Mod: UnitGen - Random nations with procedural sprites!

[elmokki]

The other forum has the same thread but I figured I should probably post this here too:



Mahamia is a nation which's army relies on a fairly unflexible infantry and skirmish tactics along with support from boar riding cavalry. The infantry is armed with bucklers and short swords or falchions, and the lightest infantry variant also carries a harpoon. The pinnacle of this infantry lineup is the Mahamian elite guard - moderately armed soldiers with exceptional skills. Cavalry support for the main army comes in two ways. The Mahamian light cavalry does not carry a lance, but instead fights with a sword and a harpoon. The Mahamian lancers are more heavily armored and carries a lance along with a falchion. Mahamians do not use bows, as they find a crushing charge more effective.

The Corrupted Keepers of Mahamia are mages skilled in blood magic, but they also dabble in air and nature magics and also have divine authority. All mages of their order are sacred. The religious authority in Mahamia is held by Mahamian bishops alongside the Corrupted Keepers.

Mahamia was generated randomly, this description, sadly, not yet though. I'm going to work on those soonish.

...yeah, so, I suppose some of you know what UnitGen is. It began as a software that makes random units out of unit parts - generally fairly decent looking sprites all in all. Natural next step has been nation generation. After surprisingly many manhours and a few months UnitGen is now essentially feature complete. It doesn't mean there won't be tweaks and major code and content additions, it just means it generates very playable nations comparable (apart from descriptions at the moment) to the base Dominions 3 nations.

Features!
- All graphics used are generated from parts and colored to be as unique as possible!
- 7 races and more coming: humans, black humans, hoburgs, caelians, lizards, tengus and abysians
- Complete rosters of chariots, infantry, archers, crossbowmen and/or cavalry of various types
- Sacreds ranging from slightly buffed light cavalry to heavy infantry with flaming spears and harpoons with ability to turn into fire elementals upon death.
- Very varying setups of mages. A nation may have 3 to 7 or so mages which are quite logically structured to seem like mages of one nation and may or may not have awesome special abilities ranging from fairly standard stuff like forge bonuses or glamour to stuff like being able to turn into a devil.
- Nations themselves may get features like cheaper buildings, blood sacrifice, abnormal temperature settings or reanimation.
- Along with the base set of pretenders every nation in the game has available, 5-10 extra pretenders are generated with random picks heavily weighed on the magic paths your nation has.
- Works on Windows, MacOs and Linux... with luck it might work even on something stranger.

You can get test builds I occasionally bother to release from http://koti.kapsi.fi/~elmokki/dom3/unitgen/dev/. The naming is formatted unitgen_dd_mm_yy.zip.


You can also find some level of documentation for editing the files at http://koti.kapsi.fi/~elmokki/dom3/unitgen/how_to_make_content.txt (included in 18.7 and newer releases too) but I recommend #dominions at irc.gamesurge.net since it isn't too throughout.

[elmokki]

Most of the work today was towards unit generation and as such isn't easily showable, but I did also finally make nation naming files race specific and made a flag generator. Currently flags are totally random, but in the future I plan to make them somewhat dependant on nation specifics.

[elmokki]

New mount sprite since I was bored but couldn't be arsed to code!

[elmokki]

8th of Feb version up.

Changes from last version:
- Race specific nation naming
- Rewritten unit naming to make somewhat more sense (still needs minor tweaking on cavalry though)
- Improved flag generation
- Offhand weapons and bonus weapons should generate correctly
- "Attack sprites" - not really, but a placeholder that should be fine for now.

[elmokki]

Army of a nation called Maag

[elmokki]

The new version contains a sprite generator with a basic GUI: http://nikita.tnnet.fi/~elmokki/unitgen/de...gen_13_2_12.zip contains spritegen.jar in addition to unitgen.jar. It does not take into account item dependencies and probably never will. So basically if you set a cloak front you have to set the back manually and if you set full plate as armor you have to set suitable pants too. Also in some cases mounted pose graphics will be misaligned until you select a mount - this just is how the program works. Mounted poses are always supposed to have a mount anyway.

Making this was probably a good idea. With an easy way to see how a sprite looks some people might get interested in implementing new races or items. Also if someone wants, renaming all those items with numbers as their name would be nice. Also I found out a syntax error in armor files thanks to this! Making a flag generator might be something I'll do at some point. It'll be a lot quicker to do since that part is a lot simpler.

Unitgen itself has some changes too, but nothing major. I've been too hooked on Crusader Kings 2 to bother programming much.


Here's a screenshot.

[elmokki]

Bigger sprites caused problems, fixed this and reuploaded. It caused a minor UI change too.

EDIT: Thanks to retarded 30min post edit limit I'll have to clarify on this post what the lack of dependency handling causes with mounted units in some cases:

The most visible thing with this is some mounts and weapons on them. Overlays are supposed to make some weapons and things seem like they are behind the mount and now they aren't selected automatically. So basically if your mounted unit looks problematic you can probably get it look better by selecting the correct overlay (and absolutely terrible with wrong overlay).

Especially the spider and the pegasus mounts need their overlay.

[legowarrior]

This is cool

[elmokki]

After a couple of days of doing nothing for UnitGen I've:

- Refined cavalry generation somewhat. You can now specify precise maximum and minimum armor (chest armor right now) for a mount type. This was done since the generic "light", "heavy", "medium" tags were a bit lacking. Some units just need a custom range of possible riders.

- Added nation tag system. Each nation gets a couple of tags - maximum of 3, but usually 0 or 1. These tags are stuff that range from very influencing to very minor. Currently I've added a preliminary list of some tags and they'll include stuff like increased chance of stealthy units, increased chance of dualwielding, nation wide +1 mr, nation wide +1 str, nation wide light cold resistance, nation wide light fire resistance, advanced, primitive, increased chance of cavalry. Tags have opposite tags that can't be chosen together with them.

Currently only two things work regarding these though. Dual wield chance may drastically increase with suitable tags or slightly decrease if you have advanced. Dual wield generation mechanics are going to change sooner or later which'll make the effect of this more major. Tags also affect item selection when items have tags defined for them - currently that's just primitive and advanced.

The effect of this item selection is currently that suitable items for your tags (ie primitive items for primitive nations or advanced ones for advanced nations) get a double chance of being selected for a nation and the opposite items (ie advanced items for primitive nations) for your nation get a fourth of the base chance.

[elmokki]

Today I "fixed" nation naming, ie made four consonants in a row and three same letters in a row impossible.

I also worked on militia/start unit selection, which is working fairly well right now, but we'll see how much work it'll need once I get to trimming nation rosters to manageable sizes, which'll be soon.

And of course as always tweaked item data. Also added Chakrams (actually got a graphic) and Sticks and stones (no graphic)

There's a 19th of February version up. I know the bonus weapons give names to units far too often and that crossbows/shortbows/chakrams as seocndary weapons should be rarer. This'll get fixed eventually.