Ancient TW: GRAPHICS discussion

[macsen rufus]

Got the basics done on the legionaries, just have a few twiddles left to finish off. I'm quite pleased with how the 1-2 attack animation with the shield then sword-thrust has worked out


And in the process of all this, I've made a couple of weird discoveries related to placing units in the startpos file. Seems the game can be a bit picky about unit names. First off I tried to give the Populares a couple of units of First Cohort legionaries (Legionary2 in the unit_prod) with a valour bonus....

ie MakeUnit ... Legionary2 160 1 (ie 160 men with 1 kill) >> killed the startpos - not available at main menu

so I removed the valour boost:

MakeUnit ... Legionary2 160 >> startpos loaded, but the unit came out as 2 men with valour 8!

Aha! I thought - even though there's no space in the name, the engine interprets the "2" as a quantity of the basic Legionary unit, so I changed the name of the First Cohort to LegionaryB, instead:

MakeUnit ... LegionaryB 160 >> killed the startpos again!

The game works fine with these units, with the sole exception of putting them in the startpos. Any unit that goes in the startpos cannot have a name that begins with the whole name of another unit. I think I have the fix, but have yet to try it - basically I need to rename the basic legionary unit to LegionaryA, so that LegionaryB no longer contains the whole name of Legionary. I imagine when the startpos file is parsed, it stops as soon as it sees the first valid full name, then anything that comes after is assumed to be the number of men.

EDIT: yep, works fine with LegionaryA, the Populares now get their two experienced units of First Cohort legionaries.

Anyway, enough of that - here's a few screenies of the new legionaries in action: