March of the Eagles Developer diary 8 - Scripting Historical Events

[SolSara]

Hello everybody!

Welcome to the 8th devdiary for March of the Eagles!

For those of you who do not know me, I am SolSara, one of the four scripters currently working at the Paradox Development Studio. I have worked on several different projects since I first started working at Paradox in January 2010. Victoria II was my first project and I'm happy to say that March of the Eagles is my seventh.

A scripters main duty at Paradox Development Studio is scripting the history database. All that data for countries, provinces, Order of Battles, diplomacy, leaders, units et cetera; all of that is our responsibility.

My favorite work task, though, is to script events! A lot of our games have historical events and they give scripters the chance to try to capture the past in a nifty bit of code.

March of the Eagles leans heavily on the historical Napoleonic Wars. To make sure you, the players, are able to immerse yourselves into the game we have chosen to script historical narrative events for the eight Great nations represented in the game: France, Great Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, Spain, The Ottomans and Sweden.

These historical narrative events borrow from real historical events that happened during the Napoleonic Wars. We have events such as the Serbian Uprisings against Ottoman rule, The London Beer Flood, the coronation of King Joachim Murat of Naples and Sicily, the death of Queen Louise of Prussia and the construction of Sweden's Göta Canal.

The research for the narrative events for each of these Great nations took a while to do, since you can't do every event. You have to pick the ones that add flavor to country and make sure that you have enough. But when the selections are made, the fun part begins! The coding!

Several of these events are rather simple; the scripting isn't that advanced. For example, the scripting of the event London Beer Flood looks like this:

### London Beer Flood ###
country_event = {
	id = 20415
	title = "EVTNAME20415" 
	desc = "EVTDESC20415"
	
	fire_only_once = yes

	trigger = { 
		tag = GBR
		year = 1814
		74 = { #London
			revolt_risk = 4
			owned_by = GBR
			controlled_by = GBR
		}
	}
	
	mean_time_to_happen = {
		months = 120
	}

	option = {
		name = "EVTOPT_OK"
		add_country_modifier = {
			name = london_beer_flood
			duration = 90
		}
	}
}

For those of you who do not want anything spoiled before you can get your hands on March of the Eagles, I have inserted the text for London Beer Flood in Spoiler tags:

Spoiler

A huge vat containing 610,000 liters of beer has ruptured at the Meux and Company Brewery! Other vats in the building succumbed as well, resulting in more than 1,470,000 liters of beer to burst out and gush into the street. Two houses were destroyed and the wall of the Tavistock Arms Pub crumbled. Eight people drowned in the flood or died from injuries.

Scripting events in March of the Eagles is as simple or as complicated as it is in any other of the games from Paradox Development Studio. An event needs an id, a title, a description, some triggers, a Mean Time To Happen (MTTH) and at least one option with some sort of effect on the conditions in the game.

I hope you are looking forward to the release of March of the Eagles as much as I am! You'll get to see all the work the scripting team has done to make the world and history of the Napoleonic Era come to life.

Here's a screenshot of the event as well:
View attachment MotE_7.png

 

[Johan]

Ok.

So when is supply up for a diary?

in a few weeks..

 

[SolSara]

You fired off that event manually, didn't you?
For those interested in the London Beer Flood, more info available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Beer_Flood

Yeah, I did. It won't fire until 1814 and I haven't got any good save games yet. Must play more

 

[SolSara]

I'm amused.

I'm also quite happy for the quantity of beer to be given in litres: this a game about Napoleon, after all, and the French armies were campaigning to bring the metric system to Europe! Though if you must use the American spelling 'liter' instead of the English and French spelling 'litre'...

However, I have a bug report!

That should be "resulting in more than 1,470,000 liters of beer bursting out and gushing into the street".



The BBC's description of the event also mentions this extra detail:

"Fearful that all the beer should go to waste, though, hundreds of people ran outside carrying pots, pans, and kettles to scoop it up - while some simply stooped low and lapped at the liquid washing through the streets. However, the tide was too strong for many, and as injured people began arriving at the nearby Middlesex Hospital there was almost a riot as other patients demanded to know why they weren't being supplied with beer too - they could smell it on the flood survivors, and were insistent that they were missing out on a party!"

There was an urban legend at the time that as well as the 8 people actually killed in the flood, a ninth died a few days later of alcohol poisoning...

There's unfortunately a limit on how many words and letters we can use for each event, if there weren't any limits I would have written more... Thank you for the bug report, I'm not a native English speaker (Swedish is my first language) and "litre" is "liter" in Swedish, therefore I wrote "liter".

Why is this in Metric units? We use imperial measurements in the UK.

Because I'm a Swede and understand "liter" better than "gallons" It might get changed before the game is released, though.

 

[Guraan]

Btw, all scripts are in Lua as with the latest Paradox titles, right?

No, no need to use LUA in this case... but if you know LUA or any other similar, functional scripting languages you will not have any probs scripting events I promise you O;D