Developer Diary | Modding!

How do you make a Joint Focus Tree?

Well, at its core, a JFT is a Shared Focus Branch, one where depending on conditions, has a set of member countries, and the completion of the focuses is shared between them, and different effects apply either to the country completing them, to the rest of the countries or to all of them equally. ​ After that it’s all Joint Focuses, and they’re different in a few ways. First thing you’ll notice is the text_icon parameter, we’ll talk about later, but the SECOND thing you’ll notice is the joint_trigger section. It’s a trigger that determines which countries will be considered part of the JFT and get their corresponding effects. In this case it’s checking if you have the alliance leader flag or you are in a faction with this country. ​ The other thing that’s different from normal focus trees is there’s 3 (THREE) different sections for Completion Rewards. ​ First one, regular old completion_reward does its effect in every valid country in the Joint Alliance, the same for everyone. ​ Then there’s completion_reward_joint_originator, that only applies the effect in the country that completed the focus. ​ And finally the completion_reward_joint_member, which applies the effect on every valid member of the alliance that is not the country that completed the focus. ​ That’s basically it. It’s a simple system, but we hope it’ll be flexible enough to have a bunch of use cases and variations, specially since it doesn’t need to be a faction! We used a faction as the most obvious use for it but you can make any amount of related or unrelated countries share the tree. Every country in a continent? Sure. Every communist country? Go ahead. Countries on both sides of a war? Can’t stop you! ​ I can’t wait to see what you do with it. ​

Focus Title Background

In the previous point I mentioned a text_icon parameter, that’s the way we are giving you the ability to change the background for the Focus titles. It’s one of the features that were added to enhance the Joint Focus Tree, but can be useful for any kind of focus tree content.. ​ It came about because we wanted a way to quickly differentiate normal focuses from joint focuses. At first we thought about just making them have the same framing on the focus icons but that proved… Not ideal. ​ The biggest problem is that it immediately made every focus icon be too busy and hard to read. ​ Plus, when the whole tree was pentagons everywhere, it looked way too repetitive. ​ Eventually, we accepted that we couldn’t solve this problem with art or design, and we were gonna have to resort to an extreme measure… Talking to a programmer D= ​ We barely survived, but after an arduous process we agreed to make a system to change the title background changeable. It was the best option; relatively simple to implement, noticeable, and we didn’t need to make every icon from scratch. Of course there was still a bit of trial and error