Faction battle shield

[VikingHorde]

I have taken a look at the unit battle shields. The "old" display their shields correct, but new factions don't. Portugal have swiss shield, even though I have a portugal shield.. Are the shields not here?

\Battle\FacShield\Hires\UnitName\FactionName.TGA

\Battle\FacShield\Lores\UnitName\FactionName.TGA

The game should display it correct, but swiss shields?
Can the game CTD if they lack the shields?

PS. Portugal have taken the swiss place in the startpos files. No trace of swiss there..

[VikingHorde]

I ran some tests last night and found it impossible to make new factions show the faction shield in battle. It must be hardcoded, pretty stupid of CA to do something like that. I allso found out that the dosn't CTD when it lack's faction shields. Ohh well, back to exploring the mistory's of MTW.

[Duke John]

I believe this is indeed hardcoded. It has bugged me too when I was overwriting existing unitgraphics. Even when the unit didn't have a shield, the program did display a piece of the faction shield.

[Lysander]

I have messed with the faction shields in the past and have learned a thing or two that might be helpful.
First, It is possible to alter the faction shield tga itself using at least paint-shop-pro.
Second, the tga file is pasted over the unit’s bif pallet in-game, that is why certain factions’ shield designs are so oddly colored (just look at any French unit, there is almost always no blue defined in the pallet). This can be solved by altering the colors in the shield tga, for the French change the blue part of their shield to some shade of green that is used to render the faction colors. If you do this the shield will show up in-game as having a blue background to the fleur-de-lys, rather then some odd color. This will work for any faction and really helps the look of the game.
Third, the game recognizes the shield rectangle itself and the bif folder name as strings, not the unit names, so you can create as many units as you want to use faction shields, as long as you use the right folders and appropriate designated shield coordinates.
Fourth, building on the above, you can make new bifs using even the folders that are linked to faction shields, by altering the tga itself to be all of one color, R 255, G 0, B 255. This is the tga transparent color. This way when your new bif image uses the rectangle area defined for the faction shield, the tga will be pasted, but nothing will show up because it is all the transparent color.
Now I thought you could do this Viking Horde, if you cannot create a Portugese shield directly in the tga, create it in the unit bif over the original shield and alter the Swiss shield to be only transparent color described above. This way, for all other old factions the shield image tga will show, but for the Portugese the tga will be transparent and the design you created on the bif will show instead. The problem with this is that you can only do it for one faction and you will have to work with the colors in the bif pallet. However, the good thing is that normally the shield designs will be similar in color to the faction’s color and you could use the faction colors of purple and green which will show up in-game as what ever the faction’s colors are.

[VikingHorde]

Thanks Lysander, I will give it a go some time. I'm new at unit making, so it's good to have experts around I have been reading Duke John's guide a lot, so I hopefully got all the info needed to get started.

http://www.totalwar.org/forum/non-cgi/emoticons/cheers.gif