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CK3 Dev Diary #71: A Coat of Arms of Your Own

Hello everyone and welcome to the 71st CK3 Dev Diary!

I’m Matthew, one of the Programmers on the CK3 team, and today I am going to talk to you about one of the free features in the upcoming 1.5 patch: the much requested Coat of Arms Designer!

I don’t think the idea needs much explanation, this feature lets you edit the coat of arms used for your titles, dynasty, and house in game and from within the ruler designer to create your own stunning medieval crest.

I think it's easiest if I just show you, should go without saying by now but everything here is still under development and the interface is a work in progress and stands to be tweaked, shuffled around the layout and sizes changed by art.
But right now here is what you will be greeted by now if you enter the customization window for the Holy Roman Empire:

1_main_screen.PNG


In the center you get the preview screen of the coat of arms as you edit it and to the right some options of what to do.
I’ll start with the bottom right options:
  • Randomise within the rule sets we use to generate coat of arms normally, great if you want to reenact this pain.
  • As with the Ruler Designer’s DNA we let you copy and paste your coat of arms to share.
  • Discard any changes you’ve made to your work in progress masterpiece.
  • If you have previously edited and saved your new coat of arms then the discard button will be joined by a button to reset to the historical coat of arms if available.

The meat of the system comes in the form of customizing your coat of arms from scratch or adjusting the existing one, both share their core components but adjusted mode is more limited if you want to take a pre-existing coat of arms and just tweak it a bit.
The reason adjusted mode is separate is that some historical coat of arms are made up of a lot of emblems in an order that whilst looks pretty in game is rather cursed if you were to try and see the full layout and background usage.

So for the bulk of this I will be using custom as the example to see how you can make your own heraldry from scratch and call out differences in adjusted mode where applicable.
The coat of arms designer has three main panels: background, layout, and emblems.

Starting with the background panel you can pick from any of the background patterns as well as pick what colours should be used. For all the colouring options in the coat of arms designer we provided a palette with some pre-selected colours that are used in heraldry generally and are what we use in randomization of coat of arms but we also give you a colour picker to let you pick whatever horrifying neon colour you want.
In the adjusted mode you cannot pick a background pattern but you can change the colours.

2_background_panel.PNG


Next up we have the layouts panel, they dictate the overall amount and positioning of the emblems in your coat of arms. This panel is disabled entirely in the adjusted mode.

To preempt this question, yes there are only a few layouts in the picture (some even duplicates) and that is because the other preset layouts are currently being worked on so there will be more than this in the released version.
Though if you have any ideas for some cool layouts do let us know! Now is the perfect time to give us some ideas whilst the presets layouts are being implemented.

3_layouts_panel.PNG


The bulk of time you will spend is likely to be in the final emblems panel, this lets you pick which of the over a thousand emblem textures that you want to use as well as how you colour them.

You can select which emblem instance you want to edit or select multiple of them by shift clicking, there is also a button to select all of them or reset your selection too so you can edit in bulk easier.

4_emblem_panel.PNG

5_color_picker.PNG


Since some historical coat of arms can have a lotttt of emblems we show them in a paged setup of 10 at a time for easier editing.
I used france a lot in my testing since it has so many to make sure things always worked on a large amount of them which has now ingrained into my brain that our france coat of arms has 33 fleur de lis on it.

To try and help the contrast of the emblems we set it so that the previews have a background that is either white/black to help things stand out better.

We also have a detailed edit mode which lets you go deeper and modify the exact positions, scale, and rotation of all your emblems as well as modify what layer they are on and even add and remove them to your heart’s content!
The UI of this mode is especially work in progress, especially the layering part of it, that will be tidied up before the release.

With the detail edit mode you can really end up with a custom coat of arms to represent the majesty of your dynasty, or as I’m sure some of you will do, try and find a way to make it look phallic as quickly as you possibly can.

6_detail_edit_layers.PNG

7_detail_edit_values.PNG


All of these edits also support an undo/redo system to make incremental changes easier.
Cadet Houses also get an additional option for if they want the quartering of their coat of arms enabled or not, in case you want to show your dad who’s boss.

That is a lot of words to explain this but let's be honest you all just want to see it in action so here we go:

Mini-shout out/commiserations to user “Lajos Tueur” who on Saturday released a mod to try and implement a coat of arms designer and had to fight against doing all of this very manually in the script with a hacky UI only for me to come in a few days later and release this dev diary.

That’s all for this week folks, thanks for tuning in and I hope you’re excited to make some majestic (or cursed) coat of arms for your rulers in 1.5!
 
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This is great. Thank you for the update.

While not a priority to many, a few random suggestions I hope you will consider…

Hopefully in future we’ll get a proper system for automatically applying culturally specific cadence markers (for those cultures that used them).

Impalement for the arms of children of an heir and heiress would be nice.

Lozenge or oval shapes (where culturally appropriate) for a family’s arms when borne by a woman.

While I like the variety created by quartering arms to produce new cadet houses, a more logical creation of arms for cadet branches is needed.

A system whereby Christian prelates receive (adopt) new arms upon appointment to a see.

Thanks again for the update.
 
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There will be an option to download the CoA in your PC as a PNG file or something like that for personal uses? I'm thinking about AARs and tweeting the COA of the character.
 
