Leaders and monarchs not appearing

[Incompetent]

It seems there's quite a serious problem with Abe affecting the leader and monarch files: after some playing, I've found that the leaders for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Hansa and the Caliphate never appear in-game, and in fact are missing from saved game files; I suspect this applies to more countries as well. I even found I was getting generic monarchs as the KoJ, and again this may be a more general problem.

Has anyone else noticed this, and are there any ideas as to what might be going wrong, in my version at least? I thought that correctly-named leader and monarch files were included automatically, but it seems this is not the case. The only pattern I can see is that the tags I've found so far with a problem are ones which don't have leaders/monarchs in vanilla.

 

[MattyG]

It seems there's quite a serious problem with Abe affecting the leader and monarch files: after some playing, I've found that the leaders for the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Hansa and the Caliphate never appear in-game, and in fact are missing from saved game files; I suspect this applies to more countries as well. I even found I was getting generic monarchs as the KoJ, and again this may be a more general problem.

Has anyone else noticed this, and are there any ideas as to what might be going wrong, in my version at least? I thought that correctly-named leader and monarch files were included automatically, but it seems this is not the case. The only pattern I can see is that the tags I've found so far with a problem are ones which don't have leaders/monarchs in vanilla.

Becuase the Caliphate leaders exist in a different ype of file (no idea why this is) it might be that something isn't being read correctly.

The KoJ and Hansa have appeared for me, but there were bugs in the Hansa file in the early years that we have ironed out (my circle of MP players, not the AD).

I would be interested to know why the Caliphate files are in this alternate Graph file format. Maybe we ought to re-write them to the standard format.

 

[tombom]

I would be interested to know why the Caliphate files are in this alternate Graph file format. Maybe we ought to re-write them to the standard format.

They are not. If you open them with Notepad or Wordpad you'll see they're the same as the others. It's just that some other application has that type of extension as well. I have this problem with other files due to the range of tags.

 

[Trin Tragula]

Written by me in the mac aberration thread:

Also I'm not sure if this is mac specific but when aberration loads a whole butload of monarchs and leaders are for some reason not succesfully included. If you want them you should save the game imidietly and then quit. Then you shall open the saved file in a text editor (I'd recomend bbedit myself) and add them manually from the respective files.
If you don't know how to do this don't bother the game will play fine without them (but some nations will be vastly underpowered compared to what they're supposed to be).

A whole LOT of leader and even monarch files are not loaded at all.
It affects more nations than the Hansa and Caliphate.

 

[MattyG]

Written by me in the mac aberration thread:



A whole LOT of leader and even monarch files are not loaded at all.
It affects more nations than the Hansa and Caliphate.

Please remember that none of us are paid to be here. We are all just trying to help one another out.

It could be the problem is Mac related, although I know the issues in the Hansa file and the solution has already been prepared for the 'bug free' upload in early May. I have not noticed issues with the Caliphate, but I will look into that as well.

Could everyone be a little more helpful to the bug catchers and detail:

1. Which countries you specifically noticed this problem with, and

2. The period in which you noticed it. (This can be critical in tracking where the problem might have begun, especially with countries that have branched lineages, liked Grenada and Byzantium.)

Thanks.

 

[Incompetent]

2. The period in which you noticed it. (This can be critical in tracking where the problem might have begun, especially with countries that have branched lineages, liked Grenada and Byzantium.)

From what I've seen, it's not a question of certain leaders or monarchs failing to appear. The save game file literally has an empty leadertable and/or monarch table, meaning that country gets no leaders at all and/or generic monarchs for the entire game, regardless of dates or events. It appears that the relevant file is simply not being read by the game at all, so it's not a specific problem with the contents.

This may well be a Mac-only problem, but I have no idea how to solve it, as it appears to be a general problem rather than a case of incorrectly written or formatted files.

Edit: I still haven't fixed it, but I did a brief test which gave interesting results. I changed CAL into TUR on both the country file and the suffix on the leader file. The result is that the country gets called 'Ottoman Empire', with Ottoman monarchs, but Caliphate leaders. Before the tag change, CAL did not get its own leaders, so fiddling with tags has somehow forced the program to read the Aberrated leader file, when previously the file was being ignored. Hmmmm...

 

[Trin Tragula]

Not sure what the employment comment has to do with anything, I'm just trying to point out were I'm experiencing bugs
I've myself been part of several fan projects for different games.

The nations that lack leaders, lacks all of their leaders, not just a few, the file is for some reason or another not loaded at all. Could very well be a mac related problem, but for instance the AGCEEP and other mods do not have these problems at all.

Leaders are not imported for:
Hansa
Kalmar Union
Brittany
Granada
Bulgaria
Caliphate
Kingdom of Jerusalem
Finland
Krete
Romagna
Swabia
Syria

Monarchs are not imported for:
Kalmar Union
Ragusa
Bulgaria
Armenia
Caliphate
Kingdom of Jerusalem
Finland
Gotland
Istria
Krete
Küstrin
Langedouc
Leon
Normandy
Podolia
Oporto
Romagna
Silesia
Swabia
Syria

Might've missed some, what I did was search a save file that I had created imidietly after launching the game. Then I opened it up in a text editor and searched for empty leader and monarch tags. Then I compared the hits with existing leader and monarch files. These are the ones that came up empty despite having files that were suposed to have been loaded.

