Mod: UnitGen - Random nations with procedural sprites!

[elmokki]

http://koti.kapsi.fi/~elmokki/dom3/u...en_14_4_12.zip

Raiel had the awesome notion of giving a possibility of generating each nation with a separate seed. This was a brilliant idea, since now we have a concept for one more cheat preventing multiplayer method: allow players generate nations until they find one they like and then just make a mod with all the seeds players have submitted. Alternatively you could use the old semi-blind selection but just generate like 200 nations and then build a new mod on their seeds. This feature is disabled by default but the .dm file will always contain randomly chosen nation seeds if you wish to reproduce your random nations later. You can enable this and some other new interface related stuff at settings.txt

Changelog roughly:
- More awesome new mounts for humans and hoburgs by Ragnarok-X, including for example ozelotl (the flying tiger), beast bat, amphithetre and moose.
- Some name/description stuff by Ragnarok-X
- Normal/sacred commanders sometimes (relatively often) get higher maximum leadership
- Mounted hoburgs can't get tower shields (such a huge change!)
- Settings.txt contains some stuff that may or may not make life easier
- You can generate mods with each nation having a different seed (see the above small wall of text)

[elmokki]

http://koti.kapsi.fi/~elmokki/dom3/u...14_4_12-v2.zip

Earlier version broke ranged naming, it's fixed now along with some other very minor fixes.

[elmokki]

http://koti.kapsi.fi/~elmokki/dom3/u...en_15_4_12.zip

Balanced the mounts a bit, sacred weapons get potentially a slightly smaller stat increase when they do (from 2 to 6 to 1 to 4 for melee) and tweaked sacred cap only chances (settings.txt!)

[jimbojones1971]

A few of questions:

1) How do I tweak it to get it to only generate nations for a particular race? I tried two things:
- setting the #basechance values in races.txt to 0.0 for nation's I didn't want (and either leaving the #basechance value for the nation I want as-is, or also increasing it to 1.0).
- removing all nations I don't want from the races.txt file, leaving only the one I want

Neither of these worked - both resulted in the game hanging in the "generating nations" step. Help! :-)

2) Are there any command line switches?

3) Is there any chance of getting a look at the source, to satisfy my curiousity about what you are doing and how you are doing it? How about if I beg?

[elmokki]

Originally Posted by jimbojones1971

A few of questions:

1) How do I tweak it to get it to only generate nations for a particular race? I tried two things:
- setting the #basechance values in races.txt to 0.0 for nation's I didn't want (and either leaving the #basechance value for the nation I want as-is, or also increasing it to 1.0).
- removing all nations I don't want from the races.txt file, leaving only the one I want

Neither of these worked - both resulted in the game hanging in the "generating nations" step. Help! :-)

2) Are there any command line switches?

3) Is there any chance of getting a look at the source, to satisfy my curiousity about what you are doing and how you are doing it? How about if I beg?

1) Not possible. It generates secondary and tertiary race for each nation just in case it's needed so the program will die without at least three races. Methods you tried are in principle okay though. It wouldn't be a too big change to make the secondary and tertiary races generated only if they are required and if they exist though.

2) No, editing files and especially settings.txt are supposed to do what command line arguments would do

3) http://koti.kapsi.fi/elmokki/dom3/un...7_4_12-src.zip
As I keep saying, the quality of code ranges from horrible to somewhat decent and it's largely uncommented. That said it's not so complicated program that it's impossible to make sense of at least most of it anyway.

The biggest issue is that there has been like no planning ahead so there's pointless copy paste code that could've been avoided all over the place. In terms of readability it would benefit a lot from a major rewrite

Oh well, if you find something you think should be changed, do tell.

[jimbojones1971]

Thanks elmokki, you are a legend! :-)

It sounds like the program needs at least three races. Could I in theory (without attempting to tweak the code) just past in three versions of the same race in races.txt, to achieve the same effect? (e.g. blue hoburgs, black hoburgs, and pink hoburgs for example).

[elmokki]

Originally Posted by jimbojones1971

Thanks elmokki, you are a legend! :-)

It sounds like the program needs at least three races. Could I in theory (without attempting to tweak the code) just past in three versions of the same race in races.txt, to achieve the same effect? (e.g. blue hoburgs, black hoburgs, and pink hoburgs for example).

Yeah, that should work. They can probably have the exact same name too. The nation summaries may be a bit skewed (like, Hoburgs, some Hoburgs, Hoburg auxillaries) in some cases though.

[elmokki]

http://koti.kapsi.fi/~elmokki/dom3/u...en-21-4-12.zip

Tweaks and spritegen allows shifting any item to find suitable offsets.

[elmokki]

http://koti.kapsi.fi/~elmokki/dom3/u...en_29_4_12.zip

A while since the last update but:
- A change on how same role poses are generated, more explanation below.
- Tengus not generating as a primary race, more explanation below as well.
- Oriental humans added as a race, though they still lack a mounted pose (and I forgot to give them the correct nametype)
- Atlantians by RagnarokX are partially in. They don't generate yet though since they aren't ready enough.

The same role pose generation used to require all poses of a certain role sharing the same armor. This happened with all existing things since it made no sense to have the two hander pose have less armor options than the onehand/polearm pose. Atlantians (and Caelians, just not implemented yet) however probably want to have some ice armor and whatnot stuff that generates only as a whole and RagnarokX wanted Atlantians to have shamblers in their race with yet different armors. This may still be somewhat glitchy, but by using command #tag "replacement itemname" you can make the software think some item is an another. As an example if I defined the full plate item on onehander pose of humans with #tag "replacement leatherhauberk" any twohander the program tried to generate with full plate would have leather hauberk instead. Since this inevitably would lead to duplicate units in some cases, I also added a sort of a failsafe that diversifies weapons a bit in these cases.

Tengus did lose their lightning strike from non-sacred non-commander troops a while ago, but at 15g I think they still are pretty good. Sure, size 3, but the stats are rather high and their gear in general was quite good thanks to consisting mostly of Jomonese super weapons. Currently no tengu nations will be generated, but nations of other races may get some tengus in their lineups at 20g base price. In the future I guess a nations mages might be swapped to tengus too in some cases. I would gladly make tengus a normal race in terms of generation again, but I will only do that if I get enough convincing opinions on how to make them balanced without making them non-tenguish (for example they are definitely katana/nodachi/naginata/yari/wakisazi wielding in most cases)

[elmokki]

http://koti.kapsi.fi/~elmokki/dom3/u...gen_3_5_12.zip

Boring bugfixes.