Developer Diary | Modding

Today we have quite a number of items for the dev diary. We’ll be covering some new additions to the career profile system, followed by some new tools coming for modders in the Avalanche update.

To begin with, I’ll hand over to our designer on the career profile:

Hello!

Ingevar here with an update regarding new features coming to the Career Profile. Since the release of Career Profile earlier this year we've been working on the next iteration that will bring more stats, non-ironman achievements, and some profile customization.

Let's look at it in detail.

Playthrough Overview

When BBA is released, every player will find the playthrough overview available in the ESC menu when playing the game.​

This familiar window will contain some numbers for your current playthrough, including new stats and awards.

New Stats

We are adding more stats to track combat efficiency like the amount of offensive and defensive battles, the ratio between them, or the ratio of battles versus encircled divisions. We want these stats to be a better depiction of each player's playstyle and will continue to add more, so if you have any suggestions, please tell us in the comments.​

Stats for Modded Games

Previously we gathered numbers only from the vanilla version of the game, but now we've added a separate set of data for games played with mods.

Both base game and modded games stats are working in single-player games, at least for now. We are looking into making MP counts as well, so stay tuned for future updates on that topic.​

Awards

Awards are medals and ribbons: new kinds of in-game achievement that don't require you to play in Ironman mode.

Medals have three grades: bronze, silver, and gold. Each grade is harder to get than the previous one, with the aim that bronze is something you can get just by playing the game, while gold will require a dedicated effort and might not be achieved from the first try even by the most experienced players.

Ribbons have no grades, but the difficulty is there for most of them.​

Awards won't work with most mods, cause you can never predict what the mod changes and therefore if the award required any challenge at all.

At the same time, we know that mods are an essential part of the HoI experience, so together with the base feature, we're introducing support for modded awards. Any modder will be able to use all existing UIs for creating a list of unique awards that can be tracked, awarded in the game, and then displayed in the Career Profile.

Profile Customization

Every grade of medal you get and every ribbon will also award you with some Career Points.

Career Points are used to unlock Profile Pictures.​

Some Pictures are unlocked after you get one or two medals, but others will be available only to players who dedicate a substantial amount of effort to getting lots of gold medals.

Friends

All this comes together in the last feature I'd like to show today.

We're adding a Friends list to the game. You'll be able to find it in the main menu when BBA is out.​

Friends window will have all your friends from Steam or Xbox and for now will only be used as a shortcut to viewing each other's Career Profiles.

By default, every profile in the game will be viewable by all your friends, but you can