 bEnc=2 str=9 att=6 def=5 prec=10 ap=9 gold=5
name=Human hp=10 mrl=10 mrst=10 bEnc=3 str=10 att=10 def=10 prec=10 ap=12 gold=10
name=Flagellant hp=9 mrl=15 mrst=10 bEnc=3 str=11 att=8 def=8 prec=8 ap=12 gold=10 sacred=1


That "Human" was used when creating new monsters. Eg. militia would have base_type=human and only different stats would be changed. There are also "Giant" etc. And it seems that her list is quite outdated and/or not complete. It has all national units and many gods, though.

There are some new units (like the nation she planned, Ice Age Human and Neanderthal, new pretenders...) but most are marked with "new=1". There are no id numbers, and that will be a problem. Mod maker wouldn't understand mods where the unit is chosen with its id. Also, some names are different from those in game. As an example, there are Militia and Militia Elite. There is no information about slots and no "mounted" stat, so all cavalry as well as all other special units would have to be chanced by a human.

However, I think that can be done with the program after it's ready enough for that.

[PrinzMegaherz]

Great! Which language are you going to use?

My first choice would be Visual Basic.
It takes all the Gui work from you, and allows fast programming.
But I am aware that many people here use different Operation Systems, so Java might be a good choice. But this would definitly take longer

[Endoperez]

Real Basic promises to be Visual Basic for Windows/Linux/Mac, but it has a 150$ price tag attached to it...

I have used NetBeans for Java programming, and it offers some UI configuration. Not much, however.

[PrinzMegaherz]

Another Idea might be C++, but again, if you want a cross plattform application you loose all the nice guy staff visual c++ offers... Does anyone here have any experience with Eclipse? Is there a gui Editor included?

[Arralen]

May I suggest Tcl/Tk ?
It's cross-platform, it's free, it's simple.

Making a GUI would be a matter of minutes, if one knows what he's doing. If all else fails, there are GUI builders out there. But for 3 buttons and file opening dialogue you won't really need that.

While it's a scripting language, you can actually wrap it into an .exe.

And on 1+GHz machines, it would be really fast enough to crunch some ASCII files...

Here's the GUI for my DOM2 MAP randomizer:
(should run with Linux, but I'm not shure if I got the shell command & pathes right)

code removed, check the next posting

As you can see, really simple all in all ... .
Win32-Wrapped-Version is attached so you can check the "look and feel".

Sorry, the board doesn't seem to like the attachment. But i hope it works ok now...

Mmmh, the *code* command doesn't work out too.. I have attached the .tcl file, which is readable with a simple text editor, to the next posting ..

Forgot to mention: There's a .csv-Package which makes it really easy to handle such files with Tcl. I'm planning on using it with my Map Randomizer. And all those Excel files could be exported to .csv

[Arralen]

Endoperez said:
Real Basic promises to be Visual Basic for Windows/Linux/Mac, but it has a 150$ price tag attached to it...

If it really should be some kind of basic, check out XBasic http://xbasic.sourceforge.net/

It's code compatible between Linux and Win32, comes with a GUI builder (in fact, it's part of the IDE) and it's free,too.

Sadly, documentation is rather scarce, or obsolet, so it's not so easy to get into as is Tcl/Tk.


.tcl code file attached - see previous posting