Two mod announcements: VnV fixes & VnV overhaul mod.

[Orientis]

Hey all, read here for a while during Rome, but never posted.

I did a lot of modding for myself on character traits etc in Rome, and now that I know the system, thought that I could make a fix for all the V&V problems in M2, and post them here. My plan is for two mods:

One, fix all the obvious bugs such as; princesses/assassins losing all trait points instead of one at a time; incorrect init traits (ie princesses never coming of age with any charm); and the wealth of simply broken or incomplete traits which mean few are showing up at all. So far I have fixes for most of these, though some very silly bugs seem to have been hardcoded: for example, I have a fix to make charm/diplomacy/subterfuge go up and down by single points on successful/failed missions instead of losing 100% of gained points on a failed mission, but it seems that the Med2 team have managed to hardcode a really stupid bug which makes anti-traits completely incompatible (in Rome, for example, if you had a toon with GoodAssassin 3, gaining BadAssassin 1 = to GoodAssassin -1, thus you ended up with GoodAssassin 2 – in Med2, gaining BadAssassin 1 negates the GoodAssassin trait, so you simply end up with no trait, then on the next failure, BadAssassin 1).

Two, do a much deeper overhaul of the trait system to make it actually involving and give your characters real personalities, moreover, completely rework governance traits so that a bad governor will be very bad (bad enough to make cities rebel), and good governors are the only way to stem late-game corruption and so on. This included; fixing the tax and admin traits; making bad governance traits seriously deteriorate public order; making anything less than 100% public order in cities start to affect the governor and become self-perpetuating, thus adding some management challenge in the late game which you can actually control (instead of being unavoidably linked to income); deleting the dull and unstoppable bloated empire syndrome, and replacing it with a new all-or-nothing Corruption trait (based on your characters other traits, ie Honest characters would not have the Corruption trait, Extravagent characters would) which would mean only non-Corrupt characters would be worthwhile governors, as Corrupt characters would take almost all your income from that city. This mod would also expand and make better use of ancillaries, with better links to fathers when characters come of age (ie a character with a Grand Crusader father is more likely to have picked up a crusading knight as a mentor).

The two mods would be separate, as I realise many people want VnV fixes without radical changes.

But…

There is a serious problem in Med2 VnV modding. The files which affect VnVs / ancillaries are:

/data/export_desc_character_traits.txt : codes trait effects and trait triggers
/data/export_desc_VnVs_enums.txt : lists all traits
/data/text/export_VnVs.txt : text for all traits, trait names, descriptions

For some unknown reason, however, when I finally managed to unpack the last file (unpack_all missed it), it’s been turned into a bloody .bin file. It is now data/text/export_VnVs.txt.strings.bin. Opening it with notepad produces a file with various ASCII (sp? I’m not a code monkey ) symbols, text spread out with one space inbetween each letter, and no structure: it would be pretty much impossible to edit on a large scale, it’s easy enough to make mistakes in the text files which do have a structure. Though most mods should still work, being unable to access this file will make them invisible, and moreover I'm not certain that the more complex VnV mods won't end up crashing as a result.

EDIT: Hah, teach me to post first and check forums later. Found the conversion program in Tools. Consider this an announcement for an intended mod then