Pimp Charlemagne Mod?

henryMCVII · Oct 10, 2009

I was seraching CFC for some pure medieval BtS Mods, but I did not find something. What I found is for Warlords or even Vanilla, but BtS Mods are missing. So I decided to play around with BtS Charlemagne Mod a bit. I did it just for my own pleasure, but now its getting bigger and bigger. Well, not really big, but harder to handle, since im pretty new in modding so even small changes are still a hard job to me.

Does it make sense to load it up here and work in a team to ... improve it a bit? I love some things in FFH (but its much to complicated for me). So i hope noone will complain about im using some stuff out of it. Maybe one day this mod will be a strongly reduced medival version of FFH... hwo knows? Since there are no medieval mods, I am afraid most Civ4 BtS players are not interested in such just ... pimped medieval Mod. Anyway, here is my basic plan:

Spoiler :

And here is, what i did so far:

Spoiler :

Version 0.01 aviable for Download, but - its not working, its just becouse I need some help. Got CTD becouse of .... Pagan buildings I guess. Anyway I couldnt find my mistake.

Spoiler :

Here is the File (4,5 MB) ==>> http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=13696

Any help or even comment still would be welcome.

Tholish · Oct 10, 2009

HRE as victory condition is integral to the original mod. However, you could try a trick I do in my future mod: have a temporarily available victory condition. I have the UN become available with Fission, but it goes obsolete with Utopianism. So if you don't have it and you are afraid someone might get a diplomatic victory you research Utopianism like crazy and gift it to whoever built the UN. Whew. Maybe you could have a discovery of the new world victory condition and just have the mod go into all kinds of renaissance stuff. So the Christendom could use the Apostolic Palace as a UN and the New World could be the Spaceship.

Also, maybe you could replace all the static leaderheads of the original mod with animated ones.

You could have vikings with the Norse religion and maybe Mongols with theirs (I don't remember what its called and don't think anyone has ever done it up). And many of the Slavs were still pagan. Also, you have Orthodox, Heretical, and Protestant versions of Christianity that could be extra rels. Maybe even blend it with Crossroads. Maybe have a map script like Earth2, Great Plains, or Oasis that generates a Europe area like map, for random games.

Ajidica · Oct 12, 2009

This sounds cool. However, please extend the map to include Spain so as to have the Visigoths/Moors. This was one thing that really bugged me with the original game. Charlemagne never fought in North Africa, yet he did fight alot in Spain (The Song of Roland). Extending the map to include Asia Minor/Levant to give Byzantium someone to fight in the east would be good or include the Slavs/Bulgars in the Balkans as they were a large threat to Byzantium.
Out of curiosity, whats the timeframe for the 'revamped' mod.

henryMCVII · Oct 12, 2009

Tholish, I know, HRE was integral part of the game, but... I turned it of, becouse I felt it was pretty imbalanced. Maybe I/we should try to balance it and turn this Victory on again? Actually I'm open to ideas... but im a new modder (and a slow one, I'm afraid). So don't expect to much at once.

@Ajidica: About te map... is here some map on CFC, which you would love to see involved here? Actually im playing around with some sort of "fantasy"-map. Yes, Charlamagne on an pure Fantasy map, with navigable Rivers, with loooong huuuge mountain ranges and some additional things like preplaced forts and and an reduced number of potential harbor plots. Its an pretty old map I had downloaded some time ago here ot somewhere else, just for my own pleasure.

For Europe playing I was thinking about this map. http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=241394&highlight=euree I liked the scale and the shape of the map, but exept extracting I didn't do very much with that until now.

Ajidica said:
Out of curiosity, whats the timeframe for the 'revamped' mod.

Well... I did not think about this very much yet, but I would not expect, making it last longer then until the beginning Age of Discovery. Starting Age was like in the original Mod 500 a.d. first, but i moved down to 300 a.d. now.

Ajidica · Oct 12, 2009

Map>A full on fantasy map might be fun to play, but having a real europe map is good. As long as Spain is included to give Charlemagne a historical muslim enemy, thats fine.
Timeline> I would reccoment pushing it back to 500 AD. If you move it to 300, you have to take into account the collapse of the western roman empire, barbarian migrations, setting up kingdoms, huns, whole nine yards. I only know of one mod that does that, and it has extensive python work to do so. If you start at 500 AD, the last vestige of Rome in Gaul, the Empire of Syagrius was gone, and with the exception of the Visigoths, the Frankish kingdoms were all about equal in power. An exception was the Visigoths, but since they were forced south of the Pyrennies in 507 (Battle of Vouille IIRC) a small anacronism at start wouldn't be bad.
I would also not reccoment going until the Age of Discovery. Alot would have to happen to make it feel realistic. Crusades, Mongols, collapse of Byzantium, ect, it would be a full blown total conversion, better suited toward RFC Europe mod.