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Tuo said:
Would it be possible to have a CoA history, similar to title history? It would be neat to look back and see the previous versions of my dynasty's arms, and when the changes were made.
Click to expand...
Which makes me think of an idea of a "simplified dynasty tree", which wouldn't show particular people, but only the "tree" of houses. Which, I know, is not something tied to this DD, but still nice
 
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This is amazing! I spent a silly amount of time customizing my knights CoA's after a holy war landing spree in CK2. Excited to bring that into CK3!

Definitely need some sort of categorization feature if there's over 1000 emblems. Hopefully they can be sorted into more than one category. Like that one bird could go into "African Culture, Animals, and Pagan." And maybe the name and categories could be helpfully displayed in a hover-over tooltip to aid in historical selection.
 
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Since we can rotate emblems, can you also allow us to flip them? For example, flipping the bird emblem so that it's facing the left instead of the right?
 
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james24eagle said:
This is great. Thank you for the update.

While not a priority to many, a few random suggestions I hope you will consider…

Hopefully in future we’ll get a proper system for automatically applying culturally specific cadence markers (for those cultures that used them).

Impalement for the arms of children of an heir and heiress would be nice.

Lozenge or oval shapes (where culturally appropriate) for a family’s arms when borne by a woman.

While I like the variety created by quartering arms to produce new cadet houses, a more logical creation of arms for cadet branches is needed.

A system whereby Christian prelates receive (adopt) new arms upon appointment to a see.

Thanks again for the update.
Click to expand...
We don't see individual arms at all - only the House/Dynasty arms, so cadency marks would unfortunately not have a place to go, and even in the cultures that made use of them they weren't usually a consistent system until the really late game, and possibly even into the EU4 period.

If we *had* personal arms cadency (and impaling) might be a possibility, but we simply don't have them.

A similar situation applies with lozenge/cartouche "shields" for women - we see the dynasty arms, not the personal ones.



As for the Christian prelates receiving or adopting new arms on appointment, they often continued to use their own arms rather than adopting new ones, although they might combine them with their office.
 
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Welcome, welcome, welcome, Matthew! Sit down, eat all you want and have a drink!
I always need people to come up with good news at my court. :)
 
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PDXOxycoon said:
I believe one of the CDs were doing some sorting on that just yesterday. At least, I heard him complaining about ambiguity as to what to categorize some emblems as. Something along the lines of: "this goes into religion, culture, culture, birds, wtf, religion, wtf, wtf". I cannot say how that will work, however. It'd definitely be a nice thing to have given the sheer amount of emblems.
Click to expand...

Could maybe add multiple tags to each emblem, and thus allow them to be sorted by tag.
 
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Seeing so much unused screen real estate is painful. I hope we’ll be able to zoom in so as to expand the CoA and be able to work on finer details.
 
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I hope there will be some kind of pop-ups to educate people and help make them create historical-looking coats of arms. Some kind of pop-up telling you when a design doesn't respect the Rule of Tincture or when the design becomes too cluttered or unreadable could be a fine addition to allow even begging to make a nice blazon for their house
 
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eduhum said:
I hope you could actually put a heraldic description box like they used to describe in the old times, so every choice configuration would have a name. I don't know the terms in english, but in spanish a red background would be 'campo de gules' (field of reds). Three lions stacked vertically had a name, like 'rampantes' or something like that. Every single coat of arms has a code-description. I would love to see these descriptions in ck3.
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A lion rampant is the style used on the arms of Brabant, Bohemia, Holland, Flanders, Léon, Luxemburg, etc., where the lion is rearing up on its hind legs and waving its forepaws menacingly.

The arms of England feature "three lions passant guardant in pale or armed and langued azure"

three lions = three lions ;)
passant = walking across the field
guardant = looking at the viewer (contrast the arms of Denmark, where the lions are simply passant and are watching where they're going instead of mugging for the camera)
in pale = stacked vertically
or = gold/yellow
armed = claws given a different tincture to the rest of the animal
langued = tongue given a different tincture to the rest of the animal
azure = blue

I imagine that most of the blasphemies against all that is good and pure in heraldry the community is going to perpetrate will yield unreadably lengthy blazons :)
 
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Mayosski said:
I hope there will be some kind of pop-ups to educate people and help make them create historical-looking coats of arms. Some kind of pop-up telling you when a design doesn't respect the Rule of Tincture or when the design becomes too cluttered or unreadable could be a fine addition to allow even begging to make a nice blazon for their house
Click to expand...
Agreed, that would be brilliant.
 
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Mayosski said:
I hope there will be some kind of pop-ups to educate people and help make them create historical-looking coats of arms. Some kind of pop-up telling you when a design doesn't respect the Rule of Tincture or when the design becomes too cluttered or unreadable could be a fine addition to allow even begging to make a nice blazon for their house
Click to expand...
That would be amazing. And maybe even bring some deserved attention to heraldry.
Totally agreed.
 
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Tiax said:
Okay everyone, we need to have an emergency team meeting to decide which feature we're all going to incessantly demand in unrelated threads now that CoA designer is off the table.
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I am afraid this is already solved in favour of religion symbols modifying/extending.
Rakdar said:
Now we just need the option to pick the color/patterns of clothing and our customization experience will be complete!
Click to expand...
Sorry, but "strike me down, and your journey to the Dark Side will be complete" :D
 
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