Mod Creator

[KaRei]

Mod Creator

IN DEVELOPMENT​

Hello, people. I was away for a long time, but somehow the Eu2 modding is calling me still back. I have several mods I was interested in or directly involved and I still have a taste to finish them finally. Crazy is that they almost didn't move from place since I abandoned them. The experiences however tought me that making the mod in notepad, Excel sheets, paintbrush, and drawing map in Photoshop takes eons. Without proper tools it is nearly impossible to finish them at all.

Since the Mod Launcher began raising in popularity, I was thinking about a tool that would be an ultimate editor for EU, covering every aspect of mod development, from drawing maps, placing countries and tracking events, through designing monarchs and leaders, modifying AI, and tuning CRTs, to generating flags and shields and converting units from civ3 into Eu format.

Because of the need of such tool to move more considerably with the mods, and because I'd like keep practicing my programming skills, I am starting a development of Mod Creator - an ultimate Europa Universalis mod editor. It'll be tons of work, but it should later bring much less work and frustration with mod creation.

As each part of the Mod Creator will be done, I'll be releasing updated versions. So at first it'll be only a minor tool able of just one thing, over time it will hopefully cover everything, or at least most of the things. One important thing to mention is that this tool will be made in C# most probably, so running on Windows only, unless you use some emulator.

For now I'd like to know, what do you think about such (for now hypothetic) tool.
Below are some major functionalities that are planned.

- Simple drawing of ID map layer
- Automatic generating of Shader layer and border layer
- Tracking of map sectors and guarding the province limits
- "Point and click" assignment of terrain/climate type to provinces directly on the map view
- Support of "brush" for setting same terrain/climate/country for larger groups of provinces at once
- "Drag and drop" system for placing or moving terrain decoration, unit and city sprites over the map
- "Point and click" or "brush" assignment of provinces to countries
- Automatic assigning of free country TAGS to new countries
- Automatic assignment of free IDs to new events, monarchs and leaders
- Tracking of IDs in the system - if ID of something changes, all references are updated accordingly
- Editor with syntax highlight for event scripting
- CRT editor with battle simulations
- Automatic generating of shields & flags from given image
- Switchable shield & flag templates (supported automatic regenaration of multiple shields & flags)
- Automatic conversion between Civ3 unit format and Eu2 unit format

 

[Third Angel]

- "Point and click" assignment of terrain/climate type to provinces directly on the map view
- Support of "brush" for setting same terrain/climate/country for larger groups of provinces at once
- "Drag and drop" system for placing or moving terrain decoration, unit and city sprites over the map
- "Point and click" or "brush" assignment of provinces to countries

This sounds particularly interesting, a "Point and click" or "brush" assignment of known provinces to countries would also be great.

Will this also work for FTG, or only for EU2? Because, as far as I know, there are no more modders working on EU2.

 

[MichaelM]

This promises to be a very cool project indeed. Let me know if I can help with anything.

 

[Monkii-sama]

Sounds great.

I'm assuming the ownership of province tool will come with what type of construction will be present in the province. TP, Colony or City. Maybe when using a sweeping brush all you do is select present cities etc but with point tool you can pick what will be in the province? (Not talking about structures)

 

[Eraclio]

Congrats for the project. Anyway I suggest you something you might improve for this project.

Firstofall, obviously, you can do the mod also for FTG: so you can do also an excellent and immediate converter for both games.

- Automatic generating of Shader layer and border layer

I think for shading layer is better a custom generator of shading: for example, for SGL map I've done a custom shading directly with photoshop, because I think automatic shading isn't good enough.

- Tracking of map sectors and guarding the province limits

I remember sectors are overlapped.
Northern sectors starts out - in -256 and they finish in 2304. "Westest" and "eastest" sectors are strange and they don't start or finish like it's wrote in minject overflop exception, just try to add too provinces there to see where precisely each starts or finishes.
Besides I've seen maximum number of provinces that can be in a sector isn't 256 but 255... I've controlled also with magellan: I've cut a sector and I've controlled with mimage /I but magellan counts 256... seems to be too.


I think with the icon you might also add the maximum area a soldier can cover, not only when only one soldier is alone but when he fights.