Alpha Centauri 2

Other Games => Civilization Beyond Earth General Discussions => Topic started by: Mart on December 18, 2016, 03:41:15 PM

Title: Rising Tide mod of SMACX
Post by: Mart on December 18, 2016, 03:41:15 PM

This is going to be also advice with details how to do some things giving problems.

So beginning with getting Gaians to RT. As a base I took existing mod of Lilgamefreak, SMAC Gaians to BE.
And since RT is somewhat different, his Peacekeepers for RT serve as example.

Having Civ BERT SDK installed in Tools in Steam.
New Project, what is important, is that we need later to set like again (?) the paths in:
Tools > Option > Civilization Beyond Earth ... both custom paths need to be checked and given to what we have on our computer.

Adding 2 xml files to the newely created project: "...Civilisations.xml" and "...Leaders.xml" to folder xml.
Then several xml files to folder art. Also I copied dds files for Deirdre.
- All these above should have names adjusted, e.g. GAIANS in the name. Lilgamefreak has STEPDAUGHTERS, but I changed that to Gaians.
- In general, file names are not that important, XML tags are, from what I understand.
Next important step is getting new files into database, so:
- When opening project properties (click its name in solution explorer window) Actions need to be set. All xml files need to be added to the list with button "Add" and:
-- Event "onModActivated"
-- Action "UpdateDatabase"
-- File ... give its name
Their order may be of importance, but I have no definitive info on this. I got first the ones from art folder though, then from xml folder

This got me visible faction on the starting game setup screen. But there is problem with dds icon.
- The files dds should have flag VFS set to true. They frequently change to false in rebuild? I read something about it, remember, that this may be a problem when working on the mod. When the dds file is highlighted in Solution Explorer, its properties and VFS flag can be seen in properties window.
- Second thing is dds files themselves, so they should have compression BC2/DXT3, which I got in GIMP. I have did that so far for the one file:
Icon_Atlas_GAIANS_64.dds
file, that is main Gaian icon and it was giving load texture error. So now it works when viewing setup screen in the game, though the faction is far from completed.
All other dds files will have to be compressed to BC2/DXT3 and there is several more xml files to make. And I am not sure on SQL additions, if they are needed. I read something, that SQL is faster way of getting some things that can be made in XML. Another thing is required LUA scripts.