Making a New Leader and Civilization

[ferretbacon]

I just installed the development tools and assets. Never attempted to make a mod, but I'm interested in trying to make a custom Ottoman civilization.

1. The ModBuddy has a preset project for a new leader and civilization with a bunch of references to felines, Jasper Kitty, and litter boxes... obviously just placeholder text, but my question is: can I actually spin a new leader and civ from this pre-format or would I be better off starting from scratch?

2. Is the Janissary model from the Poland Scenario actually contained somewhere in the development assets? I'd like to use that model for the UU, but I can't locate it.

3. The Feline pre-set uses multiple colons in instances like "AssetObjects::ArtDefSet". After modifying the files, this evidently became an error (multiple colons can't be used in XML files). If I remove the extra colon, however, I get a replacement error that states "Name space prefix "AssetObjects" not defined". What does this mean?

I'm sure I'll have more questions if I get into this. If anyone would be willing to answer my questions, I'd appreciate it.

 

[ITcore]

2. Janissary ArtDefs are located in the PolandScenario folder under DLC.

That's all I know.

 

[StandardGaussian]

For #3, don't worry about it. The format for ArtDef files doesn't follow a "correct" XML schema, but the parser that the game will use knows how to read them just fine, so just ignore those errors. If you're ever in doubt, look at files under Civ 6 on Steam. Under <Civ6InstallDirectory>/Base/Assets, you'll find all the assets the base game uses to define art, make civilizations/leaders/etc:. It's a safe bet that, if the base game does it, you can do it too.

For #1, the template is the bare bones of what you can do with a new leader/civ. It'll definitely point you in the right direction, but if you ever need to do anything other than the bare bones, the template won't help you. I'd recommend downloading a mod from Steam Workshop that makes a new civ/leader and looking at the files from that.

 

[ferretbacon]

For #3, don't worry about it. The format for ArtDef files doesn't follow a "correct" XML schema, but the parser that the game will use knows how to read them just fine, so just ignore those errors. If you're ever in doubt, look at files under Civ 6 on Steam. Under <Civ6InstallDirectory>/Base/Assets, you'll find all the assets the base game uses to define art, make civilizations/leaders/etc:. It's a safe bet that, if the base game does it, you can do it too.

For #1, the template is the bare bones of what you can do with a new leader/civ. It'll definitely point you in the right direction, but if you ever need to do anything other than the bare bones, the template won't help you. I'd recommend downloading a mod from Steam Workshop that makes a new civ/leader and looking at the files from that.

Thanks. So for the first issue you address, I can ignore the error message it's reporting and just continue to build with the double colons?

As for the second, I found a mod that I think will work for reverse engineering (it even uses a custom commercial hub district, which I was planning on for my civ!), but I can't actually locate where the files go on my computer after I subscribe to a mod. The only mod folder I can find contains only official Firaxis mods.

 

[StandardGaussian]

Wherever you have Steam installed, generally under Program Files on Windows:

<SteamDirectory>/steamapps/workshop/content/

Each folder in there corresponds to a game you have workshop content for, and the folders inside that are the various workshop mods you've got installed for that game. You can probably sort by modified date to find the right one.

The .dep file roughly corresponds to the Mod.Art.xml file in your mod, though there are differences, so if you're adding .artdefs and whatnot you'll need to do a bit of translating. The .modinfo file is made through the project configuration options in Modbuddy. Other than that, the files are directly from the source before building the mod.

Happy hunting!