Matchmaker - a tool to help you find that perfect noble

[badger_ken]

Matchmaker - a tool to help you find that perfect noble - download verision 1.9 here.

What it does, briefly

Matchmaker is an out-of-game tool that loads a save-game file, and then lets you apply all sorts of filters on the nobles in that game to find the ones that are of interest to you.

A picture is worth a thousand words - here's a quick example. I started the 'Hundred Years War' scenario as Philippe VI of France, immediately saved the game and exited, and used the Matchmaker to find those who (a) have the 'Genius' trait, (b) are unmarried, (c) female, (d) with a 'Diplomacy' of at least 10, (e) at least 16 years old, (f) at most 40 years old, (g) Catholic, and (h) not having the 'Chaste' trait. And 10 passed the test:


What it does, in more detail

The matchmaker displays 18 columns of data, 12 (age, name, etc.) are available in the games 'explorer' view, and 8 that are not:

1. (as of 1.9) How many spouses they have
2. How many living children they have
3. number of claims
4. traits
5. piety
6. wealth
7. (as of 1.2) their normal 'home' county.
8. (as of 1.3) their holdings

More interestingly, it lets you filter these 18 columns by the following filters:

• by 'Age'. You can specify both a min and a max age.
• by 'Gender'
• by 'Number of spouses'. You can specify both a min and a max.
• by 'Kids'. You can specify both a min and a max # of living children.
• [V1.1] by 'Dynasties. You can specify either a dynasty they must have, or up to 5 dynasties they must not have.
• by 'Holding level'. You can specify a minimum holding level, e.g. they must hold a County-or-higher level title.
• by 'Claims'. You can specify both a min and a max # of claims.
• by 'Attributes'. You can specify a min/max value for each of the 5 attributes
• by 'Traits'. You can specify up to 5 traits they must have, and up to 5 traits they must not have.
• by 'Religion'. You can specify either a certain religion they must have, or up to 5 religions they must not have.
• by 'Culture'. You can specify either a culture they must have, or up to 5 cultures they must not have.
• by 'Piety. You can specify both a min and max piety.
• by 'Wealth'. You can specify both a min and max wealth.

How to get it

Visit this web page, which has links to the download and much more documentation and examples.

 

[badger_ken]

Faq

FAQ

Does it work with Mods?
As of 1.6, yes. It's known to work at least with 'Memento Mori', 'Balansegang', 'Ogamod', 'Friends and Foes' and 'CK2 plus'.

Does it work with version 1.0g?
Yes.

When I run it, it displays the raw, unadjusted values for attributes, not adjusting for traits. What's happening?
You entered the wrong installation directory. Enter the directory which has

ck2.exe

in it.

I downloaded the zip file, and it has two files, a .exe and a .jar. Which do I use?
The .exe is nothing but a 'wrapper' for the .jar, that mandates a certain amount of memory. Normally, the .exe is what you want. But if you're on a Mac, or if you like futzing with the run-time parameters to the .jar, that's there for you as well.

I double-clicked on the .jar, and when I told it load a file it said "loading" for a little while, then exited. What happened?
It ran out of memory. Try using the .exe version instead, which pre-allocates more memory.

I double-click the .exe, and it aborts with 'Error: Could not create the Java Virtual Machine'
You need more free memory on your machine. Try closing all other running programs.

When I press the 'Load'Button, the app just hangs, or it doesn't hang but it doesn't show anything
This usually means you didn't specify the 'save game file' correctly. Another option, reported by Malarious is 'I had my system locale for non-unicode programs set to Japanese and Matchmaker would hang whenever I clicked the green 'Load' button. It works fine if I set my locale to English, though'

 

[badger_ken]

hi all,
I would welcome posts that let me know if the Matchmaker works (or doesn't) for you.

I'd also love to hear about particularly useful/interesting filters.

 

[James009]

Awesome Program

Awesome tool, works for me and found three people that met my classifications .

My only thought on it is...
- Could the 'initial' setup be saved once it's properly completed so you don't have to redo it every time you run the program?

Regarding other features, I can't think of anything it doesn't have. You've got the bases covered. I think all that's next is optimizing the interface and polishing it.

I think many people will find this comes in handy for those poor bachelors they've got. Excellent work!

 

[Herl]

haven't tested it yet but

I LOVE YOU

this is already a MUST HAVE

 

[westcoastbias]

I can think of one other thing that would be nice to have on there - whether or not they would accept an invite to your court.

Not sure if that information is available in the files, but if it is, it greatly helps with getting claims and filling out your council.

 

[badger_ken]

So glad to hear that it's working!

Awesome tool, works for me and found three people that met my classifications .

My only thought on it is...
- Could the 'initial' setup be saved once it's properly completed so you don't have to redo it every time you run the program?....

I hear ya. What I do is make a text file with two lines, one with the name of my install directory, and another with the name of my save-game directory, and paste those lines into the two dialogs. Kludgey, I know, but try that for now.

haven't tested it yet but

I LOVE YOU

this is already a MUST HAVE

thanks, I'm fond of you as well

I can think of one other thing that would be nice to have on there - whether or not they would accept an invite to your court.

Not sure if that information is available in the files, but if it is, it greatly helps with getting claims and filling out your council.

Sadly, that is far beyond my abilities at present .

 

[westcoastbias]

Yeah I didnt think it was as easy as showing the other attributes. Maybe somebody will figure out the logic for it.

