Dev Diary: 1.9 Patchnotes and Modding Updates

Today's Development Diary by Podcat

Hi guys! Here is the promised bonus dev diary. First up is the full changelog, and after that we will be going through all the new stuff we have for modders.

1.9 'Husky' Patchlog

See the full patch log here: https://pdxint.at/2P84LIj

Modding

1.9.0 will include a lot of tools/improvements that will hopefully help modders developing their awesome mods. Bug fixes and small improvements are too many to list here and can be found in the patch log but we will be listing more major stuff in this dev diary.

More effects, triggers and game variables and more variable support

We added quite a bit new effects/triggers and game variables with new free patch. Full list can be found in in the patch notes or the documentation files that are generated by game.

In addition to those new scripting tools, we also added more variable support to existing effects/triggers. And now hoi4 scripting language supports storing tokens as a variable. For example you can do the following:

Here we are storing token infantry_equipment in a temporary variable named to and later we are using this stored token in add_equipment_to_stockpile effect.

At the moment following objects can be stored in variables and all effects/triggers should be able to accept such variables

ideology/ideology groups equipment types operation

We have plans for adding support for more, feel free to have suggestions for other types of tokens if you thing they would be useful.

We are also adding a better documentation support for our scripting language. Following html files are output of our new script documentation tools:

Effect Documentation

Trigger Documentation

Modifier Documentation

Dynamic Variables Documentation

History Logger

"History Logger" is a tool that we developed to observe AI gameplay and now it is available for public as well. More details available on AI dev diary

You can see some examples using following links:

https://common-assets.paradoxplaza.com/hoi4-devdiary/history_viewer.html?zip=1.zip

https://common-assets.paradoxplaza.com/hoi4-devdiary/history_viewer.html?zip=2.zip

We hope that it will help people that makes overhaul mods or AI mods. To use it you need to run game you need to lunch the game with "-hands_off" option which make game automatically start up on observing country defined NGame::HANDS_OFF_START_TAG (Or you can manually start the game and run console command "history_logger"). During the run, the game will collect data and dump it on every month under "documents/user/Hearts of Iron IV/history_dump" folder. Once you believe the game collected enough data, you can zip the contents of that folder and load it to game\tools\history_viewer\history_viewer.html file.

The hands off will also output the test conditions that you want to satisfy. You add more conditions to game\tests if you want and they will be reported as a success or fail under user\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Hearts of Iron IV\logs\tests

Crash Logging

The game will run the last executed script or last loaded script/history/save line if something goes wrong during script execution or save game loading and the game crashes. Which hopefully will give you more information on why it crashes and avoid the problem until we solve the crash itself.

This information is only stored if the game is launched using "-crash_data_log" option (it does have a performance hit so I would suggest not to enable it during regular development). The crash will be outputted to user\Documents\Paradox Interactive\Hearts of Iron IV\crashes\...\meta.yml which should give you the file & line info

If the game is crashing while loading a save game, I would suggest changing