aghast said:
I have a question about CIV4ArtDefines_Leaderhead.xml ...
Aghast: You pretty much hit the nail on the head. Here's the detailed story for interested parties:
There are two graphics files for each leaderhead: The "Shader", or <NIF> file, and the "NOSHADER", or <NOSHADER> file. Each of these has a corresponding "leaderhead.dds" skin file or "leaderhead_noshader.dds" file, respectively.
The first is for graphics cards the support texture shading, the second is for those that don't. Now I didn't realize this when I first created all the new leaderheads. My graphics card (a Radeon model) supported shaders--all I could tell was that editing the <NIF> field and the basic leaderhead.nif file changed the leaderhead, and editing the <NOSHADER> field OR the leaderhead_noshader.nif files seemed to do nothing.
So being the pragmatic guy that I am, I simply ignored all those noshader files and fields and left them blank. This resulted in people with Shader-supporting cards seeing the new leaderheads, and older cards seeing the ORIGINAL leaderheads instead...or in some cases a weird colored leader if I had altered the noshader.dds file. I didn't realize this was why some people were complaining about the skins in the CivGold pack--they weren't seeing them. But the plot thickens...
When 1.61 was released, Firaxis for some reason decided that my graphics card did not, in point of fact, support those shaders, and now suddenly my graphics all instantly switched to the <NOSHADER> fields, which confused the @!#$ out of me until I worked out what had happened. "Ah-ha!", says I, those leaderhead_noshader.nif and <NOSHADER> fields were for the guys without shader support and many of them were not seeing the new leaderheads!
But looking at my setup, I had seen those new leaderheads just fine but was now not...and they were higher quality before! So I did what any rational computer geek would do: I forced the high-quality display and to hell with the consequences! Essentially, I changed all of the <NOSHADER> fields (the lower-quality pre-shaded images) to whatever the <NIF> field was (the higher-quality real-time shader images). Voila'! Fixed my problem and now I was seeing the high-quality images again.
But as yourself and several others pointed out, all was not well in the world. For while this hack seems to work for most people, a select and lucky few got freakish no-body leaderheads where I had forced the shaders, probably because your graphics cards seized when asked to display them.
SOOOOOOOO...I was faced with a dilemma. What to do?
In the end I decided quality and consistency was what part of what sets this mod apart, and to do it right the leaderheads had to be re-addressed. So I went back and re-skinned and re-altered ALL of the leaderhead_noshader.nif files to match their leaderhead.nif counterparts and merged the shader.dds file with it's _noshader.dds counterpart to emulate the real-time shading. With all of the XML fields back to the originals now, the leaderheads were now displaying correctly, though I was seeing the lower quality <NOSHADER> versions.
So here's what's going to happen in 3.0: I'm going to "ship" the mod out with the higher-quality shader leaderheads forced in the XML; it works for most people and image quality is really much much better. But I'm also going to include a backup copy of the leaderheads file called Civ4_Leaderheads.xml.safegrahics. If you're having a problem with the graphics or performance is hindered, you can copy this over the original and it will shift the <NOSHADERS> from the forced version to the safe, albiet lower quality non-shader versions. Seems the best compromise to cover the broad range of graphics card issues out there.
Anyway, that was probably more than you wanted to know, but now you understand why the leaderheads.xml file looks the way it does in your version. As I said, stay tuned for a day or two and I hope to have the 3.0 out.
