UNIT CARDS
Making unit cards is a lot more fun than database entry, mainly because it is done almost entirely out of PFM. You will need the newest version of GIMP which you can download for free after a quick google search. Making unit cards from scratch would be ridiculously difficult to do, therefore like everything else in this tutorial we will be using unit cards that are already in the game and editing them. The unit cards can be found in two pack files, the majority of them are in data.pack while the remainder is in data_rome2.pack. Here is how you find them.
We will first be looking at the unarmoured falxman and will then copy it's style. Look for it in the packfile and then extract it by right clicking then clicking "extract" then "extract selected". Extract it to where you wish, I have a specific folder where I keep all the unit cards. We can now open it up in GIMP, shall we take a look?
Here we have a nice handsome falxman. A lot of people don't like the unit cards but I actually like them, they are minimalist and the style is very authentic, best of all their simplicity is a god send to unit modders as they are very easy to edit. We now need to consider how we will change the card, so we will look at the unit we're adding.
So we want to add:
- A helmet.
- body armour.
- A cloak.
For this tutorial I will show you the two techniques I use for editing. They are freehand drawing and the other is.... wait lets make a game of this, see if you can guess what it is:
We are going to get the helmet from another unit, I think this Celtic helmet from Naked Warriors will do.
So we will open up the two cards in GIMP. Then we use this tool, the free select tool, to select the Naked Warrior's head and helmet
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Then in GIMP you click on "Edit" then "Cut" the head you select will then become a brush, here:
You can then use the paint tool to paint the head onto our falxmen. Undo it and redo it as you will probably need to edit the size to get it right.
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Too small, too big, Just right! Now I am going to draw the armour and cloak freehand. This is not difficult, when I was a little kid I used to play with microsoft paint, you probably did the same and that's all the skill you need for this.
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It really couldn't be any easier. You'll notice that the unit card is colourless. That is because the faction colour is not included in the icon but in the mask which is another file. It is possible to paint colours on unit cards and forget masks all together but this will cause problems if the units are shared between factions and if there is a civil war.
This is what a mask looks like:
I can hear you saying "what the hell is that?!" It is the unit's pants and the shaft of the falx painted in a special colour. This lies over the unit card and the colour changes to the faction colour. It must be perfectly in line with the unit card and essentially look like the same picture. Sounds hard right? how are you going to draw the pants in the exact same place? Easily, I'll show you how.
All you have to do is bring up your unit card and use the dropper tool to select the special colour. Then you select a new layer here:
Now you get your paint brush and in the new layer you paint over all of the places you want the mask. For our Armoured Falxman we will paint his pants, sleeves, cloak and the shaft of his falx.
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As you can see the coverage doesn't need to be perfect. Next what you do is delete the old layer, it should be the name of your unit.
Then you use the filler tool to make the mask more solid.
And there you have it, your mask. Export both the mask and the card. Adding it to your mod is easy, in the template the unit cards and masks are here:
Just right click on the templates, click "add" then "files" and find your unit cards. Make sure you rename them in the same way the templates are named. The unit card is
named with your unit's name and ".png" so ours will be Get_arm_falx.png. The unit mask is saved with your unit's name and "_mask_1.png" so ours will be Get_arm_falx_mask_1.png.
Now we are ready to see what it looks like in game. Remember, a unit card is the icon + mask. Put them together and what have you got?
Bipity, bopity, boo.
TEXT
This section will deal with text, you will learn how to give your unit's names and descriptions. This will be a short section as its fairly simple. The text tables can be found in the template here:
Make sure you rename the tables with your own prefix in the same way you did with the db tables. We will start with land_units.loc. This is the table that gives a unit it's name. Here is what it looks like when it's opened and expanded.
When you are making only one unit then it is fine to just edit the line that I provided. But if you want to make more lines then you cannot click on "add new row" then it will not work, the game won't crash but the name will remain blank. Instead you highlight the template row and click "clone current row". Now to edit the table you simply replace the entry on the left with the unit name from db and the one on the right with how you want it to appear in-game. Here is how our Falxmen look.
The next table is unit_description_short_texts.loc. It is very similar to the the first except this one gives the unit a description, the one that will be visible when you hover your mouse over the unit on the battlefield or on the campaign map. Filling in the description is easy, there is absolutely no technical skill needed. However, this is one of the things that a lot of mods do wrong. I know that I say that a lot of things are easy but this is hard. The unit description is literally the your units first impression and as we all know, first impressions are very important. Like everything else in this tutorial it is very important that the description fits with the other in the game, they must sound good, give historical information, tell you how the unit should be used and be a little poetic. As always it is best to look at a similar unit. Here is the description of the unarmoured Falxmen.
Hmm, that isn't very helpful. We should look at the Noble Swords unit to see what that says.
That's a little better but isn't really relevant to a Falx unit. Maybe we can combine the two? How is this?
These noble warriors, clad in the finest armour, wield the mighty falx to cut an enemy in two with a single blow.
That's pretty good. I will put that in the right entry and the unit name in the left instead of Template. Here is what the name and description looks like in the game.
So, you are no longer only a modding genius, you're a poet too!