CK3 Dev Diary #37 - Making Mods

[vickerage]

Hi, I'm currently working on a mod focusing on the British Isles for CKII and I was wondering how easy it would be to port a map to CKIII?
Would it require a lot of work and an entirely new set of images?

[ MOD ] Britain - Barons, Hundreds, Wards and Wapentakes

"Britain - Barons, Hundreds, Wards and Wapentakes" is a mod for CK2 focusing on the British Isles. In this mod you can play as a smaller tier feudal lord as the map is made up of smaller divisions of land, using the historical system of...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

Also, I had planned to rework the holdings to fit more of a manorial system (Since the map is split into a tonne of baronies it wouldn't make sense for each one to have a castle) Do you have any idea how moddable the holdings would be? Could we perhaps create entirely new holding types?

 

[OwIcohoIic]

Green, or purple? You gotta draw the line somewhere. To heck with purple people! Unless they're suffocating. Then... help 'em.

IS that a Mitch Hedberg quote? I applaud your good taste sir

 

[SMiki Lorebringer]

So the skin color palette that we use is a square image with gradients from light to dark on the y axis and from reddish to yellowish on the x axis.
View attachment 610259
Skin color is simply defined as a coordinate on this palette. Children that are born will get a skin color that is picked somewhere along the line between the parents' coordinates.

So you could definitely add more colors to the palette but you would have to put some thought into which colors are next to each other. If you would have all the colors of the rainbow in the palette, for example, a child between a red skinned person and a blue skinned person might get green skin

View attachment 610263

Can it be changed to a rectangle or must it be a square?

 

[Riamus]

Can it be changed to a rectangle or must it be a square?

He showed a rectangle, so that should be fine. The square just gives you more chance to blend along 2 axes equally rather than mostly just one axis. If you were to make the normal skin tones on a rectangle, you'd lose out on a lot of the possibilities. Of course, if you're just using fake skin tones or you only want specific ones, a rectangle may work better for you.

I think the bigger question is... can you use more than one palette? For a fantasy mod, for example, you might want orcs to have a brownish set of skin tones, trolls to have a blue to green range of skin tones, elves to have a normal "pinkish" to blue or purple skin tones, etc. I suppose you could put these on the same palette and since the child will be somewhere between the skin tones of the parents, you could just have each race set in the right part and go from there. But it might be easier to work with and adjust the skin tones if you could do so with multiple palettes.

 

[Karlington]

IS that a Mitch Hedberg quote? I applaud your good taste sir

It is indeed, my good man! Thank you! I was hoping someone would recognize it for what it was.

 

[mteir]

He showed a rectangle, so that should be fine. The square just gives you more chance to blend along 2 axes equally rather than mostly just one axis. If you were to make the normal skin tones on a rectangle, you'd lose out on a lot of the possibilities. Of course, if you're just using fake skin tones or you only want specific ones, a rectangle may work better for you.

I think the bigger question is... can you use more than one palette? For a fantasy mod, for example, you might want orcs to have a brownish set of skin tones, trolls to have a blue to green range of skin tones, elves to have a normal "pinkish" to blue or purple skin tones, etc. I suppose you could put these on the same palette and since the child will be somewhere between the skin tones of the parents, you could just have each race set in the right part and go from there. But it might be easier to work with and adjust the skin tones if you could do so with multiple palettes.

Even if you can't have multiple pallets (because the DNA system can only use one?) you could hijack the 125 shades of black and white by flipping the main axis of the gradient to add some colours. Would need to rework every race DNA color in game to ocupy a new area on the gradient map, and if a greenish and a pinkie has a child it would be human color. Someone more creative might try to jam in more color dimensions.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Even if you can't have multiple pallets (because the DNA system can only use one?) you could hijack the 125 shades of black and white by flipping the main axis of the gradient to add some colours. Would need to rework every race DNA color in game to ocupy a new area on the gradient map, and if a greenish and a pinkie has a child it would be human color. Someone more creative might try to jam in more color dimensions.
View attachment 610349

Potentially a 3D colour space?

 

[mteir]

Potentially a 3D colour space?

