Adding new castle variants to custom battles

**Mythic_Commodore** · November 22, 2008, 03:02 PM

I have successfully added in the red brick castles and villages with hills into my game from the Teutonic expansion. However, what file can I edit so that in custom battle maps, where you choose the settlement culture from Northern European, Southern European, Mesoamerican, and Middle Eastern, East European shows up as an option? Is there any other way to allow me to use these new settlements in custom battles?

**Mythic_Commodore** · November 23, 2008, 07:51 PM

Anyone?

**Mythic_Commodore** · November 26, 2008, 08:18 PM

I am beginning to guess that this is impossible.

**Eothese** · November 27, 2008, 06:52 AM

Sorry Mythic, been busy lately. The changes you made, are they just strat map or did you get something onto the battle map in campagin mode? If you did get something onto the battle map in campaign mode then, for me, it should be working in custom battle. I managed to change the wooden forts in the vanilla game, to stone, one for each culture, both in campagin and custom battle. But I couldn't get it to work in a Kingdoms mod. My theory on why is that the Kingdoms expansions are just like any other mod, they take info from the vanilla game and I think that's where the changes need to be made. In the main folder.

Anyway I assume the changes should be made in the settlements/culture/castles or settlments/culture/settlements, but I'm guessing you already got that far...

**Mythic_Commodore** · November 27, 2008, 01:30 PM

Thanks for the reply, Eothese. My problem is that I have added more variants on the battle map and I cannot get the extra variants to appear as an option for custom battle.

**Eothese** · November 27, 2008, 01:58 PM

I can't really give you anything definate here, the way I did it with the forts was to copy the stone fort data into the basic vanilla fort (in a modfolder) and overwrote it. Then played around with the text in .worldpkdgdescr. I lost count of the number of CTD's I got before it worked and there were several bad results, a half buried fort and floating fort.
So my guess on this is that custom battle uses the default settlement;
Entry from my modded wooden to stone fort.

Code:

  serialization::archive       knightly_order_fort_b
   settlement  `   Settlements/South_European/ambient_settlements/fort/se_fort_a.world         culture   southern_european   environment   generic   faction   any   fortificationlevel   3   type   default_fort   variant   stone_fort_b

It should be possible to change the 'variant' to point to the settlement you want.
Its a lot of trial and error, but I'm very interested in this. Please keep me posted and know I'm happy to help out if needed.

**Mythic_Commodore** · November 27, 2008, 07:50 PM

That sounds like what I'm looking for. Does that file use a system of numbering the number of characters in a line, like the battle_models.modelsdb? Is there a formatter out there somewhere?

EDIT: Success! I was able to edit those files using a hex editor. I found out from wolfslayer that they do indeed use a battle_models.modelsdb numbering system. The way to do it, however, is to edit the culture rather than the variant line. Otherwise I think it will be a random variation of another culture's city. Thanks a lot for the help. +rep

**Eothese** · November 28, 2008, 12:50 PM

Glad you got it to work! So what is your final result? A village amongst hills and a redbrick castle on the battlemap in both custom and campaign?

PS. I noted the serialization::archive in the .worldpkdgdescr but couldn't figure what it was counting, if thats the right term, and I just used notepad to open it. If you could explain in a little more detail, I might be able to get buildable stone forts into my Kingdoms mod!

**Mythic_Commodore** · November 28, 2008, 01:39 PM

I used a hex editor to open it. Specifically, this one - http://www.chmaas.handshake.de/delph...vi32/xvi32.htm . Unfortunately, I have been having a bit of trouble in the custom battles. So far, the hilltop villages are just ordinary villages. I haven't tested the castles yet, but I'll be sure to keep you posted. By the way, here is the final code for, as an example, the village. I had to make it a .txt file to get it to upload. Also, the reason I spelled east with an extra "e" is so that it would have the same number of characters as "north", decreasing the amount of hex numbers I had to change.

EDIT: Here's an update. I was able to, through some hacking of the .world files, make the red brick castles use a separate texture from the North European. I just now realized that when I went through and did a search with my hex editor through the village files, I searched for north without a capital "N". I am redoing my search, replacing all instances of "North" with "easte", except for those that point to generic textures. I'll update on whether it works.

**Eothese** · November 29, 2008, 05:54 AM

You might have to add another culture to get this to work in custom battle, or replace an existing one. Hex editors go right over my head, it may as well be Japanese, but I understand the principle now. Maybe I'll have more success! + rep back

**Mythic_Commodore** · November 29, 2008, 06:55 PM

Final update here. I managed to get it all working by editing the .worldpkgdesc file - the culture is still northern_european, however, I coded in it to be unique to the faction Poland. I then repeated the process, replacing the name at the top of the file, east_european_village_a, with east_european_village_b (not the reference to the world file), and coding it in to be specific to Hungary and saving it as east_european_village_b.worldpkgdesc, then finally doinf the same with Russia as east_european_village_c.worldpkgdesc.