DJ's Beginner Tutorial To Modding: Creating Your Own Unit

[Dee Jay]

A Modding Tutorial by Dee Jay

This Tutorial will tell you everything you need to know about how to make your own mod; I’ve tried to make this simple, short, resourceful and with lots of pictures for a beginner modder. Im assuming that you have already read my "Making a Simple Mod" tutorial for this one.


Creating Your Own Unit

Now, the first thing were going to do is extract the DB files that we need from patch4.pack in the Napoleon data folder. Extract the following into the "Mod" folder on your desktop;

building_units_allowed
uniforms_to_faction_colours
uniforms
unit_stats_land
unit_to_unit_abilities
units
unit_to_exclusive_faction_permission

All of these are needed to create your own unit. Now, were going to create a French "Middle Guard" unit for an example. So after extracting all those files to the folder, you can create a new mod.pack with them and save it (just like we did in my "Making a Simple Mod" tutorial) over your old "Mod.pack" file.

So were going to go to the "unit_to_exclusive_faction_permission" table, find and then clone the row for Inf_Elite_French_Old_Guard

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And then replace the "Old" in the first column with "Middle". DONE

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Next is the Units table, find the Inf_Elite_French_Old_Guard, and click COPY ROW while your clicked on that row

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Then click ADD ROW and go up to the new row (it automaticaly goes to the top, I think)

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Click on it, and then click PASTE ROW, and replace the "Old" with "Middle". DONE

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Now for the unit_to_unit_abilities table, find the Old Guard rows again (there are about 5 this time) and then clone each row and replace the "Old" in each row with "Middle". DONE

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For unit_stats_land table, were going to find the Old Guard row again, copy it, add a new row, find the new row, click on it, and paste over it. Then replace the "Old" with "Middle" again, just like in the units table. DONE

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For the uniforms table, find this row: France_Inf_Elite_French_Old_Guard; clone it, and then replace all the "Old" in the 3 columns with "Middle". DONE

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For the uniforms_to_faction_colours table, clone the France_Inf_Elite_French_Old_Guard row and replace the "Old" with "Middle" again. DONE

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Finally, for building_units_allowed, we just want to do the same thing clone and then rename it. and DONE

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After you have done all that, we are going to save it.

Now were going to get all the varient.models files and the unit cards and icons that we need for the unit. So extract all of those files from your new saved mod to the "Mod" folder on your desktop (say yes to over write the old files)

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And then open the data.pack file again with the PFM. go to UI > units > icons and find the unit card for the Young Guard (because they look closes to the Middle Guard), its called france_inf_elite_french_young_guard_icon.tga

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Then extract that file to your "Mod" folder on your desktop

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Then go to UI > units > info and find the Young Guard info pic and extract that one too.

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Now were going into the varientmodels.pack in the Napoleon data folder

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So go to varientmodels > units, now find all the files that begin with france_inf_elite_french_old_guard

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and extract them to your Mod folder. So now create a new Mod.pack using your "Mod" folder (the same way in my first tutorial) and save it over your old Mod.pack. Now replace all the "old" with "middle" in the varientmodels

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and all the "young" with "middle" in the unit cards

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and save it again.


Adding a New Units Name


Now, last of all we need to create the name for our new Middle Guard unit, so open that pack file you made in my "Changing and Adding a Units Name" tutorial called "Mod_Names.pack"

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Open the localisation.loc file

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click on the "Tag" tab to put all the entries in order

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Then go find the units_on_screen_name_Inf_Elite_French_Young_Guard entry

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Clone it, then replace the the "Young" in the first and second column with "Middle"

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Then save it, and your all done.

Now, just test it to see if it works, if it does thats great, so now if you want you can just fiddle around with your new unts stats and cost and all that, I would suggest just putting the cost and stats half-way between the Old and Young Guard.

Now if ou’de like to continue strait onto my next Tutorial “Changing Unit Parts” which is when we make your new Middle Guard unit look more like the Middle Guard.

Hope you liked this tutorial and learnt some good stuff, Cheers DJ

[E.K]

Anohter quality tutorial!

Keep it up

[Dee Jay]

Cheers EK, the only tutorial I have left now is the retexture one.

[Dee Jay]

Is there anything else anyone wants me to add to this tutorial? And what other tutorials do you all what to see?

[kenniston5]

+rep!! wondering i know i read from Aldgarkalaughskel about changing unit skin colors and textures, but to me seems hard to follow and to many directions it goes, like the way you make them easy to understand and simple,and hope you post one about how to change unit skin colors and thanks for these tutorials

[Dee Jay]

The next tutorials I will be making are Making Your Own Loading Screens and How to Retexture a Unit. Many people have been asking for a retexture one for a while now. But I will make one on how to change unit colour too.

[Dee Jay]

This is everyone's last chance to request a tutorial, just post something that you want a tutorial for here and I will try make one.

Cheers DJ

[SirFork]

Hey, really well done tutorial, but i've got a problem i've follow all of the steps but when i start the game after few seconds after the loading napoleon screen it exit and return to the desktop without any kind of error report, but if i remove the mod.packs it runs normally, any ideas :S ?

[Dee Jay]

It could be because you done it wrong.

Sometimes this happens when you clone a row that you are not supposed too, some rows you have to copy and paste them, like the units and unit stats DB.

Or you could have missed 1 table

[SirFork]

Hey thanx for the infos, i'll try again!!

p.s. waiting for your re-texture units mod

[Dee Jay]

Retexture units mod?

What do you mean?

[SirFork]

Sorry i meant Retexture units tutorial...

[Millander]

Great stuff but im wondering. In any of your tuts have you touched on changing the unit info?

[Dee Jay]

No sorry I have not, I should add that to the unit names tutorial, because it involves the same file.

Thanks for pointing that out Romulus

[Caesar15]

I bewlieve this is also the way to make units in shogun 2?

[Dee Jay]

Damn strait, this is the way to do it in ETW, NTW & S2TW

[Caesar15]

It happens that local_en_patch is not a pack file in shogun 2 folder

[Millander]

was going to make french marines so I was cloning the gaurd seamen but I couldnt find there files in the variant models. are they even there?

[Capt. Caveman]

Thanks Dee Jay for the tutorials! +REP

What files would I need to edit to ad a navel unit?

[Scottishtroop]

how would i chose what voices troops have like i want the black watch voice to be the same as highland foot