Hello there! I have made a tool that will hugely facilitate creating character history files, family trees of every ruler in your mod, by letting it be done in the software specifically designed to do it. Two years back, I spent an evening making a quick and easy console app in C# that will convert a GEDCOM genealogy file to CK2 dynasty and character files. This year, I spent about two weeks in total updating it to CK3 and making it better in every way.
HOW IT WORKS
You can make family trees with family tree software, such as FamilyEcho or Simple Family Tree. These allow you to easy define people and relationships, and display the resultant trees visually, unlike CK3's boring script. Any self-respecting genealogy program (including those two) allows exports to the GEDCOM format. Such a file is the primary input for my converter tool.
The other input includes the lineage files, those being Dynasties.csv and Houses.csv. In those, you list every dynasty you wish to be represented in the game. This serves two purposes: it lets you define the CK3 representation of families in the GEDCOM file. A person's surname in the GEDCOM is matched to the combined dynasty/house name and prefix in the lineage files, and the dynasty/house is generated with the ID specified. Or they are not generated, in case you just want to refer to a vanilla dynasty/house.
The lineage is also used to set default cultures and faiths for every member character. However, you can define exceptions to those in the GEDCOM. Every person has a Description or Notes field in the GEDCOM standard, and my tool detects specific words in those files. Those being cultures, faiths, and traits. Just put them in there, separated by newlines or spaces.
Those words reference three more input files: cultures.txt, faiths.txt, and traits.txt. Those are extremely simple txt files containing the CK3 keys of every culture, trait and faith in the game. It is set up like this to allow you to add keys for your own modded versions of such entities, if you have any.
The last input file is settings.txt. As the name implies, here you can define some settings to tweak the generation, such as character file ordering and the aforementioned namespace.
When running, the tool uses a simple command line interface that just reports what is going on, without asking for input like the CK2 version. The result is that once you have all the files set up, the tool should do everything automatically and generate your required files without issue. Of course, any errors will be reported here too - which will also be printed to a log in the Output folder, in case the tool should close unexpectedly.
The output files are:
HOW TO INSTALL
Disclaimer: I know one or two things about coding, but very little about deploying. This method I have used seems reliable enough but I can offer no guarantees - please let me know if it doesn't work for you! The required platform is Windows, 64-bits.
HOW IT WORKS
You can make family trees with family tree software, such as FamilyEcho or Simple Family Tree. These allow you to easy define people and relationships, and display the resultant trees visually, unlike CK3's boring script. Any self-respecting genealogy program (including those two) allows exports to the GEDCOM format. Such a file is the primary input for my converter tool.
The other input includes the lineage files, those being Dynasties.csv and Houses.csv. In those, you list every dynasty you wish to be represented in the game. This serves two purposes: it lets you define the CK3 representation of families in the GEDCOM file. A person's surname in the GEDCOM is matched to the combined dynasty/house name and prefix in the lineage files, and the dynasty/house is generated with the ID specified. Or they are not generated, in case you just want to refer to a vanilla dynasty/house.
The lineage is also used to set default cultures and faiths for every member character. However, you can define exceptions to those in the GEDCOM. Every person has a Description or Notes field in the GEDCOM standard, and my tool detects specific words in those files. Those being cultures, faiths, and traits. Just put them in there, separated by newlines or spaces.
Those words reference three more input files: cultures.txt, faiths.txt, and traits.txt. Those are extremely simple txt files containing the CK3 keys of every culture, trait and faith in the game. It is set up like this to allow you to add keys for your own modded versions of such entities, if you have any.
The last input file is settings.txt. As the name implies, here you can define some settings to tweak the generation, such as character file ordering and the aforementioned namespace.
When running, the tool uses a simple command line interface that just reports what is going on, without asking for input like the CK2 version. The result is that once you have all the files set up, the tool should do everything automatically and generate your required files without issue. Of course, any errors will be reported here too - which will also be printed to a log in the Output folder, in case the tool should close unexpectedly.
The output files are:
- One or more CK3 character history files - depending on the settings these may be grouped by culture, dynasty, or not at all.
- CK3 dynasty and/or dynasty_house files.
- A localisation file - used for the dynasty/house names as well as any prefixes. Note that these may duplicate vanilla prefixes, but I have no way to tell which so that may be the only manual maintenance required
- A cache file. You do not need to do anything with this, it just makes sure that over multiple generations with the same file, the same ids are given to the same GEDCOM people.
HOW TO INSTALL
Disclaimer: I know one or two things about coding, but very little about deploying. This method I have used seems reliable enough but I can offer no guarantees - please let me know if it doesn't work for you! The required platform is Windows, 64-bits.
- Install the Dotnet CORE 3.1 or higher runtime framework, if you haven't already. Get it here: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download
- Download CK3-GEDCOM.zip (attached to this post), and unpack it
- Run it from the exe. The default setup has a simple GEDCOM and associated dynasty/house files, kindly provided by @Torngasuk
Last edited:
- 6
- 5
- 1
.png){kind=avatar}
