[BNW] Questions from a noob modder

[AbsentFriends]

Hi everyone,
I know I've come pretty late to this platform, but I'm hoping someone can give me a little advice on my first custom civ for BNW.

I'm planning on making the Bretons (not from Skyrim, the real Celtic people), and I've had a lot of fun working out the AI flavours and creating a cross between a heraldic Ermine and the ancient Celtic Awen symbol for the civ icon that I'm really proud of, but there's still a lot of things I'm confused about.

I'm new to programming and modding in general, so I apologise if I don't know the right terminology.

Question 1: Is there a good technique to make good-looking civ icons that scale well? I made my icon using Irkalla's tutorial, but it's way bigger than the atlas template I found in the Civ5 program files, and when I scale it down in GIMP to fit, it gets kinna fuzzy. Does anyone have any tips for making and scaling icons (preferrably using GIMP or Inkscape)?

Question 2: Does anyone have a blank Gods and Kings + BNW civ mod file with all the entry places you need to make a functioning mod? I went through my program files and I got a lot of them but I'm afraid that I might miss something. Can I borrow the format (but not the input values) from someone else's mod that I download?

Question 3: What color format is the civ player color coded in? I can tell it's based on RGB but I've never seen anything use decimals with RGB before. I assume that black is 0 0 0 since white is 1 1 1?

Question 5: Where do you indicate that a leader uses feminine titles (Lady, Empress, etc.)? I assume it works similar to spy names with <gender>feminine</gender>, but I'm not sure where to put it on future projects.

Thank you in advance for your responses!

 

[whoward69]

Q2 - see XML data files for Standard Civilizations (inc DLC) | CivFanatics Forums

Q3 - From the above link "NOTE: The RGB values are not the usual 0 to 255 values, but 0.0 to 1.0 values. To convert from the more usual values divide by 255 and round to 3 decimal places, eg 218 is 218/255 = 0.8549019607843137 so use the value 0.855"

Q5 - You set it when you define the TXT_KEY for the leaders name, eg

<GameData>
    <Language_en_US>
        <Row Tag="TXT_KEY_LEADER_ALEXANDER">
            <Text>Alexander</Text>
        </Row>
        <Row Tag="TXT_KEY_LEADER_CATHERINE">
            <Text>Catherine</Text>
              <Gender>feminine</Gender>
        </Row>
        <Row Tag="TXT_KEY_LEADER_DARIUS">
            <Text>Darius I</Text>
        </Row>
        <Row Tag="TXT_KEY_LEADER_ELIZABETH">
            <Text>Elizabeth</Text>
              <Gender>feminine</Gender>
        </Row>
    </Language_en_US>
</GameData>

 

[4eeee]

As for your first question, if by fuzzy you mean blurry, that's how it should be when you downscale something. If you zoom the image out just right so it has the same pixel size the game uses to display it, it should look just fine. Unless you changed the interpolation settings when downscaling the image, perhaps? Cubic interpolation should work just fine and it's the default setting in GIMP