G.A. Homelands and Barbarian Migrations?

[Re Berengario I]

Quote[/b] ]I remember one of the CA guys back in the Spring stating that they had used all of the available land regions, so I wonder if anyone has actually used those last 8 regions.

Someone stated he added some more province but theory and practice are quite different so I want try to do it by myself in the next days and see if it works.

Quote[/b] ]In some of my reading yesterday, a guy mentioned some files in the frontend_files\factionselect_menu that had to be altered or made from scratch.

I listed them in a previous post in this thread:

Quote[/b] ]
MINIMAP.BIF
MINILUKUP.BIF

Images used for the selection screen (where you choose the faction and you see its lands on the map, MINIMAP.BIF is the map, MINILUKMAP.BIF is the "political" map showing the provinces.

FE_MINIMAP.BIF
FE_MINIMAP_LUKUP.BIF

These are the images used for the little map displayed on the left-up corner of the strategical screen. The same principles as above apply here as well.

Quote[/b] ]Btw, if I input the locations of the port, ship, castle and unit placement for the new and altered provinces into the campaign files, shouldn't this remove the chore of making those dots with the LMM

Coordinates in the startpos files are calculated getting the position on the image and multiplying it by 8 if you use the hi-res map or 16 if you use the lo-res map.
I never used LMM as I prefer do all by hand.

Quote[/b] ]The bad part is that the game won't load the 8-bit versions, so they'll have to be reverted back to 24-bit size before they can be used.

I confirm this as I already tried it. If the "end-user" has a program (like PSP) which can convert between JPG and TGA the size could be shrinked down even more. Messing with compression of the LUKUP maps is instead a no-no, otherway you'll experience very nasty effects (and CTDs) as the colors will be messed up.

Quote[/b] ]easily see all that needs to be done to add the new provinces

Let me try to add a province in the next days to my mod. I know that region_specific.txt and faction_specific.txt needs to be changed. Regowner_table too for sure. I'm not 100% sure about names.txt and description.txt and I don't remember if also the heroes.txt needs to be updated (because the rebel definitions for the new province).

Changing the maps has the side effect that or the original files are overwritten or you need to use the directory and file structure in the style of VI. This is another choice you have to do, I choosed the VI structure but now I don't know if I would choose the same as at the end a lot of the original files needs to be overwritten anyway (projectile, dead_coords, regowner_table, names, descriptions, factions GA graphics).