Darkest Hour - Dev Diary #12 - Modding with Darkest Hour Part 2

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Today's Development Diary will focus on the new event and decision interface.

First of all, we've introduced two new styles for events.
The first style is chosen by writing "style = 1" and allows the use of bigger pictures. The new picture size is 400x116 instead of the standard 156x116: the height did not change but now the picture is as large as the event window. Moreover the action buttons are now smaller. Overall, this is a simple cosmetic improvement in style, but take a look at how beautiful it is:



The second event style (chosen by writing "style = 2") is a bit more complex and provides a newspaper-style header. The header is composed by a 400 x 48 pictures that can be generic (news_header.bmp) or country specific (news_header_TAG.bmp). Under the header, the current game date and capital name are displayed (e.g. "March 7 1936, Berlin" or "March 25 1939, Rome"). Below that, the event pictures (440 x 116, as for the first style) is diplayed, followed by the event title and description. For the generic header we used the "News of the World" newspaper, but we also added more specific headers for some countries:



The HOI2 Vanilla style is obviously still the default style and can be explicitily chosen by writing "style = 0".

And now, let's take a look at the decision interface. We've already introduced decision in Dev. Diary 6 and we will talk more about their coding in another DD, for now we will introduce their interface.
As you've already seen from our screenshot, we added another tab to the frame in the left side of the screen. In this tab, all available and active decisions are listed. A decision is available when it is listed there, which means that you can read its requisites and its consequences. A decision is active is the requisites are met and can be taken by the player at any time. That means that a decision can be available but not active if its requisites are not met: the player can then read the requisites necessary to make the decision active and its consequences and decide whether to pursue them or not. Take a look at the following example:



If you decide to take a decision, it is triggered as an event and you can accept it or cancel it. If you cancel it, the decision won't disappear but remain listed as active in the decision list, so that you can take it at a later moment (if the requisites are still fulfilled, of course).



Next week we'll talk about our improvements to the event system!
 
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I love the changes. They are very atmospheric.

What is your philosophy concerning events BTW? When are they justified? Will they offer new gameplay options? Flavour? Will you develop new ahistorial paths to follow? Will the AI choose ahistorical choices (or maybe it's tickable in the main menu)?
 
We follow a less is more approach. We added a lot of new events all in all, but are trying to limit ourselves to events that really have an impact and are not just flavour events.

There are ahistorical (but hopefully plausible) paths, most of the time the ai will act within historical parameters. On the other hand radical ahistorical player behaviour may lead to ahistorical ai-behaviour aswell ;)
 
We follow a less is more approach. We added a lot of new events all in all, but are trying to limit ourselves to events that really have an impact and are not just flavour events.

There are ahistorical (but hopefully plausible) paths, most of the time the ai will act within historical parameters. On the other hand radical ahistorical player behaviour may lead to ahistorical ai-behaviour aswell ;)
So I can safely assume that AI-made choices in events will be no longer decided by random chance alone?
 
This is just pure awesomeness!

And the ability to re-trigger events at a later date...veeeery nice and much needed.
 
Minor remark: Could you remove the "smeared" print on the parchment below the event text? It looks weird and makes the text somewhat more difficult to read.

Or it could be slanted at a steeper angle so that it is not (almost) parallel with the event text.
 
Really cool :D
 
Great! Hard to wait for the next DD. I usually begin to refresh the forum from Monday mornings.
 
Interesting idea... As for the "less is more" doctrine, please don't go too much to the "less" side :)