A Brief overview of "variations" and "faction_variations" for textures.
This is a work in progress, but I seem to recognize a pattern on the way textures load for the battlemap.
Whenever there is an open field battle, the game will look for different variants of textures, plus winter.
The main texture folders load for any faction, as long as you are in your region.
A winter subfolder is included in blockset/textures and several other folders; these always load when the ground is snow.
Whenever the battle location is a south_european or middle_eastern open field battle, the game will look for subfolders for both types; these two types cover a very large part of the stratmap.
The game will look for a faction_variations folder when there is a settlement involved in the battle.
The faction_variations, as far as I can tell, will always be for the faction who owns the settlement.
I made a quick example to illustrate:
Kiev_Rus is defending in a siege battle against Hungary.
I created a custom texture for walls_castle_large_stone.texture and placed it in the folder data/blockset/textures/faction_variations/kievan_rus/winter/
This will only load for a Kiev_Rus castle or any other Kievan structure that uses that texture in winter.
For my Engish mercenary Sudanese horde I am currently deploying in my campaign; I just quickly created a pseudo-english skin for the cavalry merc texture and put in a variations/south_european/subfolder. Since I know I won't encounter any enemy units with this same unit in this region (Milan), I don't have to worry about both sides having the same skin.
As I move north I will create a Sudanese" winter skin, for the northern regions (Their objective is Lithuania, then a ship back to Timbuktu for the survivors, if any ;-))
I accidentally deleted this Moorish nubian texture set when I reinstalled Kingdoms back around New Year's, but you get an idea of how it works; all independently of the modeldb and EDU.
Also notice the catapults wheels are impacted with snow; this works on the same principle; I explained this on a different thread a while back.
The variations also are affected by which faction you play:
If I start a campaign as Egypt, the game will load the regular folder textures, not middle_eastern variants. Only when I move outside the middle_eastern regions will it look for variations, or if I attack any other faction's (including other middle_eastern faction) settlements.
That same basic principle seems to hold true for all factions.
The variations/faction_variations can be applied to every single texture folder in the game: attachment sets, units, effects, overlay textures, blockset, vegetation, terrain, etc.
This is still a study in progress, so there still may be other variables and changes I've yet to confirm, but this is a basic overview.
And this is for textures only, not models, unfortunately.
I have seen the game search for a variations folder in the main data folder before, at the beginiing of the game boot sequence.; whether or not this path could be used to load alternate mesh and cas files has yet to be explored...
Feel free to comment or add what you might know on this subject.
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Originally Posted by Echad
