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Philippe
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New symbol for capitals in WIA

Thu Mar 08, 2012 8:22 pm

I've gotten much better at adding alpha channels to PNG files quickly and easily, so I couldn't resist turning out another one of these.

Truth in advertising: it isn't as much fun as the Liberty Bell symbol that I came up with earlier. But it does work for the English, French, Spanish, and all flavors of Americans, so you don't have to change it when you change scenarios.

I'm still hoping that Pocus will come along and explain exactly how to give different symbol icons for different factions. I know there are similarities between the WIA and PON engines, but I think there may be a mechanical link missing from the WIA engine that would allow each country to have its own symbol. If it does turn out that this is possible, I've already made several nation-specific symbols. But I'm not rolling them out for now because I just don't see how to apply them. [Just to be clear: as much as I like the Liberty Bell icon, I don't want to see it showing up on the French, British, and Spanish capitals].

This icon is derived from one of the ones that gets used in PON, only it's been recolored, repainted, and resized. So back up your originals, unzip the attached folder into a safe place, and add the folder named Graphics to you WIA folder.
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PhilThib
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Fri Mar 09, 2012 8:47 am

Get in touch with lodilefty here. He may help.

The capital icon can be customized in our recent games, and most likely it should be able to work also in the older games, because the engine is more or less the same...only some special directives are activated or not.

You can make a try for yourself.

Go to GameData/Factions and open the faction file of the nation to edit with a text editor (wordpad)

Add inside:

CapitalSymbol = XXX.png

where XXX.png is the name of your new icon

Run the game and see if it works.
:cool:
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Philippe
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Fri Mar 09, 2012 3:20 pm

Even if I were to add a few lines with a text editor that defined the image file that a country were to use for its capital, the problem that I'm having is understanding where to put the collection of capital images. Do they go into their own separate folder, and if so, what name do I give it? And whether they go loose or in their own folder, where in the graphics folder do I put that folder (or lack of folder)? Computers are finicky beasts, and if you don't get that kind of thing exactly right, it won't work.

My first reaction is to create folders that imitate what goes on in the structure of PON. But I notice that the folder in PON that holds the folder that contains the different national capitals has a name that doesn't exist in WIA (Faction Indicators&Flags). Do I create a Capital Indics folder inside the WIA Flags folder and hope the program can read it?

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PhilThib
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Fri Mar 09, 2012 4:11 pm

As long as in the Graphics folder, it will be read.... :D

Nevertheless, for 'cleanness' and ease of finding, place them in the same folder where the current indicator is: Graphics/Plates
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Philippe
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Fri Mar 09, 2012 4:41 pm

It's not showing up. I may have done something wrong, and I need to check a few things. The first of which is what the name of the file that I'm using as a test really is.

I've added CapitalSymbol = Bell.png to the last line of the American faction, and saved a bitmap as a PNG in Photoshop and named it Bell. I guess I need to double check to make sure that the bmp extension got purged from the name of the file (pretty sure it did), and that sticking the CapitalSymbol instruction at the end of the list was a good idea. I suppose I also need to check to make sure there aren't some invisible spaces lurking in there somewhere throwing things off.

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Philippe
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Fri Mar 09, 2012 5:08 pm

I've tried a few more things but no luck. I checked to make sure the name was correct and didn't include something weird and invisible like an extra bmp extension. I tried moving the file around to a few different folders, and I even renamed the file American and moved its instruction line in the faction file just to see if that would be more compatible. Nothing seems to be working.

My guess would be that there is an extra step that was done to get the game engine from WIA format to PON format, and because people never remember things that they only did once, a long time ago, it's probably passed out of collective memory.

Or there's some magical switch that needs to be turned on by sprinkling fairy dust on it.

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PhilThib
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Fri Mar 09, 2012 6:12 pm

Unfortunately I suppose the code is not compatible...can't do more on that :(
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Philippe
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Fri Mar 09, 2012 6:29 pm

I didn't think it would work, but it was worth a try.

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