At Imperium:TW we've noticed some strange stuff when playing with the hording and with emerging factions.
The first experiment:
Step 1: copy the bi directory;
Step 2: copy the RTW files (those in \data, not \bi\data) into the corresponding folders, overwritting almost every bi file except the skeletons and the files needed to have night battles.
Result: we can play RTW using the bi.exe (Rome Total War-BI.exe). BI.exe has even the Senate inside.
Not so surprising after all, but wait, there's more!
The second experiment: the Scythians were moded in order to be able to horde. Then we've noticed the first 2 strange things:
a) The left side of the city scroll, that which has the horde button, was missing and instead there was some strange vertical band.
b) If the Scythian army was taking any city, clicking on the sacking option was resulting in a CTD.
The cure for those two problems proved to be simple: we've replaced the strat3.rsd, shared2.rsd and battle3.rsd of rtw with the bi one (those files are in \bi\data\ui). So now the Scythians were hording nicely and they were also sacking cities like any decent barbarian should do.
Then we had another idea: to spawn the Scythians like the Slavs are spawned in BI. We changed the descr_strat.txt, descr_sm_factions.txt, descr_events.txt and historic_events.txt accordingly. To our surprise we were getting the event announced but no actual spawning was taking place. The Scythians remain dead without being ever resurrected. Any idea why, Jerome?
The third experiment was done on a clean copy of the BI folder. The idea was to test if spawning was in any way related to the internal names of the BI factions.
First part of the experiment, we made several factions whith horde ability to spawn like the Slavs do. Then we gave the horde ability to the Alemanni and then spawned them on event.
For the second part of the experiment we've changed the internal name of one faction, the Slavs, from Slavs to Scythians. By internal name I mean the faction name used in export_descr_buildings.txt So no tricks like the classical extended_bi.txt editing "{SLAVS} Scythians" but "{SCYTHIANS} Scythians" instead. I also want to point out that {SCYTHIANS} is not an RTW internal name (the RTW faction is called {SCYTHIA}).
Here are all the files in which we've replaced the string "slavs" with "scythians":
In bi\data\text:
- historic_events.txt
- expanded_bi.txt
- campaign_descriptions.txt
In bi\data:
- export_descr_unit.txt
- export_descr_ancillaries.txt
- export_decr_buildings.txt
- export_descr_advice.txt
- descr_sm_factions.txt
- descr_names.txt
- descr_offmap_models.txt
- descr_models_strat.txt
- descr_model_battle.txt
- descr_lbc_db.txt
- descr_formations_ai.txt
- descr_character.txt
- descr_building_battle.txt
- descr_banners.txt
In bi\data\world\maps\campaign\barbarian_invasion:
- descr_win_conditions.txt
- descr_strat.txt
- descr_events.txt
We've also changed the names of the folders bi\data\ui\unit_info\slavs and bi\data\ui\units and replaced the word "slavs" with "scythians" in the names of the files in bi\data\models_strat. Actually we didn't replace the names of the files or folders but instead we've created duplicates with "scythians". We did copying instead of replacing in order to give the game the possibility to fall back on something in case we'd miss out replacing all the references.
After making all those changes we saw the game loads, the campaign also loads (a new map.rwm is generated) and the campaign can be played as a normal one. But the game CTDs without any message when it's the time for the Scythians to emerge. However that was not the strangest thing. After all, we could expect a CTD since we've fiddled with the internal name, couldn't we?
However, the most bizarre thing is once we've changed the internal name of the Slavs, nobody else can spawn on event anymore without a CTD (again, no error message). It is like the change SLAVS -> SCYTHIANS has also affected the ability of the Lombardi, Burgundii, Huns etc. to emerge/spawn_on_event. And it's not like before, when the message "The Scythians Emerge" shows up but the faction is not resurrected. This time is CTD without the message. Jerome, any idea why this is happening?
Did anybody else manage to make a non-BI faction spawn_on_event (emergent_faction)?
Edit: the proces of changing the internal name can be used in RTW to get rid of the Senate and use it like a normal faction. There are no known side effects discovered till now because hording and emerging factions don't work anyway in RTW 1.3/1.5.
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