Modding tips and tricks

[Burnsaber]

Now that I've gotten back into modding I see that one sometimes manages to reveal a random piece of modding knowledge when trying out stuff.

If you also hold some fruit of usable modding knowledge, please share it. I'll add them to the list on this post.

- When starting on your first mod, it is very helpful to copy as much as you can from nation mods that already work. Sombre's mods are considered highly in this area.

- You can use #onebattlespell with custom spells with this minor hack. Copyspell a orginal dom3 spell (use a spell that is not likely to be used as a #onebattlespell itself) and alter the orginal spell to your liking. Remember to clearly document what vanilla spells you have altered.

- Did you know that to make a pure holy divine (aka school 8) spell, you need to #copyspell a excisting holy spell to make it visible in the scripting screen?

- You can #onebattlespell summoning ritual spells. Doing this will create a "cloud" that will spawn units from the ritual spell at the start of each combat turn. The graphical effect for this cloud is the poison cloud from the C'tis poison slingers, but it can be changed by #selectspelling the ritual summon in question and giving it different #explsprite. You can also get the same effect by using a spell with effect number over 9000.

- There is a bug with giving forts to a new nation: See this useful post from Jazzepi for details.

- Pure holy ritual spells cannot be monthly casted, doing so will crash the game. Pure holy rituals are also buggy and seem to crash the game on turn generation from time to time. Globu has reported getting a holy ritual work under certain circumstances, but I'd recommend to just forget it, since even he can't monthly cast it.

- If your spell uses #flightsprite that takes effect on the caster, make sure that spell doesn't have huge range. Althought there is no missile sprite, the game will stall until this invisible "missile" hits the target. Very annoying.

- #older accepts negative value, making units younger.

- When using #nextspells, make sure that the #nextspell is researchlevel 0. Apparently the game will not cast the nextspell unless you have it researched! I don't know if this is the case for vanilla spells, but I got hit by this when using my own modded spells. You could also use this to your advantage and make a spell that gains #nextspells as you advance in research.

- Here are some tips from Endoperez on how to easily make good looking new unit graphics.

-See also my guide on the matter of sprite editing (or frankensteining as it known on some circles) in here

- Weapons and spells use same explosionsprites, but you can't use weapon #flysprites with spells nor can you use spell #flightsprites with weapons. These sprites have also been mapped, see this thread:


- Item Modding is quite limited in 3.23, but here are some tips from Psientist on how to work around the limitations.


- You can assign boots of the planes to an Indy commander and have that commander show up in a random other Indy province during game play. (From Psientist)

- If you create a unit with NO magic paths, and give it a magic leadership, it will still not be able to lead magic units. However, if you give it a #magicpath X 0 (a level of zero in that path), it will then be available for leading magic units in the Army Setup menu. (From Psientist)

- You can assign a #watershape (and probably a #forestshape, etc) to a unit in addition to a #secondshape... but the #secondshape must be the last item listed in the series inside the mode file, and the #watershape only is activated when the unit changes provinces. (From Psientist)

- Did you know that the pictures on magic sites are based on path & level? esd29a has mapped them, see this post for details


- There are some mystic bugs regarding PD. See this thread for details.

-The spell effect "polymorph" (number 54) allows for different #damage values for different shapes. However, it seems that the transformation spell does not accept damage values over 1000, perhaps because the spell then adds caster level for damage? Giving values over 2000 seems to result in monsters with monster ID under 1000.

-Also, kennydicke noticed that the Ritual of Rebirth can also be modded by changing the #damage value to revive the hero in another shape than the basic mummy.

-You can give a piece of armor negative encmumberance to make it actually reduce encumberance, for example if you have a unit with a -2 encumbernace shield and 3 base encumberance + 1 from body armor and the -2 from the modded shield it will have a net encumberance of 2. (Thanks to Swan for finding this)

-Here's a modding trick by Sombre:

You have a recruitable commander, let's say a "Royal Guard Captain". The recruitable form of this commander comes with a summon5 and a domsummon of "Royal Guard Infantry". It also has a firstshape pointing to another instance of "Royal Guard Captain" which does not have these summons. Now when you buy the Captain, you get some free troops with him, in a limited supply, without the drawbacks of onebattlespell combat summons or endless streams of summon allies or autosummons.

Of course it eats an extra unit slot, possibly two, per commander you use it on. But then you wouldn't use it on every non mage commander. Just some of them. The 'free' troops are a compensation for hiring a non mage commander

He (Sombre) tested this with lizardmen and you don't even need to differentiate the summoning form from the normal form, because when you recruit them, this happens before EoT, as does the summoning of their troops, so they summon the troops, then they change shape and become normal. In other words, no delay between hiring them, them summoning and them turning into the normal version. So you can literally just put in the description that when you buy them you get X free dudes

-Here is my hack that gives a commander a "battleshape" that it turns into at the start of each battle. Useful for making mages that get weaker in combat, for example.

- If you have too many #tags on a monster, some of them might fail to work. Kennydicke has reported #shape tags being ingored just because of having too many tags on the monster.

- Here is my report on some spell modding test results.

- Popkill and leper only work on commanders. (by Soyweiser)

- A pretender with the changeshape commmand needs a higher monsternr for his second shape. Or it will not show up in the pretender list (by Soyweiser)

- #nobadevents - tag works on troops. I tested with a troops that had 100 bad event prevention and my single province did not a single bad events during 40+ turns in turmoil and misfotune 3.