Flags switched everywhere

[unmerged(458121)]

Recently I purchased this game on Steam, and have been having fun with it. However, after a while, a friend pointed out to me that the flag of a certain country was wrong- that Venice had the flag of some african nation (the Kingdom of Zenata, we found out after long searching in the files). We looked, and noticed that every flag in the game was wrong- but only by a little, usually. For example, the Kingdom of England uses the Duchy of Northumberland's flag, and the Kingdom of France uses the County of Toulouse's flag, and the Hungarians use this weird wavy blue, the County of Tours uses the Duchy of Brittany's, and the Latin Empire has no flag at all, just a black shield. Curiously though, very little if anything appears to be wrong in Germany.

We know this because we're playing with a mod, but if you load the game without the mod, the flags work fine- england has lions, france the fleur de lis, etc. Or at least, we think it works fine- the Caliphs when we play the mod have the words Allah written in black and white on their flags, while without the mod they have a sword-and-crescent flag in garish colours. But no christian kingdoms are obviously wrong.

Now, what's mysterious about this, is we haven't changed any of the flags in this mod, nor does it in any way make references to flags in anything it changes. As far as we can tell, the game simply reads "k_france.tga" and loads that flag, so why would it load c_toulouse? Further, why would, with the strange exception of Venice, all countries have mistaken flags that are only a few provinces away, but whose filenames are completely different? It's really weird.

Since the Kingdom of Zenata doesn't exist (or if it does it's minor), we tried to fix it back when we thought it was Venice only, by adding a k_zenata.tga in the mod-file that was just venice's flag. This worked for a single load of the game, after which the kingdom of venice swapped to a different african flag. Does it somehow know? Why did it, alone, among flags change, and only after being fixed?

We read that you should delete the my documents/paradox interactive/gfx folder in a thread about flags being weird, so we did that, and it didn't work. We then deleted the entire game, reinstalled, and it still produces strange results when this mod is active.

So I checked the newly rebuilt flagfiles_0.tga files and whatnot in the my documents/paradox interactive/gfx folder, and its order seems to be reasonably likely to be correct- it goes rebel, pirate, pope, patriarch, white allah, black allah (the two caliphs I presume), a couple that could be mongol empires, then through some holy order flags. That seems like the order the titles exist in landed_titles.txt, and shows that the game is inccorect when both the mod is on and the mod is off- just less wrong when the mod is off, as the only flags that are incorrect at first glance (I haven't looked at every duchy or county since I don't know those) is the two Caliphs.

The recommended fix doesn't seem to work. The best theory seems to be that the mod includes map changes, but how could a map change change the flag of the kingdom of france to the county of toulouse, for example? And why would the caliphs have the wrong flag (I doubt they use pink sabres over a beige circle) when the mod is off so the provinces are unchanged?

 

[Veldmaarschalk]

Modifications to the game aren't supported here. Only unmodded games are.

For mod-problems you need to post in the user-modification subforum.

 

[Veldmaarschalk]

Thread re-opened, please upload a screenshot from your unmodded game showing the weird Caliph flag. Thank you.

 

[unmerged(458121)]

First off, thank you for your patience. I'm sorry my report was initially a bit confused sounding, as I was unaware of the caliph issue for half the time writing the post until it caught my eye.



Now, to save you some time hopefully, I can present a theory.
What I have checked-
=It doesn't matter what DLC you use, if any.
=It doesn't matter if you delete the my documents/etc/GFX folder. The flags .tga file in there has the correct caliphate flags, but they don't seem to get loaded.
=The caliph's flag is right or wrong by the time you get to the country selection screen, it doesn't change in loading the game.
=The issue is consistent and the Caliphs use the same wrong starting flag on three different computers, unmodded and reinstalled, all of whom share only the fact they purchased it on steam and bought the DLC.
=It doesn't matter whether you have a mod in the mod folder if not loaded, but it DOES matter if you load the mod AND it changes the caliph's starting religion, but NOT if it doesn't (one computer had a mod that did, one that didn't, and in the one where it didn't mess with initial religions it was wrong even when modded)

As such, I can render a pretty good guess as to the issue affecting the caliphs- muslims get pseudo-randomly assigned flags (presumably based on a consistent seed).

Theory- E_Shia_Caliphate.tga or whatever their flag is is associated with the title, but the game loads that first, then goes 'oh hey, a muslim, I should give him a randomly generated aniconic thing' and gives him flourescent pink swords. By changing the caliph away from muslim at game start, the game manages to start a scenario without thinking he's a muslim (though it by default gives all flag-less pseudo-muslims a random islamic flag nonetheless), thus his flag is correct.

Problems with the theory- when a mod to change the religion of the muslims at start is used, the Seljuk Turks seem to have the wrong flag, and seem to have the right one when not- this is backwards from what my explanation would predict. Further, it doesn't explain all of christendom and pagandom being wrong (and sometimes also off-centered) when a mod is loaded except the titles like pope, patriarch, and emperors. If it's an error in positioning flags, why is venice the nonexistant kingdom of zenata, and why is the latin empire black?

 

[unmerged(458121)]

Good news and bad news.

The good news is that I found out that all of christendom changing is due to a single dropped parenthesis in my mod. It didn't affect germany because the parenthesis was in the ERE, which is after the Germans in the Landed Titles file. That is also why the Pope did not change in any case, as he is defined first. Therefore the error is mine. This also fixed everything from norway to venice to et cetera. So the error for 'all of christendom has different flags' is entirely user error due to a typo in modding. You have my sincere apologies for wasting your time if you searched for a reason for this in the base game.

However, the bad news is that in the base, unmodded game, the Seljuqs (who should use a pair of white birds on blue), the Caliphs (who should use arabic Allah in black and white or white and black), and apparently all other titular arab kingdoms (and at least a significant fraction of the de-jure ones) still consistently do not load correctly. Thus there still seems to be a base-game issue I am reporting.

Now that the christendom and pagan errors are factored out, I now am quite certain that the game (at least in the steam edition) loads arab flags then overwrites them with random ones, even when it should not (such as the seljuqs and caliphs). This may be WAD for things like k_africa or the various states in spain to prevent arabs from having iconographic, christian-looking flags, but it should not take place when there is an arab-style flag specified for them like in the case of the caliphs and the seljuqs.

Oh, further evidence that it's a flag bug related to being muslim overwriting your proper shield- in the unmodded game, the tengri Golden Horde and Ilkhanate have the proper shields, but the muslim converted ones later on do not have the proper shields, assuming it was intended they would keep them.