Sprite Generator... CA ?

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Ah. Yes. The sprite generator. It's there already, but I'm afraid it's not all that user friendly. Like many of the tools used for Rome it's embedded in the main Rome exe, and you access it by starting up the game with "-sprite_script" on the command line. It was made available in the 1.2 patch exe, and won't be there in earlier versions.

What this does is cause the game to start up looking for a file called "sprite_script.txt" in the game's root directory, which it uses to construct the sprite pages and .spr files for the sprite imposters into the data/sprites directory. This process references data in the descr_model_battle.txt file to create sprites which correspond to the different faction colour / model texture pages. I'm including a chunk of the syntax below, so that you will have something to work from when creating the script:


barb_female_peasant no_faction
east_female_peasant no_faction
generals_horse romans_julii generals horse
generals_horse romans_brutii generals horse
generals_horse romans_scipii generals horse
horse_cataphract seleucid horse cataphract
horse_cataphract parthia horse cataphract
barb_cavalry gauls generals horse
barb_cavalry germans generals horse
carthaginian_medium_cavalry carthage generals horse
carthaginian_medium_cavalry numidia generals horse
carthaginian_medium_cavalry spain generals horse
persian_sparabara_merc no_faction
egyptian_peltast_merc no_faction
greek_elephant_crew_merc no_faction sprite_root


And so on... it's essentially a list of "descr_model_battle type id" "faction type" "mount type". You have to explicitly list all the factions that you want sprites for, since you could economise on space by sharing sprites among factions. The sprite_root keyword is used to indicate a model which is on a mount but is nevertheless standing up (chariot drivers, etc).

Be warned that this process can take a long time - a couple of hours for regenerating the complete set of sprites was not unusual - and requires a decent graphics card (128mb of video memory minimum, I believe). If you run with -ne on the command line you should be able to do other things during that time, although I wouldn't recommend running anything that uses DirectX.

After it completes you'll have to modify descr_model_battle.txt to correctly use the new sprite files.

Hope that gets you started...