Dev Diary - Modding Changes

For those of you who do not get unreasonably excited by hearing about new script commands and changes to databases, the long and short of it is this: We made some fundamental changes to the way the game handles some things, which will probably require your favorite mods to spend some time updating. On the flip side, those changes also allow for some exciting possibilities down the line. If you came here hoping for a release date, we must ask you for just a little more patience. We promise the announcement is very close - but not today.

Characters

Probably the biggest change is in how we handle people on the backend (or ponies, for that matter - we do not discriminate). In the current live version, the game has no real concept of a person as a distinct thing. It only knows about country leaders, military leaders, political and military advisors, and operatives. Cases where a country leader could also be a general had to be handled manually, leading to lots of exciting bugs when the country leader was removed but the general was forgotten about and other such cases.

We have overhauled that side of the game from the ground up with the introduction of characters. This should dramatically reduce the amount of potential zombie generals shambling around, which I am sure the non-zombie population will greatly appreciate.

Characters are defined in the common/character folder, and their definitions look like this:

Every character is defined as a container for different roles they can fulfill, like General (corps_commander), Advisor, country leader etc. Due to technical concerns, Operatives remain their own thing. On the character level itself, things like name and gender are handled. This also means that character names can now be localised and you can refer to a character by ID instead of by name (this helps a lot with character names that have non-english characters in them - turns out this broke some triggers and effects).

This also means that if a character is removed from play - say, through a purge - they are automatically removed from all roles that they could have, which makes such systems a lot easier to do script-side. It also means that if we wanted to allow Zhukov to become a country leader, we could simply add a country leader role for him in the character file, like this:

Or we could also add the role later on, via focus, event, decision... like we do here with Beriya:

hat means there is a lot less confusion and duplication of effort necessary when putting a character into a new role, since stuff like portraits, name etc. are already handled. A broken portrait only needs to be fixed in one place instead of five etc.

Once defined, characters are recruited in the country history file in order to be added to the game. As you can see in the first screenshot, you can use visible triggers for unit leaders to ensure they are not shown if you don’t want them to be.

Characters that can potentially become country leaders are made into country leaders using the promote_character effect, like so:

This is a clear departure from the practice in the live version of the game, where you would create