The Great Austrian Mystery

**falkonfive** · 02-22-2008, 00:50

As a complete novice to modding until 3 weeks ago I have been quite pleased with my efforts in giving NTW 1 figures the proper colour uniforms and making small changes. ( Pleased by my standards that is!! ). So far I have managed to make 50 or 60 a little more accurate and attractive. Then came the great Austrian Grenz ( Light Infantry ) affair. I am using the standard procedure, bifreader, convert to bmp, Paint Shop Pro then back into the 12 frames of the BIF file. No problems at all . Then this -

As you can see the rear view appears to have the unfortunate Grenzers leaning on a gravestone!! Absolutely no sign of this in the BIF animation or on Paint Shop BMP's and it is only the rear view that it appears on. It looks like part of an object of some sort. Personally I think the Grenzers are protesting at their rather garish Blue and Orangey brown uniforms ( but accurate ).

I'm hoping the old modding hands out there will be able to tell me what causes it and how to get rid of it and many thanks in advance for any advice.

Falkonfive

**macsen rufus** · 02-23-2008, 11:38

That is the famous "faction shield" bug at work!

You will be using one of the "dangerous" animation folders for this - there are six which in the original game are associated with faction shields, effectively a faction-specific shield design for each model (eg various sergeants, men at arms, knights etc). The only solution is to use different animation folders or keep your number of factions below 20. I can't remember the full list off the top of my head, but it includes Peasant, MSHelm .... erm and four others

. If you haven't used them already you could just copy these folders across to Custom0 --> Custom5 and the problem will disappear.

**Raz** · 02-23-2008, 12:46

Heh, how come I was never told of this bug? Has it only recently been found or is it buried in the archives?

**macsen rufus** · 02-23-2008, 14:05

Hi Raz, you don't get all the secrets in one go, you know

You have to pass the initiation tests and sacrifice enough ~~camels~~ goats to the Old Ones

Actually the issue did get a bit confused in the early days when someone started using the terminology "face shield", and most of the necessary info is buried around in various parts of the forum. The original "Adding a new faction in VI" pdf guide (by Starkhorn) does cover this briefly, see the repository thread of the same name.

It is all rather complex, but it's best to avoid the "dangerous" folders altogether, and you have to be 100% sure not to use them for factions above 20. There is another trick that will stop the bits of shield showing up as in Falkonfive's pic, though I can't remember the full file path - it might be in Battle/Shields - but there is a directory that contains a series of TGAs for the various units, with one for each faction. If you open up all of these and replace the shield image with a completely pink (ie "transparent" colour) TGA, then copy them across to all the other directories it will stop inappropriate shields showing up.

If you do a trawl through the manin Ancient TW thread there are various stages of my discovery of all this explained... it started to bug me about the time I had to introduce Ligurian chariots (The Ligurians were my faction 21, so the first to come across the problems....)

**falkonfive** · 02-23-2008, 16:22

One goat sacrificed to Macsen Rufus, wisest of the wise. That did the trick. Must have been lucky with the other 'dangerous ones' cos they worked fine. Factions wasn't the problem cos we only have about 10 in the Napoleonic lineup and were trying to lose some of those but thats not my department.

Many thanks MR

Falkonfive