Moddding EOS

[Kelly's Heros]

Brit,

How easy is it going to be to mod EOS, like swap out unit icons and add or change music tracks? Not that what you have is not very good and usable, but I'm sure when we get a hold of the ruleset editor we may want to create specific units like Tiger tanks, etc.

[Brit]

Brit,

How easy is it going to be to mod EOS, like swap out unit icons and add or change music tracks? Not that what you have is not very good and usable, but I'm sure when we get a hold of the ruleset editor we may want to create specific units like Tiger tanks, etc.

I actually hadn't thought of changing out the music tracks.

As far as the other issues, I'll break up the question into parts.

When creating your own ruleset, you can start from an existing ruleset or start from scratch.

* Units

The attributes of all units are changable. The attributes include things like: their name, movement rate, movement range, damage, attack/defense values, how does terrain affect movement rates/defense values, what units they can contain, and how much space the unit has. If you take a look at the Official 1900-2030 ruleset, then ask "what varies between these 100+ units?" All of those variations are modifiable. You can also define that a unit can only be built in a city if it has a particular city improvement (eg. you need to have a shipyard in order to build battleships, or a uranium refinery to build nukes).

All units can have 0 or more tags. The tags are used to for containment and view details. So, you can say that a "transport" can contain all units with an "infantry" or "vehicle" tag. But a "transport aircraft" can only contain units with a "paratrooper" tag. This allows you to setup some complicated containment rules. The tag system also allows you to define visibility ranges. So, an aircraft might have a default view range of 100, but it's view-range for all units with the "submarine" tag is 25, and its view-range for all units with the "aircraft" tag is "200".

The rules allow you to define your own "Movement Types" and "Combat Types". In the Official 1900-2030 rules, I define two types of ground-units: "Infantry" and "Vehicle". They have different modifiers for terrain-based movement rates, and terrain-based maintenance costs. The ground-units are split into two combat types: "Soft" (infantry and non-armored vehicles) and "Armor". The combat types are used for setting up the entrenched-defense bonus, and terrain-based defense multipliers. All units have combat values against each combat type. This means that a particular unit might have very good attack values against "Soft", but very bad attack values against "Armored". Inside the ruleset editor, you can makeup whatever movement-types and combat-types you want. So, you could create one movement type and one combat type for all ground units (for simplicity), or you could make-up a dozen different combat types for units, and name them something like "infantry", "lightly armored", "medium armored", "heavy armored", etc.

The game has a bunch of unit images already, and you can use any of the pre-existing unit images. There is not currently any way to add your own unit images to the system, but I'd like to add that, and add it to the game's upload/download system that currently allows players to share maps, scenarios, and rules with each other.

You can define which units are available to players at the very beginning of the game, and define which units are only available after a particular technology has been researched.

* City Improvements

You can define which city improvements are available in the game. You can name them, set their construction cost, and setup their effects. The city-improvement effects are not completely open-ended. There's a bunch of things to can change (like how much does a factory improve the production value of a city), but you can't come-up with completely new effects. Right now, the images for city-improvements are the seven buildings you see in the "Official 1900-2030" rules. You can pick any of those images, but there is currently no system for adding new images. (If you look at the file-system, you can see that's it's actually trivial to add unit or building images to the system, but they won't get shared with other players. Like the unit-images, I'd like to add building-images to the upload-download system in the future. Until that happens, I'm saying that you can't actually add unit-images to the system -- if you added your own images and tried to play multiplayer with rules that use your new images, and those other people didn't have the images, it would crash their system.)

Like units, you can define which city-improvements are available to players at the very beginning of the game, and define which ones are only available after a particular technology has been researched. Here's an image of the city-improvement editor page:

* Technology

You can construct your own technologies. You name them, set their cost, and setup the their prerequisites. Then, you can arrange them into a technology-tree.

* Unitsubsets

There is also a "Unitsubset" system in place so that certain players have access to certain units, technologies, or buildings. This means that, theoretically, someone could create a system where a rules-system has a "German" unitsubset (which has Tiger tanks, V2 rockets, etc), a Japanese unitsubset (which has Zeros and Kamikazis), and an American unitsubset (which has Sherman Tanks and atomic bombs). Thus, certain players would only have access to certain technologies in the game.

The rules-editor is not a scripting system. It's a system with a bunch of variables, and it allows you (in some cases) to define your own keywords.

* Some things you can't do in the rules-editor:

You cannot add your own images or animations. (But, I'd like to add this.)

You cannot makeup your own resources. The game is limited to money, oil, food, and iron. You cannot, for example, add "water", "aluminum", "diamonds", or "uranium" to the resources. It would be nice to expand on this.

You cannot add resource-improvements (like investing in oil-fields to improve oil-production). You also cannot have resources become exhausted over time. (So, you cannot simulate some sort of 'peak oil' situation.)

[Clarke]

Thank you for taking time to post this Brit. Great info. Very encouraging.

[Kelly's Heros]

Brit,

Thanks for the great detailed response. Sounds like you have plenty of work for EOS 2 or post release patches. :-)

How is the game coming? Are you still on track for an early Dec release?

[Clarke]

Brit, can we sticky this information?

[Moon]

Thread has been stuck... stickied...

[aka_Hawk]

...

* Some things you can't do in the rules-editor:

You cannot add your own images or animations. (But, I'd like to add this.)

You cannot do this in the editor, but you can by creating new folders and files in the ..\data\images\units\ folder of EoS.

Here are a couple of examples.

(new infantry unit to the right)

This was simply done by copying the entire ..\data\images\units\infantry folder to ..\data\images\units\infantry2, and then batch process all the png files in Paint Shop Pro in order to change the color of all the files. This means I also get to keep all the nice animations. NB! I found out that it was smart to rename the files as well, since having the same name as the original files seemed to confuse the program in the Rulset Editor. The _ImageDesc.unit file had to be updated with the new names as well.

Here I just tried to create some boardgame style counters with standard Nato symbols. They look crappy, but you get the idea.

Of course, I cannot create new ruleset and then distribute it because other don't have these new graphics, but I am confident Brit will make that possible in the editor eventually.

[nicodede62]

Here I just tried to create some boardgame style counters with standard Nato symbols. They look crappy, but you get the idea.

Hello, first post and already a first question .

I see you managed to integrate a new image, could you explain the procedure please.

I tried on my side, but the result is not up to par, with a white background unpleasant, Is it be possible to circumvent this problem?

I use gimp.

[hoolaman]

Just fire up the image editor, it is fairly self-explanatory.

If you open up the unit images that come with the game you can see they are small squares that have transparency around the unit sprite.

You need a single image for each frame of each animation for every facing direction.

[aka_Hawk]

Yes, you must use transparency. I'm not that familiar with Gimp, but I'm pretty sure it has alpha chanel attributes (used for transparency).

[Franky007]

I am attempting to add an Helicopter image to the game.

All seem to work except for transparency.

I use GIMP, add an alpha channel, remove the background.

Here is the final example of the png file.

Can you see what is wrong ?

[Brit]

I am attempting to add an Helicopter image to the game.

All seem to work except for transparency.

I use GIMP, add an alpha channel, remove the background.

Here is the final example of the png file.

Can you see what is wrong ?

On initial inspection, it looks fine. I'll have to put it into the image editor and see what happens.

[Brit]

I am attempting to add an Helicopter image to the game.

All seem to work except for transparency.

I use GIMP, add an alpha channel, remove the background.

Here is the final example of the png file.

Can you see what is wrong ?

I tried this file, and everything is working fine for me, including transparency. Are you running with 24-bit or 32-bit color (rather than 16-bit color)?