 

[Bamilus]

Haven't used it yet because I'm still at school for another month (my craptop doesn't run CK2 that well and my new desktop is at home) but it looks awesome. I'll definitely be using this. Thanks!

 

[unmerged(243149)]

This is a fantastic tool, thanks a lot. It works fine on my Win 7 64-bit machine.

Initially, I thought that "installation directory" meant where the Matchmaker file was located rather than the CK2 directory, so at first I got a "couldn't open file" error and thought it wasn't working. Might be good to clarify that in the documentation for dumbasses like me.

One very slight glitch is that I get <html> tags around the Traits attributes when I export the file to .csv.

Great work, thanks again.

 

[wolfing]

I haven't tried it but will definitely after 1.5 comes out.
One suggestion (if it's not there already), can you save different search parameter sets? Like save a set for when you're looking for a wife, another set for when you're looking for a new vassal, another for when looking for someone with a claim, etc. Basically you set the filters, save the profile, and then next time you can select the profile from a list of the profiles you've saved, if that makes any sense.

 

[badger_ken]

I haven't tried it but will definitely after 1.5 comes out.
One suggestion (if it's not there already), can you save different search parameter sets? Like save a set for when you're looking for a wife, another set for when you're looking for a new vassal, another for when looking for someone with a claim, etc. Basically you set the filters, save the profile, and then next time you can select the profile from a list of the profiles you've saved, if that makes any sense.

Thanks for the input - this one seems like quite a hairball, though - you have to add functionality to save profiles, load them, name them, edit them, preview them, and email them. I know I've read reports that similar functionality in Windows Explorer is almost never used .

What I am looking into is adding a "Reset" button that resets all filters, this makes it easier to switch from one search to another without having to look at every tab, as you do now. Another option is I might add a description of your current filters ("culture not basque, age at least 22, at most 3 claims"), that would make it easier for you see what you want to change as well. There's no end to the fun

 

[badger_ken]

This is a fantastic tool, thanks a lot. It works fine on my Win 7 64-bit machine.

Initially, I thought that "installation directory" meant where the Matchmaker file was located rather than the CK2 directory, so at first I got a "couldn't open file" error and thought it wasn't working. Might be good to clarify that in the documentation for dumbasses like me.

One very slight glitch is that I get <html> tags around the Traits attributes when I export the file to .csv.

Great work, thanks again.

thanks for the report, and kudos to you for being the first person to use the CSV export! Can I ask you to make a graph or chart to share with the forum?

Re the html tag - pull up a chair, my fellow nerd (if I may so presume), and I'll tell you about it.
Right now, the CSV value in each column is simply equal to the text displayed in each column in the table. The text in the table has an html tag on it because google told me that was an easy way to get the Traits content to word-wrap, the default JTable behavior puts all the contents on one line and clips .

Now, from a CSV point of view, what you really want is one column per trait, but it turns out there are around 200 traits, and I thought this would be pretty yukky for people to look at and use. So, if it's packed together into one Excel column as a string, you'll need to use something like the Excel 'search' function anyway to find the trait of interest, so having the 'html' in there doesn't hurt.

At least, that's my lame excuse

 

[badger_ken]

It just ran on a 1.5 save, no problem.

 

[badger_ken]

Version 1.1 released

Hi all,
While letting the dust to settle after the 1.05 patch, before starting my next game, I took the lull to tweak the 'Matchmaker', adding two things, both shown in this pic:


1. The reset-filter button. A button has been added, only visible when you have active filters, which lets you reset them all. Handy when you are switching filters.

2. You can now filter by dynasties. As with religion and culture, you can either filter by a dynasty they must have, or by up to 5 they must not have. This one has a little flaw in that it turns out that Paradox recycles dynasty names, especially later in the game. You may see 3 or 4 dynasties all with the same name - sorry 'bout that, not much I can do .

Anyways, the download page is still here - check it out, let me know if it works.

 

[Dagfinn]

Help!

This is just the utility Iv been waiting for!

But I cant get it to run properly o

I have installed it and been able to make it start, and Iv been able to select installation directory and save game file, but Im unable to load anything.

Any idea?

 

[westcoastbias]

One more possible suggestion, could you report in the output what city they are currently in? Sometimes tracking them down can be a pain, but if I knew what court they were in it could help.

 

[badger_ken]

This is just the utility Iv been waiting for!

But I cant get it to run properly o

I have installed it and been able to make it start, and Iv been able to select installation directory and save game file, but Im unable to load anything.

Any idea?

odd. Does the 'load' button turn green?
If so, do you click it?

If the 'load' button isn't green, then either the installation directory or the save-game file hasn't been entered.

 

[badger_ken]

One more possible suggestion, could you report in the output what city they are currently in? Sometimes tracking them down can be a pain, but if I knew what court they were in it could help.

nice idea, thanks. I usually track them down by going to the person-finder and then sorting by their name, or their dynasty, or their culture, whichever I think will get me 'close'.

I'll look into how hard it is to figure out where they are, thanks again for the idea.

 

[Dagfinn]

odd. Does the 'load' button turn green?
If so, do you click it?

If the 'load' button isn't green, then either the installation directory or the save-game file hasn't been entered.

Its green.

OTOH, sometimes it takes for ages from I click on the directory or save-game button before anything happens. I have waited long time with the load button tough, but to no avail.