Wheel of Time scenario

yeah, how about it s3rgeus? We should work together.

I can't believe I've let such a ridiculously long time go by with this project, I'm really sorry that I left all you guys without a word for a few months. Unfortunately, I don't think I'm gonna be pursuing this Wheel of Time mod any further; I'm working on developing my own game for now, or at least for this summer.

But I think that a Wheel of Time mod would be great for CivV, it's an awesome platform for it. (The full DLL access would be nice.) I don't know if anyone wants to take it up, but here's a zip of all the code and assets I was working with:

http://www.filedropper.com/wheeloftimemodcode

There are a lot of stubs, and a lot of stuff that I wrote placeholders in for to remind myself to code actual logic later. All of the art assets are shamelessly plundered from the internet. There is also a great comic series based on the New Spring novel which could be a good source of art.

In that zip file the 'WoT' folder has all of the art assets in raw forms as I was using them, and some templates I had downloaded/made (was using GIMP). The 'WoTModCiv5' folder has some extra files, notes about what I was planning on doing. Copies of all my Lua files are also in there, since I was using Notepad++ to edit them, and didn't want to externally edit ModBuddy's working directory. And there's a drafted up 'reveal' forum post for a new topic in the base zip directory. The 'WoTModTC' folder is the folder from the ModBuddy directory, so it's got the packaged code, and all of the actual source files. I believe the last thing I was working on was creating a new minor civ trait, a unique one for Tar Valon; but there's a lot of unfinished stuff in there for anyone to pick up.

There are also a lot of other utility mods, and pieces of other people's mods from around this forum integrated in there. I think I drafted up a list of thank yous in the reveal post, but thank you very much to all of them, and to everyone who helped me out on the forums here with my questions; the Lua coding was actually a great introduction to event-driven programming.

Sorry again for not keeping going with this, but hopefully my code will be useful or spur someone on to take up the project in truth, because I would really like to play a Wheel of Time mod some day. A mention somewhere for some credit would be cool. I'll be checking source code.

Ive been working on other projects aswell, but I think that I'm going to start working on this again ASAP. Thanks for providing those files. I only have a very basic programming knowledge (like very very basic), but I'll see how far I can get. I'll post here again if I get anywhere.

Ok, so Ive been going through the mod that you posted, and I gotta say, Im rather excited. This is a lot farther than I ever got. I really want to make this thing, and I should be able to spring board of of this, the only problem being finding where you left blank ends (ie leaving false dragons named 0, and all the places where the qoutes say "the wheel blah blah blah" ) Unfortunatly, this is not only my first time trying to mod anything, but Im also working on a book right now that I am determined to get finished. On top of that, I have no idea how to write lua files, I could probably figure it out if I put enough time into it, but, as I said, Im also working on other projects, and I start school again in 2 weeks.

There is also the annoying problem that i get the stupid error message

An unexpected token ")" was found at character position 68 in condition "'($(PackageMod)' != 'false' And '$(Configuration)' != 'Deploy Only')". C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Firaxis\ModBuddy\Civ5Mod.targets 117 42 WoTModTC

from modbuddy whenever I try and build a mod. So im going to have to get that figured out before I can make any tangible progress. That being said, I really do want to get this mod working, and if anyone is willing to help, I would really appreciate it

arturhawkwing said:

There is also the annoying problem that i get the stupid error message

An unexpected token ")" was found at character position 68 in condition "'($(PackageMod)' != 'false' And '$(Configuration)' != 'Deploy Only')". C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Firaxis\ModBuddy\Civ5Mod.targets 117 42 WoTModTC

from modbuddy whenever I try and build a mod. So im going to have to get that figured out before I can make any tangible progress.

Click to expand...

There is a manual fix for this problem suggested by whoward69 on the 2K forums.
You can find it here.

thanks my dalek friend. There's one problem that I dont have to worry about anymore!

now if only i could figure out why only manetheran and Arad Doman work...

That false dragons named 0 thing was plaguing me for ages and ages. Starting the name with the word 'false' seems to be a keyword or something, I think it gets evaluated as a boolean rather than a string, so the name just becomes 0. As a placeholder, if you want it to be more readable, put another character before the F (like a quotation mark). I think that was one of the things I was trying to fix before I left off, so I'd removed that small fix to work on it.

After a while I had a sort of system for unfinished stuff, "INPUT" in all caps is flavor text that I just hadn't written yet. Things like quotes from the books that were too much trouble to look up. "UNDECIDED" means that I hadn't pinned down exactly how a that specific entry would affect the game yet, but I thought it was a good piece of the mythos to include. (Eg. the Fancloth tech) Speaking of which, reordering the tech tree was something I was working at in the end too. Getting everything to pop up in the right places so they'd all link up was quite a pain. Those two systems aren't all-encompassing though, unfortunately there's some bad practice on my part in there. It's difficult to tell that some things don't work because the info given to the user is all there, but, say, the trait doesn't actually do anything.

As for what could be breaking the mod so only arad doman and manetheren work.... Well, if you can't scroll through the civ selection list, it's most likely a problem with the majorciv_UU or majorciv_UB files, since those are loaded there. A simple thing like duplicates TXT_KEY entries causes that whole screen to wig out.

I know I'm not officially a developer in this any more, but I'll lend a hand now and again if I can.

EDIT: Btw, regarding Lua, if you've got any prior programming experience (in any language) then Lua is quite predictable. The hardest part is learning what Firaxis called all of their functions and what all of the stuff they call in their code does. (Last I checked it, all of the function names were on the wiki but you've gotta guess at what some of them do.) I found reading other modders' code could sometimes be more helpful than reading the main game's stuff.

If work is continuing on this mod, or even if it isn't, I'd like to get in on helping it along. The filedropper link for the code repository doesn't seem to work (redirects to the site's front page); not sure if it's just dead or what.

Seems those links have a finite lifetime. I've uploaded it again, so it should work. My code won't have any of the changes arturhawkwing made though.

Link again: http://www.filedropper.com/wheeloftimemodcode

Just found this thread, I've been working on a similar mod with about a half dozen civs from WoT. Saw the filedropper link was dead once and it appears to be again. I'm tracking down a few bugs in my code, could someone repost the file, or has anyone gotten on this mod? Thanks.

Ok, this link should be more permanent because it's hosted on my DropBox account. Gods & Kings has come out since this was made, so it probably needs an overhaul for compatibility with that, but I understand G&K allows much more customization for mods, which definitely helps this mod a lot.

Good luck to anyone who picks it up!

Code zip file.