Hi everyone, I'd like to put a question to you here as it encompasses a lot of M2TW modding.
This is my situation: I'm adding a faction to my mod, following DukeOfSerbia and Gigantus's guides. I've done this 5 times already without any problems. I'm basing it on 'france' and, to make it slightly easier to manually add their units to modeldb, I gave this faction the internal name of 'franks'. I'm on Mac so error logs are unavailable to me, but I have some experience with this.
But, instead of working fine like the 5 times I did this before, this faction is a huge pain to add. I've restarted at least 3 or 4 times and every time I end up with the same problem: CTD at the start.
Yesterday I finally get a breakthrough! The game opens, the faction is available on custom battles and in the campaign selection screen. However: campaigns get kicked back to menu and custom battles (with AND without the new 'franks' faction) give a full-on CTD.
I check out all of the files and I find a weird mistake in descr_character.txt! The file starts with 'franks', thereby messing up the whole file and 'disabling' it, so to say.
I'm elated, I've finally found out what the problem is, I correct it and start the game. Immediate CTD.
Can't even open the game anymore. Uuugh.
So I try removing the new faction's entries from descr_character.txt again. Game starts, everything seems normal, except the campaign now CTDs (which is to be expected, after all: the new faction doesn't have any models!). Custom battles work fine if the new faction isn't involved, obviously. If the faction is involved, CTD. This is also to be expected due to captains being references in descr_character.txt
So what does this mean? I'm assuming something is wrong with the new faction's entries in descr_character? But I've gone over those entries countless times and all they do is copy the entries for 'france' exactly.
My questions are: 1. has anyone ever had this before? 2. what are all the files that descr_character references? I can think of only modeldb and descr_model_strat. However, mistakes in modeldb result in an immediate ctd at the start, so that can't be it. The new faction has been added to modeldb fully (in the sense that it has all the units the 'france' faction has.
The cool thing is that now I've got a pretty specific set of files that MUST be the culprit, the weird thing is that it's still a mystery!
I'm going a bit crazy over this thing, so much so that even the ever-helpful Gigantus told me to step away from it for a day or two! But I'm so close now I can taste victory. Besides, I'm going on vacation and I actually don't want to bring my laptop to distract me =)