Likely not full 3D color space. More, how to flatten the 3D color space to 128x128 2D and have the DNA system still produce offspring with sensible colors (choose any two points as parents and every point on a straight line between those two points should make sense as a child). Another possible option is decals if they are available, assigning race as a trait and the trait applies a decal over the character skin, slightly similar as how ck2 handles fantasy races modded in.

 

[poindexter1985_01]

In modding CK2, if you wanted to 'unlock' certain events or chains of events, it was generally necessary to edit all of the events to change the conditions checked in their triggers. For example, if you wanted to enable Seduction events and decisions for a character that doesn't have the Seduction focus, you'd have to search through the script and decision files for instances of "has_focus = focus_seduction" and make many changes.

Has there been any restructuring in how such prerequisites are implemented in CK3 that could streamline that and allow accomplishing the same with fewer elements edited? For the above example as an illustration, if the game applied a character flag on choosing a focus, and the vanilla events checked for the presence of that flag instead of the presence of the focus, then the modder would have the freedom to add that flag in other ways to enable the Seduction content.

I'm thinking specifically of what would be involved in modding in new lifestyles, focuses, and perk trees. One might wish to add content like this, but re-use events from pre-existing ones rather than needing to create entirely new sets of events.

 

[RelVleDy]

I'm saying it might be possible but TBH I'm not completely sure so I can't make any guarantees. We haven't tried to use the system in that way.

Would implementing static character models be significantly easier then, such as swapping out assets for still-images of dragons via Google search?

Perhaps the modder can create multiple dragon traits with each trait devoted to a unique static image that substitutes out the in-game model for the image. I'd have to play around with where the best place to store each image would be though.

 

[DaJay42]

We do have effects to modify the unborn character though such as setting if they are a known bastard, changing the assumed father, and setting the number of children.

Is the gender of the child still determined at birth? If not, can we get/set the gender of an unborn child? Otherwise, can we do so before the birth is announced to the player?

I imagine certain total conversion mods might find this very useful.

 

[Astephos]

Why won't the Dev's answer whether baronies will be able to be modded in? If we can't remove the restriction to play baronies as they are, we'll just have to bump the titles down by one so baronies are just counties with only the capital barony attatched, making the base baron level title obsolete, or possibly having it as a sort of off-world title for knights in your realm.

 

[GreatWyrmGold]

I have no idea what most of this is, but I like it. Seems strange to me that the fix for that one issue is being pushed back to the 1.1 release if it's already done, though. Is that a "We don't have time to implement this because we're in hardcore crunch time" thing, or is it just a game dev thing?

I realize I'm answering a week-old question (which already has multiple simple, if solid, answers, including one from a Paradox programmer), but there are good reasons (certification requirements, mostly) for a fix made late in development to be put into an early patch and not in version 1.0, and if nothing else I want to link to a guy who knows what he's talking about. Also, I am of the opinion that more details are always better, as long as they're presented clearly.

To summarize: Games need to go through a process called certification before they can be released on any platform. The exact process varies a lot by platform, but it's invariably a significant expense, so you don't want to go through it twice. This means that A. you don't submit games for certification before you're confident they'll pass, and B. you don't change games after submitting them for certification except to fix bugs that will make the game fail certification.
Patches also need to be certified, but the process is much easier (and cheaper) than certifying a whole game. If you find a non-cert-breaking bug after the game has been submitted for certification, you fix it in the first patch, because that's cheaper and easier. Then, if everything goes according to plan, you release the patch on day 1 so nobody ever notices the broken aspects of 1.0.

So the skin color palette that we use is a square image with gradients from light to dark on the y axis and from reddish to yellowish on the x axis.
View attachment 610259
Skin color is simply defined as a coordinate on this palette. Children that are born will get a skin color that is picked somewhere along the line between the parents' coordinates.

So you could definitely add more colors to the palette but you would have to put some thought into which colors are next to each other. If you would have all the colors of the rainbow in the palette, for example, a child between a red skinned person and a blue skinned person might get green skin

View attachment 610263

A clever artist should be able to find a better way to arrange the colors, of course. My first point of reference is the paint.net color wheel thingy:

Spoiler

Here, a red/blue hybrid child would be magenta-ish.

It should go without saying that having technicolor people and ordinary skin tones on the same palette would be...tricky.

