Mighty EB coders, I plea for your help

[Zarax]

Or, in a less dramatic way, I was hoping if you could give me some tips on a problem you faced in EB's development.

During EB's earlier versions roman and greek cultures have been swapped and as everyone knows it works fine.
I've been trying to do the same for XC but despite my best attempts I keep getting CTD on exit and lesser overall stability.

If by any chance any of the coders who did that are still around, would you be so kind to give me a few tips?

Thanks!

[Atraphoenix]

Or, in a less dramatic way, I was hoping if you could give me some tips on a problem you faced in EB's development.

During EB's earlier versions roman and greek cultures have been swapped and as everyone knows it works fine.
I've been trying to do the same for XC but despite my best attempts I keep getting CTD on exit and lesser overall stability.

If by any chance any of the coders who did that are still around, would you be so kind to give me a few tips?

Thanks!

What kind of modification are you planning exactly.
I modded, traits, ancillaries, faction names, movement points, EDU, EDB, DMB even added religion to EB but while adding religion traits it CTD. So I think you can add alex religion but not conversion traits.

If you aim around this files I can help but I have no info on scripting or modelling or modding map.

P.S. I am not a member of EB team.

[Zarax]

Like I said, I'm trying to swap culture between the greek and roman factions.
The simple aim of this is to enable the romano-british trick with baktria in order to emulate the rebelling satrapies.

[Atraphoenix]

Like I said, I'm trying to swap culture between the greek and roman factions.
The simple aim of this is to enable the romano-british trick with baktria in order to emulate the rebelling satrapies.

romani-british was a special faction in BI, it had some hardcodes as well, I hope its culture is not hardcoded, too.

Are you planning mod BI files instead of RTW or just panning to mod so as to play under BI?
If it does not work you can utilize religion system as culture, in fact I gave up to add religion alex EB but to add cultures under religion modification you can have a different but a insured way under BI.

[Zarax]

I'm doing it to play with the BI exe.
I already swapped seleucids and romano-british, all I need to do is to make them roman and to make the romans greek internally.
Everything else worked like a charm (parthia rebels perfectly with their trigger) except that one thing.

As this was done before successfully by the EB team I was wondering if they could give me a tip.

[Aemilius Paulus]

romani-british was a special faction in BI, it had some hardcodes as well, I hope its culture is not hardcoded, too.

Really? Why? I knwo it was emerging, but quite a bit of other factions were as well. So why, I am curious?

[Zarax]

Do you mean romano-british or baktria and parthia?

[Atraphoenix]

romano-british has some engine related codes but I really do not know the details, the only thing I know patch 1.6 for BI enabled playing with them.

[Zarax]

I am aware of the codes but that's not really the subject of the original post.
What my problem is comes before that (in fact I didn't even try the final steps of the implementation yet) as I need to have a stable code before adding features.

As for the rest of BI sensitive code I pretty much managed to use every other available bit in XC, meaning that the seleucids also gets this:

[Tellos Athenaios]

Or, in a less dramatic way, I was hoping if you could give me some tips on a problem you faced in EB's development.

During EB's earlier versions roman and greek cultures have been swapped and as everyone knows it works fine.
I've been trying to do the same for XC but despite my best attempts I keep getting CTD on exit and lesser overall stability.

If by any chance any of the coders who did that are still around, would you be so kind to give me a few tips?

Thanks!

That would have been during the port from RTW 1.2 to 1.5 which is a good 2 and half years (or thereabouts) ago. Since I wasn't a EB member at the time I can't really vouch for this, but I would hazard a guess and say that there never really was a swap: what appears as a swap is simply the effect of starting from scratch with the basics (porting over the factions in terms of descr_sm_factions and required symbols and such) and then gradually port code including updating the old references to cultures (that can be done reliably with N + 1 search and replace operations for N cultures) ...

As a matter of fact an artefact of the EB cultures is the abundance of "Western Greek" buildings: IIRC Foot once theorized a fix for this which had to do with how cultures are ordered.

[Atraphoenix]

I am aware of the codes but that's not really the subject of the original post.
What my problem is comes before that (in fact I didn't even try the final steps of the implementation yet) as I need to have a stable code before adding features.

As for the rest of BI sensitive code I pretty much managed to use every other available bit in XC, meaning that the seleucids also gets this:

faction seleucid, spawned_on_event

In BI it should be like that

faction romano-british, spawned_on_event

to get seleucids respawn there should be this code.
check this if the assigned faction (seleucid) has this code delete it, if there is no code, there should be something unknown on BI.
also this message is coded in descr_advice.txt scan it for seleucids.

[Zarax]

to get seleucids respawn there should be this code.
check this if the assigned faction (seleucid) has this code delete it, if there is no code, there should be something unknown on BI.
also this message is coded in descr_advice.txt scan it for seleucids.

Atraphoenix, as I said I have no problem with that and it's been already solved.
Unfortunately it seems that the original purpose of this thread has been fulfilled and looks like I will have to look for different ways of solving the culture swap issue.

Admin, you can close the thread to avoid spam. Thanks for you answer Tellos.

[Foot]

There was a swap, as can be seen by the fact that two of the roman factions are now in the eastern greek faction, the third is in the eastern culture group, and the fourth, saba nee senate, is in the semetic culture group.

what files are you changing to faciliate the culture swap?

Foot

[Zarax]

Thanks for you answer Foot.
here's the list of files I changed:

descr_banners
descr_cultures
export_descr_character_traits
export_descr_sounds_stratmap_voice
descr_offmap_models
descr_sm_factions
export_descr_sounds_prebattle
export_descr_sounds_units_voice

Am I missing something obvious?

[Foot]

Are you renaming the internal names of either the factions or cultures?

Foot

[Zarax]

Both, even though in different tranches.
Before that I renamed several factions and assigned the proper culture to them without problems.

The thing is as soon as you just swap the two cultures in descr_sm_factions you get EDB errors upon exit which makes no sense, and further changes aggravates it into a CTD on exit, even though it's relatively stable in game.

It would be a shame if my attempt would be unsuccessful as early tests with emerging parthia are a blast as seleucids as if you focus a lot of resources in the east to keep the population under control you most likely won't have enough cash to face the ptolemies in the west, most likely loosing Anthioch with the best starting barracks.

EDIT: I can provide the beta code if needed, it's not like it uses industrial secrets after all...

[Foot]

I would suggest gutting the edb

EDB: Remove all requirement lines after the faction brackets (and removing all factions within brackets - replace with "{ all, }"). Remove all capability lines as well.

Foot

[Zarax]

Hmm, drastic but guess it could work.
Will try progressively gutting and seeing, although that should be ok after checking with the EDB validator...

[Foot]

Its how I did EBII. I started with the barebones mod folder and then gutted every file.

Foot