New Doodads

Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2012 8:02 pm

I've been working on a mod that adds new doodads into the game.

infantry corpses for every faction:

British, German, Japanese, and Russians infantry corpses have already been created and seem to work fine. honestly, that was something that sorta bugged me from the moment I got this game. "why not make corpses for every country, it couldn't be that hard, right?"

added new destroyed tank doodads for Germany, Russia, and the United States:

USA

Light Tank
USA

Heavy Tank
USA

Truck
GER Light Tank
GER Heavy Tank
GER King Tiger
RUS Light Tank
RUS Heavy Tank

(the tricky part was adding the different grades of tanks-- and my solution was a bit odd. I copied the appropriate tank death onto the tank corpse template-- what this means is that it will ANIMATE the tank death to create the corpse-- but the corpse doesn't dissolve into the ground like normal. I'm sure there's a better way to have gotten things done-- but I'm not all that good with hex-editing, to be honest. so I picked the easiest solution I could think of)

made a generic truck doodad (created by splicing the RUS and USA

trucks)

made a generic ambulance (see above, with a red cross applied to the top)

would anybody be interested in these new doodads? any suggestions for others?

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2012 8:42 am

When you say doodads, are you talking about things that are added to the the battlefield via the map editor, or things that are spawned after a unit is destoyed?

Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2012 6:10 pm

these are literally "Doodads". they are all added manually through the map editor.

Posted: Tue Jan 17, 2012 8:42 am

How big are the files?

Would be interesting to recreate Stalingrad and D-Day with tons on bodies/destroyed tanks. More realistic.

Posted: Wed Jan 18, 2012 9:55 pm

about 5 megs: if you drag and drop this into your A&A "Data" folder it will should add/overwrite everything appropriately.

the zip-file is too big for me to post here-- so I'll see if I can post it online somwhere else.

Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2012 11:19 am

Gizmotron wrote:

about 5 megs: if you drag and drop this into your A&A "Data" folder it will should add/overwrite everything appropriately.

the zip-file is too big for me to post here-- so I'll see if I can post it online somwhere else.

Might want to try filefront (Or gamefront now apparantly) as they have a bunch of mods there. There is a paratrooper mod that adds airborne anti-tank and engineer infantry to the factions. I found this quite useful as it showed me how to make airborne versions of every infantry in the game (Save for the obvious ones, like marines).\

Also how did you add the bodies? I plan on making new infantry units, so it might be useful for me to know. I guess I could just look at your files though to see how.

Posted: Thu Jan 19, 2012 9:30 pm

you copy and rename the .nif files. the important detail is that for an active unit (one you can recruit) the base skin has to be the exact same name as the unit you copied.

for example, I've given marines and snipers to every nation (to varying degrees, my current mod has marines as a sort of melee-counter to snipers. if you can get them entrenched even snipers have a hard time defeating them).

so even though I've copied the .nif and renamed it GermanInfantryMarine the base skin still has to be USAInfantryMarine for the .dds file.

with doodads and buildings, if memory serves, everything has to match or you get wild neon pixelatied skins.

I started off by finding the TGI file that I wanted-- then changed the data to reflect a new nationality.

it's easiest to start off with modifying existing files.

I decided that I wanted German to be able to recruit "Volksgrenadier" regiments. so I copied the actor data from the Russian conscript unit (since these were basically German conscripts using submachine guns) for the .tgi file. I then copied the SAS Commando base (since the Volksgrenadier weapon was a simplified copy of the Sten gun) and renamed the .nif file.

you have to be careful to rename all of the parts-- the game will not allow the same IDS to be attached to multiple units or regiments.

I copied the [Element Component] from the sniper infantry .tgi file... so that the German HQ can't have access to the "Volksgrenadier regiment" without purchasing "conscription" technology. the same can be done by copying the "required tech" lines from Flamethrower infantry, or whatever unit you like.

I've looked into making marine-based infantry into airborne-- but the templates don't match up. it's hard-wired into water or ground deployment... but it would be cool to come up with airborne marines.

names become important-- because I converted the 76.2 mm Russian field gun into an anti-tank battery with the same armor piercing power as a Russian medium tank. I renamed the item "bunker_at"

then comes the sometimes tedious process of opening up the strings_data_AA tgi file in the "Localization" folder to make sure that your new additions get named properly in the game. sometimes this works easily-- and sometimes, for reasons that are still a mystery to me, the names won't stick. the placement of the new data seems to be very important. it only looks for certain types of names in certain sections-- so if you make a new special op it seems to require it to be within a certain section of code. the same seems to hold true for regiments, sound effects, and doodads.

Posted: Fri Jan 20, 2012 11:10 am

Gizmotron wrote:

then comes the sometimes tedious process of opening up the strings_data_AA tgi file in the "Localization" folder to make sure that your new additions get named properly in the game. sometimes this works easily-- and sometimes, for reasons that are still a mystery to me, the names won't stick. the placement of the new data seems to be very important. it only looks for certain types of names in certain sections-- so if you make a new special op it seems to require it to be within a certain section of code. the same seems to hold true for regiments, sound effects, and doodads.

For names, I found it easier to simply put the actual name in the same file. For example a file for a any unit/ technology/etc has the paratroopers:

name = "Paratrooper Officer"
editor_name = "#rus_paratrooper_co_editor_name"

Originally the name was in "#", but I changed it like the above and tested it and it works fine. So now it reads from the unit data rather than the strings_data_AA.tgi. I've done the same for techs, units, haven't done it for buildings yet, but everything I changed to reflect the above example works perfectly.

Posted: Sat Jan 21, 2012 11:39 am

aha, that's good to know. maybe the reason it has such a Byzantine naming process is because some units get used by multiple factions and by special ops...

Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 10:39 am

Gizmotron wrote:

aha, that's good to know. maybe the reason it has such a Byzantine naming process is because some units get used by multiple factions and by special ops...

You can do the same for descriptions as well. Like for techs.