hero abilities ,battle-ui and battle.sd.xml

[Noobio]

hi to everybody

i've just started playing this yesterday...visually outstanding !!!

even though i'd like to change some stuff and maybe also "correct" some minor issues
(like empire units having a "put down siege equipment" button in place of "shield wall" one and some other stuff)

anyway...i've done this "hero_abilties and custom battle-control buttons" submod for the Third Age and i thought of redoing some stuff for CoW too...

it's gonna be less difficult since there aren't so much lore-restrictions as in TA and so no "research" is necessary since most of generic-fantasy artwork would fit in fine (i remember getting annoyed while doing my submod for the TA cause of most of the pics i found on-line were too "warhammerish" hah)...

only "problem" is that

- the descr_hero_abilties.xml seems a bit too weird (as in not having a linear-uniform edit)

and

- battle.sd.xml being totally strange as it seems to be completely out of place ,yet still working

(if you're familiar with the file ,
-the battlepage_04 entry is reffering to the 141 x 143 casual one while the actual one is 320 x 512
-it doesn't even include "hero abilties" entries but still all the sprites appear in game)


so what's the deal ? how do these sprites get to find their way ingame ?

i'm only gonna have internet during august ,since aftrewards i'm gonna be concentrating on graduating (internet and studying arent't the best of friends.. )

so i need a quick response in order to get started as soon as possible and also upload it in time

here's a taste of my work for the TA ,i think it's gonna turn out even better for this one...

[Kahvipannu]

I like the pics, very clear and good looking for such small area to work with. I too find it funny that the mod throws sometimes wrong battlemap icons in buttons, not sure if it is those files or the tga-files itself, but would be cool if you could figure it out.

[Noobio]

seems like someone just replaced the battle.sd.xml from which the battle.sd came with an "empty" one....so

-even though the sprites assignement works
-one can't really know what's in there

cause thegame reads battle.sd (that can't really be read by humans) and humans mod the battle.sd.xml that automatically edits the battle.sd

maybe i'll just try using the files i made for my submod..the main structure is anyway the same,,

[Noobio]

i've taken a look at the interface subfolders ,but first attempt ,after deleting what seemed to be "junk" ended up in a crash upon starting a campaign...the whole interface thing is really messy as there are a lot of tga files ,hanging out in there ,without having a way to exactly understand what and how are they used for (see post above)...

if someone that speaks russian could find ,through the russian forum , the original battle.sd.xml from which the battle.sd got generated it would be of really great help...
then it's all easy and pretty straightforward...

[Gigantus]

I have come across this discrepancy as well when cleaning up. The XML files simply do not correspond to the SD files. You found that out the hard way by removing the 'teutonic' named graphics out of the interface directories. They are not listed in the XML file, yet their absence leads to a crash pointing to them, which means an original XML for the existing SD files does not exist.
Only way to to synchronize them is hard work via the SD converter (the way the original modders did for some strange reason): convert the SD files to a readable format and then make sure all those entries are in the XML file. I kept that converter for a rainy day like this (not my program, credit belongs to someone else, I think there is a readme file included).

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