Modding the battle editor

This is a bit weird question, but it there a way to mod the battle editor itself, to add more options and buildings available?
I have noticed that all the buildings, settlements and other objects in battle editor are related to one of the factions from RTW vanilla or a mod, and can be seen also in the campaign. But it would be great if it was possible to add more objects and land tiles, or even new kinds of roads, to increase the variety and make the historical battle more exciting. Maybe, put the features from different mods in the editor.

Has anyone tried this? I am sure that there must be a file, from which the editor takes all the features from, I suspect the descr_items.db, but I am not sure.

You can get new things to become selectable in the battle editor, by making them as 'settlement plans' (no I don't mean full scale settlements)

To get new models into game at all you do need to go through the conversion process from .cas to .item and that does include getting game to regenerate the items.db file - look for Alpaca's tutorial in the scriptorium for that.

When you've done that - unless you replaced an existing item - it still won't come up as an option to add in the battle editor. To get them in there you need to make a text file in data/settlement_plans folder, example of the simplest type of thing would be

Code:

---

plan
        {
floor        underlay_clump_of_palm_trees_A.cas
new_item_name,                        0,        0,        -90,        0
        }

---

you seem to need some sort of underlay.cas for each, I think you can probably make new ones, but I only re-used existing ones. Numbers after the item name are x,y,z co-ordinates and orientation in relation to the underlay scene root (or centre not sure which).

To get it to show in battle editor add that settlement_plan's name to descr_landscape_ambient_settlements.txt
ambient_settlement new_plan_name

Code:

---

{
        type        special

        plan        new_plan_name

        st                -20
}

---

makes it come up in same sections as wonders and it won't appear spontaneously on map.

Also add the plan's name to the list at the bottom of descr_settlement_plan.txt file like:

Code:

---

        plan new_plan_name                new_plan_name.txt

---

There are probably other ways of getting things in but that at least gets you things selectable from editor for custom tiles. There are some hardcoded issues around things the game considers to be roads, so you might not have much luck on those....

That is a very useful info, thanks. I will try it out soon. :lam: ~:)