how to mod in 'bonuses' (corn, gems, horses, etc) properly in xml correctly? :-o

[yourmatthew999]

hiya ~*~*
well almost a year goes by and im at it again. milking vanilla bts for all its worth
in sort of my own vanilla 'realism invictus' wannabe mod project.
but the one thing that has caused a roadblock now is modding the 'bonuses'.
it seems that the only xml bonus data is in the actual civ iv files and not the bts
expansion. when i tamper with these, whether they're pasted to the 'custom
assets' folder or not, it causes buggy crashism.
is there a right way to do this? maybe there is a limit or such on the number of
bonuses? im sure theres information for it somewhere but im still pretty much
an xml-only modder.

 

[isenchine]

1) There is a BonusInfos file in the BtS XML/Terrain folder.

2) There is a limit of 74 bonuses (because you can fill in 3 rows of resources in TGA files minus the last slot = (3 * 25) - 1). The two tga files must be changed accordingly with the new bonuses. If you want more of them, there are solutions, but as far as I know, it requires a dll modification. Look in the components for 'huge tga' files or this modpack.

 

[vincentz]

1) Iirc there is NO bonusfileinfos in BtS its in Warlords, which is prolly your (OP's) problem

 

[ThorHammerz]

Always search the file in warlords before searching the vanilla..... Firaxis did some schema/formatting changes for a few of the files between those directories....

 

[yourmatthew999]

so thanks to all three of you for your replies/advice
~ yeh he's right, there is *no* bonus file in the bts terrains folder, but, thank you
isenchine for the advice and cool mod pack link (that i plan to use)
well until then i am tentatively assigning 'gems' to give the lucky owner civilization
'military knowledge' (meaning, they are one of the empires who will have access to
the more tactically-involved units, such as phalanx, legions, etc., the other poor sobs will have to do with their random clumsy sword swingers and disorganized spear-throw/chuckers )
the idea was that i didn't want a civilization in my mod to gain those 'evolved' units just by obtaining one extra tech for it (although i thought of making the tech path more complicated along the way)
i decided to use resources ("bonuses"?) as a magic way of endowing certain civilizations with special abilities and power. i figured i can just plop their first city down on top of that resource on the starting map, as well.
(see: rome just happens to be on a 'gem' emplacement, thereby giving them
a seemingly more formationally organized style of warfare, even though i also
gave the germans and any other germanic tribes i also added to my mod
certain promotions to make them woodsmen and just all around fierce fighters,
simulating the whole roman empire/barbarians past the rhine effect)
maybe i will cop out for a while on this mod and just upload it here
(12 mb xml to paste into 'custom assets' thats quite a far cry from evictus or
c2c )
just for some giggles
i also tweaked the combat system as differently as i could so far within the given
xml limits
ANYWAY so yeah i figured if i could add more resources i could keep assigning my
own ("military science", "early tanks" during the classic period, etc ) lots of
possibilities in there)
still though i haven't found a way to just modify the bonus files without
bugs

 

[isenchine]

Yes, my mistake, I should have remembered that I was that day on a computer that does not have a clean install of BtS.

In my mod, I have unique palaces per civilization so it is easy to give a specific bonus or promotion.

You don't explain what goes wrong. Just keep in mind that the bonus file is associated with a CIV4ArtDefines_Bonus.xml file in the XML/Art folder. The tag '<FontButtonIndex>' in that file refers to the two tga files located in the Assets\res\Fonts folder.

What else? You can have different 'fake' bonuses that refer to a same Art Def entry and to a same FontButtonIndex.

 

[Archid]

2) There is a limit of 74 bonuses

That is true if you are using a vanilla dll, but it is possible to have many more resources if you use an extended TGA file. I extracted several peoples work and bundled it up into a mod comp here that has the necessary dll code changes and example TGA files.