Please dont take this to be domineering. Its your mod, not mine.

henryMCVII · Oct 12, 2009

Starting at 500 sounds reasonable to me. Running until 1300 or even 1400 would be nice anyway. The problem to me was just I love playing marathon and I run into 1600s while playing. So I just pushed the start back. Something with Calendar need to be adjusted, but its a minor thing, I believe.

I dont care THAT much about historical game play but its always nice to have the right civs/leaders involved. I'm still thinking about adding Huns or Mongoles later on (or even more). Not sure about making them playable or not. Making them Minor Civ(s), may allow some privateer like pirates without adding to much civs...

henryMCVII · Nov 26, 2009

Last week I was working a bit on my files but run into some trouble. I added Paganism Religion, but I cant get it run; I was searching the mistake I made for hrs, but without success. Anyone pls... could you check the DL from Download Page?

Short descriptioin, how i run into problems: While adding Paganism i was loading each single step in BTS and got erroe messages (of cource - there where lots of things missed first: Pagan Buildings and Pagan Missinoary). Then i added the Missionary using the confucian one. It was working but i still got errors becouse of missing buildings. Now I added buildings using confucian buildings there as well and buddhist sound + icon. ... tested... got errormessages ... errors removed ... now the Game crashes without error messages.

I tought it could have to do with missing entry in Python event file for Charlemagne, but I removed the python stuff and still got the CTD. Then I was checking for typos again and again... I did not catch my mistake. :cry:

Here is the file. http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=13696

Btw, I could not find any Tutorial "How to add Religion?", just "How to change Religion" http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=150737&highlight=religion .

The_J · Nov 26, 2009

When does it crash?
If it loads: Does the new religion show up in the civilopedia?

If you can edit the normal XML files, and you understand them (okay, main parts), then you don't really need a tutorial. Look at the shinto religion to see, what files you need to edit.

The Capo · Nov 26, 2009

All you really have to do is replace the other religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) with whatever religions you want and enact them in the XML for the mod. I'm not that familiar with the Charlemagne mod but it doesn't seem like this should be that difficult to do. From what I gather you are trying to do one thing at a time and then check on it by loading the mod? If this is the case that is the WRONG way to go about this, some aspects of a mod need more than one thing/file to be enacated/altered in order to work so if you are only editing a line here and there (especially if you aren't adding the corresponding art in a lot of cases, which means you should be editing at least three different XML files) you are certainly going to get an error message.

Adding/replacing religions should be the least of your worries for a mod like this. I would just edit the existing religions to different ones (Hindu could become Slavic Paganism, Buddhism could become Norse Paganism, Taoism could become Celtic/British Paganism, Confucianism could become Tengriism for the Mongols or something to that effect) and in that cause all you have to do is replace the regular XML which should be pretty simple to do. I mean if you can't pull that off you should probably start modding on a smaller scale.

EDIT: Although you might want to have Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but I'm not really sure about the time-frame for you mod so you may not have to do this really.

Ajidica · Nov 26, 2009

I would split Catholicism and Orthodox into two different faiths. Even though the Great Schism hadn't occured yet, the eastern and western churchs disagreed on alot. A few examples are Iconoclasm, Monophysitism, and control on the bulgarian church. (Rome claimed it because initialy it was Catholic while Constantinople claimed it due to distance. Eventualy it sided with Constantinople but Rome didn't like that)
The crowning of Charlemagne didn't help anything because it theoreticaly called into the unity of christendom. It was viewed as one God in Heaven, one Emperor on earth.

phungus420 · Nov 26, 2009

The absolute best medieval mod is History of Three Kingdoms. Well worth checking out:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=311432

nutnut · Nov 26, 2009

phungus420 said:
The absolute best medieval mod is History of Three Kingdoms. Well worth checking out:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=311432

Wrong place, wrong timeframe. Though some of its concepts could certainly be transported over to this.

henryMCVII · Nov 26, 2009

The_J said:
When does it crash?
If it loads: Does the new religion show up in the civilopedia?

Thank you, The_J, it crashes just while loading, so there are no error messages and no civpedia.

The scenario was loading (with error messages) as long no/not all buildings where included in files. But now its crashing during loading without any messages exept the windows vista error "the programm dont run any longer... bla". The only "solution" is, removing pagan religion again from all connected xml files.

Could you take a look please? I added a small DL (4 MB) in Data base.

Oh, just changing for example buddhism into paganism dont work, becouse there is no buddhism in every charlemagne religion connected xml files.

Im not sure if I will split into orthodoxy and catholycism. We need to test with 3 religions first - once it is running. Anyway, the idea itself sounds fine.

