How to modify the religions - an in depth guide

[srpt]

I'm changing islam to zoroastrianism and the icon is showing up in the WB and in the city screen but on the map itself its still the old one. Any help?

 

[The_J]

Assets\res\Fonts\Gamefont.tga and _75.tga is the problem, see here for a tutorial.

 

[srpt]

ok I got the tga files edited and the religions are working but the corporations dont show up on the city bar. even in regular BTS they are not showing up, but they do show up in mods. anyone know why this is?

 

[el_hidalgo]

ok I got the tga files edited and the religions are working but the corporations dont show up on the city bar. even in regular BTS they are not showing up, but they do show up in mods. anyone know why this is?

It sounds like you changed the tga files in the main game directory as opposed to a mod directory? If so, that's bad. Do you have backups of the originals? You should put the originals back and create a mod directory, such as C:\Users\YourComputerName\Documents\My Games\Beyond the Sword\MODS\YourMod.

Anyway, I can't help you with the tga's, but I can tell you that it's a very tricky file to modify and it can easily cause problems. The reason the mods work fine is that they have their own tga's. But whatever you did, you did it wrong, and that will cause problems with the other religions and corporations to the right of the one of you changed.

Are the other religions fine? If you changed Islam, I would guess you'd see problems with Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, along with the corporations. Or did you just add a new religion?

Anyway, sorry I can't be of help. I gave up on editing this file myself.

 

[srpt]

I actually changed the first religion, and they all work so its not a case of everything to the right of what I changed not working, and I changed my mod, not the main file.

Also if I run another mod with my edited tga, all the symbols show up, corps included.

 

[The_J]

That does not make any sense.
Please show us your .tgas.

 

[srpt]

here they are.

 

[The_J]

...um...why have you deleted 3 from the 7 corp icons?

And why did you not put the new religions after the old ones? They have to be in the same order like in the XML, but chaning the XML order is far less complicated than shifting + redoing some of the gamefont icons.


Else, just checked it, the icons themself look okay.

 

[srpt]

nothing has been deleted. there are the same number of images as regular. in this mod the corporations are minor religions. judaism and taoism just got demoted. I'm only using 4 corp slots so far. yes I changed the xml to match and my buttons work too. the only thing wrong is that corporations don't display on the map. they do display in the city screen, which I know is buttons not gamefont.

 

[srpt]

rofl you must place the holy city on the map 1st or the others will not show up. thats got to be one of the quirkiest things I've come across in modding this game.

edit
actually no its still acting weird

 

[The_J]

I'm only using 4 corp slots so far.

Ah, okay, did not know that.

the only thing wrong is that corporations don't display on the map. they do display in the city screen, which I know is buttons not gamefont.

Corps will only appear on the map when you have at least 1 of the required resources .

 

[srpt]

well I did remove the resource requirements but the game just doesn't like that and still says "requires access to ". I guess I can xml around that somehow with an invisible resource. thanks again for all the help.

 

[wotan321]

I did not fully understand hatred until I tried to add a religion and ran afoul of the gamefont.tga file. Wow.

My symptom, after moving all the corporation symbols over to make room for the new religion, was that all the following icons were 2 symbols off, in other words the art for Corporation 3 showed on the map for Corporation 1. After hours and hours of trying this and that, I was just fumbling around with an old version of PaintShop Pro and used it to look at the gamefont.tga file. I noticed on close examination that in the pixels where the cyan and pink line pixels were to be transparent on the alpha layer, they were discolored. I made sure to write down the exact pixel coordinates and went into the alpha layer using the DXTBmp software, and made sure those pixels there were the same black as the background.

After that, everything worked. So if you are like me, and have read EVERY thread on this forum regarding that stinking file and still cannot figure out WHY the icons show up on the map in the wrong place..... take the time to make sure the alpha channel is not messed up.