[TOT] MGE Conversions

[Thorvald of Lym]

Aye, I jumped straight from vanilla to MGE but I gather there were several undocumented changes under the hood (see: Major Objectives coming and going, &c.). It's not actually needed but I'm a pedant for rounding off edge cases, plus it could be useful down the line if ToTPP adds a function to (re-)enable wonder vids in scenarios to pair with custom videos.

The legacy events converter/engine is NOT!!! meant to be a way to learn to write code. It should "just work" as long as the legacyEvents.txt file is a valid events file for the macro system.

Ah, so it works as a live interpreter rather than a file converter. Yeah, a pared-down version could be useful—it wasn't that long ago I was still running off monthly bandwidth rations, so streamlining file size has become instinctual.

EDIT: of course, if you're converting the events manually to learn the system, that's OK too.

Aye, the MGE scenarios don't really need Lua conversion; it's more a convenience for the ToTPP generation if they want to tinker around with these themselves. Virtually all my coding knowledge comes from picking apart existing work and learning through trial and error, and I do my best to pay the experience forward.

 

[Prof. Garfield]

@Thorvald of Lym

Can you remind me why you need the events converted to Lua? If you're just re-releasing the scenarios in Test of Time, then the macro events should be fine. TOTPP can interpret macro events, it is just not recommended to have both macro events and Lua working together. The legacy event engine is necessary if you want to add extra Lua exclusive features to a scenario, but in that case you should be working with the full template anyway.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

the MGE scenarios don't really need Lua conversion; it's more a convenience for the ToTPP generation if they want to tinker around with these themselves.

Again, it's courtesy: since most of ToT's modding has shifted to Lua, I figure why not throw in parallel events files as a springboard for third-(fourth?-)party modding. Some of these I do plan to spin off into ToTPP-featured upgrades, and having a workable Lua base can only help.

 

[Prof. Garfield]

Again, it's courtesy: since most of ToT's modding has shifted to Lua, I figure why not throw in parallel events files as a springboard for third-(fourth?-)party modding. Some of these I do plan to spin off into ToTPP-featured upgrades, and having a workable Lua base can only help.

In that case, I don't think it makes sense to ship with a "stripped down" conversion system.

If designers want to add something at a later date, adding in the whole template to an existing and working scenario is not difficult, given the current state of the template. The template provides a lot of functionality from modifying tables rather than having to actually code. That said, I do need to write a proper documentation guide for it. I have a couple more modules that I plan to add before starting (I've started documenting before, and ended up making changes to file organisation).

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Aye, if my experience modding OpenRA has taught me anything, programmers speak in tongues but rarely see fit to provide a dictionary.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Finally had the time to swing back into this: Demo for Alexander. Tweaked the city graphics to be more culture-appropriate, and reconfigured the units to use ToT permissions rather than the old special techs; base game tech tree has been restored and "Plumbing" added as a phantom tech to preserve the original research times, such as they are. Apart from tribe masks, the only other to-dos are terrain graphics and possibly leader portraits now that TOTPP enables custom DLLs.

Since bitmaps retain the same file size regardless of detail to the image itself, I had the brilliant idea to throw in revamps even for units that don't feature in the scenario, so that tinkers like me have thematically-linked assets on hand for their own house rules. Case in point: here vanilla sprites have been substituted with available Hellenic counterparts.