Altering the senate graphics

[Herrebrugh]

Is it possible to edit whatever "[GetPartyIcon(SenateItemGlue.GetType)]" is (in game\gui\government_view.gui)?

To give a bit of background: I want to mod in icons with a top-down view of a senator sitting on his seat to spice up the representation of the senate a little. I first tried doing this by simply replacing unit_card_square.dds (which is used as the background behind the party icons in the senate window) with my custom file, by editing government_view.gui. This means the party symbol obscures the little senator man I so lovingly created, though, and making the symbol smaller so it fits on his head makes it too hard to read.

My solution was to colour his toga according to party (so red for the military faction, green for the civil faction etc.). The only way I can figure out to do that is by getting rid of the party icons in favour of my senator graphic (simply replacing the icons in game\gfx\interface\icons\party_types), but this isn't perfect anyway, and I'd prefer keeping the old icons intact except for in the senate screen.

It now appears to me that, in order to do that, I would have to somehow use something like "[GetPartyIcon(SenateItemGlue.GetType)]" to "get" my own icons. Being a complete noob at whatever that is, I tried editing 00_graphics.txt in game\common\defines\graphic (mainly because "defines" sounds pretty serious) to contain the following ("L" and "R" mean left and right):

L_SEN_PARTY_ICON_PATH = "gfx/interface/icons/l_s_party_types"
R_SEN_PARTY_ICON_PATH = "gfx/interface/icons/r_s_party_types"​

in the hope that this was what "[GetPartyIcon(SenateItemGlue.GetType)]" was referring to, so I, by analogy, added to government_view.gui:

On line 677, instead of "[GetPartyIcon(SenateItemGlue.GetType)]"

texture = "[GetLSenPartyIcon(SenateItemGlue.GetType)]"​

On line 729

texture = "[GetRSenPartyIcon(SenateItemGlue.GetType)]"​

And I created two folders in the locations above (gfx/interface/icons/l_s_party_types and gfx/interface/icons/r_s_party_types) with the correct icons.

This, as I expected, didn't work one bit, and I currently think this is simply hard-coded, and I won't be able to mod in my graphics like I hoped.

Spoiler: Here are my icons if you're curious

To ask the question again a bit differently: is it possible to write the kind of code that can be called by "[GetPartyIcon(SenateItemGlue.GetType)]"?

 

[Herrebrugh]

To make myself a bit clearer, this is roughly what I want:

Spoiler

This is functional, but my senate icons don't really work as party symbols, so I need to find a way to only use my icons for the senate graphic (I'd prefer a vanilla party symbol on the spot of the consul as well).

Maybe it's possible to include all icons on a sprite strip and have the game look for a specific area in the image file it's in? I mean, make a dds file that has the senate bloke on the left and the party symbol to the right, and make the game look for the left part of the image file for the senate box, and the right side for all other cases.

EDIT: I can confirm this method works

Spoiler

I may release this as a mod in the coming time.

 

[Will Steel]

This actually looks far better than the vanilla Senate seat tiles which you have to squint at to even realize what they are.

I'd have preferred a semicircular Senate/council with coloured dots, but that is up to the devs anyway.

 

[Herrebrugh]

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https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1729851494