The legion thing in chinese scenario looks great to me... not sure if i will be able to add such thing here. I'm still beginner in moding, you know?

The Capo · Nov 26, 2009

I hope you didn't think I meant to change the religion in the main files, of course you have to add it, but if this works like other mods (and of course I am not sure if it does because I am not very familiar with it) all you really need to do is get the XML from stock BtS and replace the on in the Charlemagne scenario with the stock XML, then from that point you alter it, but again I don't know what Charlemagne looks like so you might have to edit techs and other stuff like that.

What I would suggest to you really is to start small. I'd take the regular Charlemagne scenario and maybe flavor a few units, add another civ or make one playable and take small steps from there. Once you get enough of that done I'd release that and then try for a more ambitious project. I am in the process of doing this myself with my mod and I have not had anywhere near the amount of problems I had with my first one. I am pretty interested in this myself because I wanted to use the Charlemagne engine to create a Conquistadors mod, but right now I am busy working on my other mod so I can't really help you out with this right now. There is plenty of great artwork out there that would be perfect for this type of mod though.

If I were you I'd start it at the Frankish conquest of the Gallo-Roman Kingdom/Soissons and end it around the time of Charlemagne's death.

EDIT: Just to clarify what I meant by the first sentence, I'm sure you know this but I don't want to be resonpsible for screwing up your stuff, do not ever change the base files.

henryMCVII · Nov 27, 2009

Some toughts about the religon related crash...

While checking XML files, I discovered I had forgotten the Great Prophet need to be able to build the Pagan Shrine. But changing the Great Prophet in CIV4UnitInfos.xml doesn't fix the crash.

Then I tought, "Paganism" is allready build in - having no religion is also called "Paganism". So I guessed, giving the new religion same name in some XML files may have caused the trouble. But changing it to RELIGION_PAGAN instead of RELIGION_PAGANISM does not solve anything.
Maybe I had not catched all paganism stuff, so I started from zero. Took a running copy of Charlemagne II and copy + paste in confucian stuff from BtS Asset XML files without renaming it in this first step. This leads to the same trouble then renaming it to pagan.

What about the Reliques and the Inquisitor things? Are there any SDK or Python files in Charlemagne scenario, that may cause the trouble when adding another religion?

I'm still clueless. Probably (hopefully?) its an stupid mistake I made, but... I cant find it.

The_J · Nov 27, 2009

For the problem in generall:
If the mod crashes during loading, then you normally missed a graphical tag.
So check, if the artDefines entry for your missionary/temple/monastery/whatever in the unitInfos/BuildingsInfos is really the right one. Check, if somewhere's a typo in it.

henryMCVII · Nov 27, 2009

I allready checked several times and several hours. Do you know how hard it is, to find own mistakes? You always tends to miss them.

Vortilex · Nov 27, 2009

I think a World Map version would be interesting. It's weird in the vanilla version of Charlemagne the Arab/Islamic capitol is Carthage, which in the middle ages had begun to decay, and the "Crusades" in the mod are only as far as Byzantium, which only has Thrace, and doesn't even have Constantinople. I think real animated leaderheads for civs other than the one with Charlemagne, the Islamic Empire, and Byzantium. There are several good Pope leaderheads and if you know how to make leaderheads you can make some new ones to replace Eleanor, Alfred (who exists here on CFC), etc. I hate the .dds/.nif file clashes that occur when one is too lazy to make new ones, so they just make happy/sad/angry .dds files and use pre-existing .nif files for other leaderheads. I think you should make it a bit more like the Earth 1000 AD mod, so that the tech tree never runs out, but it's still a mod because of all the added content. Becoming the HRE should be the main goal (because that's what it is in the Vanilla version) but is more like a super victory point bonus, not a victory condition.

davidlallen · Nov 28, 2009

henryMCVII said:
I allready checked several times and several hours. Do you know how hard it is, to find own mistakes? You always tends to miss them.

Passing by ... you may want to look at civcheck, which automatically finds a number of these mistakes.

Pimp Charlemagne Mod?

henryMCVII

Warlord

Tholish

Emperor

Ajidica

High Quality Person

henryMCVII

Warlord

Ajidica

High Quality Person

henryMCVII

Warlord

henryMCVII

Warlord

The_J

Say No 2 Net Validations

The Capo

godless Heathen

Ajidica

High Quality Person

phungus420

Deity

nutnut

Budding Modder

henryMCVII

Warlord

The Capo

godless Heathen

henryMCVII

Warlord

The_J

Say No 2 Net Validations

henryMCVII

Warlord

Vortilex

Imperator Mundi

davidlallen

Deity

Similar threads