Revolutionary France Uniforms

[Monglor]

A thought occurs. I know it would be hard to make an in game switch from the white uniforms of the Bourbon French to the iconic blue coats of the French Revolutionary army, but I've seen that some game mods can be added at will simply by dropping in the pack files or whatever they are called.

Now with that in mind it occurs would it be possible to simply drop such a file into the data folder (as with installing, for example the smoke mod) in order to change a uniform colour, and then remove that file to change it back?

If this is possible then I believe that's a reasonably good way (not perfect but acceptably easy) to allow for players to change the appearance of their French troops to those of the Napoleonic era soldiers as and when they hit the Revolution. Have revolution in game, save game, close it down, add file, start game, reload it all, and unleash the blue goons.

Does this sound like a good idea to anybody or do I have mouldy cheese for brains?

[Lordtim810]

Sounds like a good idea to me! Or at least a good workaround until some coder-savvy modder figures out how to make a in-game switch.

[Iaius Statius Laurentius]

It'd be odd, but do-able.

The problem with this is that unit color is controled by the factions_tables db file, and every French unit will have the same main color as an overlay. Because of the strange way which patch.pack works, you can't simply make a separate pack file and have it used instead of patch.pack.

So what you'd have to do is have two separate patch.pack files; one with a factions file with the original Bourbon white, and then a separate one with the Revolutionary blue.

Except most other game mods you'll make will also use patch.pack, so you'd be forced to update two different files. However, there's an interesting side-effect--not only could you change the unit colors, but you could change the territory color too.

Now, I don't care for the Bourbons, so I've simply gone ahead and made France blue on the map and changed all the uniforms. And to have the proper red trim, I've taken the diffuse tgas from the US and simply used them for the French. Interestingly, there's even a US version of the cuirassier with red cuffs and tails, even though the US doesn't even have cuirassiers.

The grenadiers are more problematic; the French use bearskins and the US doesn't. The bearskin grenadier has a single diffuse file, which had white cuffs and tails--so I had to recolor it (teaching myself how to texture in the process) to use red.

I can upload the textures if anybody wants them. Changing the color to blue is easy enough--just use the .pack editor, go to factions_tables and change the R5, G5, B5 fields on France's row to use the rgb values for whatever shade of blue you want to use for the uniforms. (Incidentally, the map colors are R1, G1, and B1).

I've also made an 1812 style tricolor Napoleonic battle standard, if people want me to upload that. I wanted to replace the strategy map tricolors with it as well, but strangely enough, it only appears on the tiny regimental flags despite the fact that I put it on the larger flags as well. I guess it's more accurate this way, though.

[Monglor]

Sounds like a plan. All that'd be needed after that is some sort of a functional column formation that doesn't get splatted instantly by shrapnel.