Why won't the Dev's answer whether baronies will be able to be modded in? If we can't remove the restriction to play baronies as they are, we'll just have to bump the titles down by one so baronies are just counties with only the capital barony attatched, making the base baron level title obsolete, or possibly having it as a sort of off-world title for knights in your realm.

My intuition says that they can't be modded like that, because the levels of title which are playable (and hence are fully engaged in the world around them) is presumably central to how the code is structured. (And, moreover, that such a hypothetical mod would probably cause serious performance issues, because there are squillions of baron-level nobles.) But I can't think of any way to reply to this kind of question well from Paradox's perspective, especially if providing more than a simple "No" requires understanding technical issues that the people running these threads don't understand (which they probably do, because again, this is presumably central to how the code is structured).

TL;DR: It's a surprisingly complicated issue, but the overall answer is probably no.

 

[Karlington]

I realize I'm answering a week-old question (which already has multiple simple, if solid, answers, including one from a Paradox programmer), but there are good reasons (certification requirements, mostly) for a fix made late in development to be put into an early patch and not in version 1.0, and if nothing else I want to link to a guy who knows what he's talking about. Also, I am of the opinion that more details are always better, as long as they're presented clearly.

To summarize: Games need to go through a process called certification before they can be released on any platform. The exact process varies a lot by platform, but it's invariably a significant expense, so you don't want to go through it twice. This means that A. you don't submit games for certification before you're confident they'll pass, and B. you don't change games after submitting them for certification except to fix bugs that will make the game fail certification.
Patches also need to be certified, but the process is much easier (and cheaper) than certifying a whole game. If you find a non-cert-breaking bug after the game has been submitted for certification, you fix it in the first patch, because that's cheaper and easier. Then, if everything goes according to plan, you release the patch on day 1 so nobody ever notices the broken aspects of 1.0.

I may be wrong here, because this is not my area of expertise, but I thought the certification requirements were only for consoles? I.e. you have to get certified by Nintendo for Nintendo, by Microsoft for Xbox, and so on?

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

Why won't the Dev's answer whether baronies will be able to be modded in? If we can't remove the restriction to play baronies as they are, we'll just have to bump the titles down by one so baronies are just counties with only the capital barony attatched, making the base baron level title obsolete, or possibly having it as a sort of off-world title for knights in your realm.

You can almost certainly mod it in so that "counts" run what would otherwise be baronies, and everyone moves down one - the problem comes that unless you do something about it, your four "playable" tiers now run out at what would normally be king tier. This may or may not be solvable by adding more tiers - or the number of tiers may be fixed.

There is a problem as well that since barons have severely abbreviated courts, you've now taken the number of potential comital courts and multiplies it by 5 or so - increasing the number of characters that will be around.

Then not all baronies are feudal holdings.
"Single holding counties" are often relatively poor, and without the tax income from the barons it would be quite hard to get any momentum going.
It also brings back the problem from CK2 of "control X kingdom entirely" becoming a chore once again as you have to hunt down far, far more title holders in the process.

 

[GreatWyrmGold]

I may be wrong here, because this is not my area of expertise, but I thought the certification requirements were only for consoles? I.e. you have to get certified by Nintendo for Nintendo, by Microsoft for Xbox, and so on?

I'm pretty sure, though not 100%, that Steam also has some certification requirements. Not as stringent as the consoles', of course, but still extant.

Maybe we should look for someone with firsthand knowledge instead of guessing at each other.

 

[Karlington]

I'm pretty sure, though not 100%, that Steam also has some certification requirements. Not as stringent as the consoles', of course, but still extant.

Maybe we should look for someone with firsthand knowledge instead of guessing at each other.

I think you might be right.

I looked and I found, well, Steam themselves.

 

[GreatWyrmGold]

I think you might be right.

I looked and I found, well, Steam themselves.

Oh. Right. Steam would need to put their requirements somewhere public, because everyone's making Steam games.

 

[Karlington]

Oh. Right. Steam would need to put their requirements somewhere public, because everyone's making Steam games.

Yup! Every guy and gal who knows a little code is hoping to become the Angry Birds of Steam.

 

[DaJay42]

I think you might be right.

I looked and I found, well, Steam themselves.

Huh, those must be new, considering people have managed to put "games" on steam that didn't even contain an executable.