 

[Incompetent]

OK, I think I now know what's going on - there's a defect in mac EUII's moddir procedure. For some reason, the Mac version of EU2 will look for the default leaders/monarchs first, and THEN go to the moddir files to see if the leaders/monarchs are to be replaced. However, if it can't find a default file, it doesn't bother looking for its moddir cousin.

This gives us a solution, albeit a messy one: if you put empty files with names like 'leaders.cal' and 'monarchs.jer' in your DEFAULT folders (ie EUII Data Files: DB: Leaders etc ) then the program will read the corresponding moddir files and monarchs/leaders will load correctly.

Thanks Trin Tragula, that list will help for sorting this out in general. Are you sure AGCEEP doesn't suffer this problem? Does AGCEEP try to give leaders and monarchs to countries which don't have any in vanilla? As it's a historical mod and uses most of the original tags, it may be that the problem just isn't as visible. If however they've genuinely fixed the problem, it would be interesting to see how, so we don't need to tell people to put dummy files in their default DB folder.

 

[Trin Tragula]

Good question I have not run the same test procedure on AGCEEP so you might well be right that it's just not affecting any nations noticable.

Going to test the dummy file theory as soon as possible (it does seem very plausible). However, doesn't Ragusa have a monarch file in the vanilla game?

 

[MattyG]

Yes, great list. Always better to have as many details to work with as possible.

Incompetant and I can divide up the countries and see what we can discover within the files. (I'll PM you to discuss this one).

It's interesting, because I have never personally experienced this in the game, with the exception of Hansa. Admittedly, I haven't played or paid much attention to some of the minors that you list.

Thanks again.

MattyG

 

[unmerged(49709)]

Hi, I've just seen this problem (empty leader table) playing the Hansa, but I could solve it quite easilly by putting an empty 'leaders.hsa' file in the vanilla 'leaders' folder, as suggested above.

So, I think it would be great if someone could tell me the tags of the countries affected by this bug (as there's allready a list of countries above), so that I could make all the empty files I'd need to solve the problem ; by the way, if you want, I could then put them in a zip file to download somewhere, so that mac users could solve the problem without creating all the files by hand...

Excepted, of course, if someone knows of a better way to solve the issue !

 

[MattyG]

The ghost file thing still surprises me a little, because there are no vanilla versions of leaders and monarchs for all of the U nations, the User Defined ones. Yet the leaders and monarchs seem to load for these places in Aberration and in AGCEEP.

However, I don't pretend to understand programming.

I would be very happy that you add to this project by creating the files you mention. We can create a folder in the DB folder titled "Add_to_Vanilla" with a Read Me explaining what to do. And you can also do the same with the Mac thingy stuff.

If you do undertake this project, I can then add other nations as they are created. However, please add to the list the following:

Leaders and monarchs for Occitania tag = MES
Leaders for Lorraine tag = LOR
Leaders for Wales tag = WLS
Leaders and Monarchs for York tag = YOR
Leaders and Monarchs for Wessex tag = PUR
Leaders for Maya tag = MAA
Leaders for Dichali tag = APA
Leaders for Zapotec tag = ZAP
Leaders for Louisiana tag = LOU
Leaders for Armenia tag = ARM
Leaders for Languedoc tag = LGD

There will be many more like this, as most nations will have leaders in Aberration, but as I said, I can create others and add them to your file as I receieve such material or build those new files myself.

And when you have done this, you could think about doing more for Aberration. There are lots of nations that need attention and I could give you a fun little project to work on ...

 

[unmerged(49709)]

Ok, that's done... You can downoald the file here (6.8 KB, empty files are very heavy ). I also added a little read me to explain what to do with the files, so that you could include it with the next beta (but check if it's not too badly written : English isn't my main language...)

By the way, three of the files you mentioned did allready exist in my vanilla EU II folder : Leaders for Lorraine (LOR), and monarchs for York and Wessex (YOR and PUR)... I added them anyway, but I wrote in in the read me that people shouldn't overwrite existing files with those ones.

When it comes to having more implication in Aberration.. I'd really like it (Ab is a very fun mod !), but I won't really have much time to work on it... The studies I'm currently doing are really time consuming, and will be for the next year and a half (excepted when on holyday, of course )... Maybe I'll try to see what I'll could do a little later, but I can't guarantee you anything serious before next summer...

But I think I'll have some time soon to begin something not too big, if you want (I've 2 weeks and a half of hollyday arround Christmas, and the last week of work before it won't be heavy... Then it'll depend on the weeks...).

 

[MattyG]

Thanks for all of these files. I have placed them into the Beta 5 package.