Some modest results with spawn_army

[Dromikaites]

Wow - this is an excellent start at cracking the spawn_army code. I have a couple ideas I can try out this weekend... will report back with any decent findings.

Please report back any attempts, as even errors are important.

[Dromikaites]

Hi!

Some more tests with negative results. Still they're worth reporting so other people know what was tried already (helps saving time).

I tried feeding the names of those mercenary units that are offered as rewards by the Senate ("you will be given an exotic unit"). My assumption is they are hardcoded because they seem to be always the same. Here is the list:
merc barbarian cavalry

merc numidian cavalry

merc barbarian infantry

merc greek hoplites

merc rhodian slingers

merc sarmatian cavalry

merc horse archers

merc elephants

merc bastarnae


Unfortunately they don't work (error report: "unrecognized token merc"). Maybe only rebels can be spawn? Jerome, please help!!!!

[SigniferOne]

Maybe try with underscores instead of spaces, i.e. merc_numidian_cavalry, or else try to find some other identifiers for those units that are a single word. Clearly the game gets caught up by the fact that there's more than one word in the identifier, i.e. 1) merc 2) numidian 3) cavalry (because in the error, it shows you that it sees, and does not understand only the first word). Therefore, try to find ways in which to pass that unit in as a ONE word. If this is a general problem for the game to find it hard to process identifiers that consist of multiple words, then there MUST be a description somewhere where a single word is also assigned to the same army, OR it is assumed by convention that the multiple-word identifier is equivalent to some single-word version. Usually, in RTW, this means that

"word1 word2" = "word1_word2"

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Hm, have you guys ever seen the docudemon output for the scripting language? I believe I've mentioned it before, but it's these three text files... they're a bit long so i'm not going to quote them, but these are the file names:

docudemon_commands.txt
docudemon_conditions.txt
docudemon_events.txt

[edyzmedieval]

Thanks for throwing us a magic wand, Jerome.

And excellent Dromikaites. Romanians rule!!!

[The_Mark]

Nice to see you here, Jerome

Yes, they are our holy documents, we have a whole thread dedicated to them here, pretty much everything we use is from those. The problem is that they seem to be outdated, so there are quite a lot of commands that don't work for us, e.g. the spawn_army command.

[Stuie]

Nice to see you here, Jerome

Yes, they are our holy documents, we have a whole thread dedicated to them here, pretty much everything we use is from those. The problem is that they seem to be outdated, so there are quite a lot of commands that don't work for us, e.g. the spawn_army command.

Problem is, we're working off the ones that came with the demo. I don't think anyone has found them (if they exist) in the final release.

If some nice developer were to release them... I'm sure we could pool our money for a case of lager or something as a reward.

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Ok, i've had a quick look at spawn_army for you... the syntax you worked out above is essentially correct -- the command expects a sequence of "unit" commands followed by unit id's as phrases ... the following should work:

spawn_army
faction romans_julii
character Foedus Chaerea, general, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 20, x 89, y 80
unit roman generals guard cavalry, soldiers 20 exp 9 armour 1 weapon_lvl 0
unit roman legionary first cohort ii, soldiers 40 exp 0 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit roman legionary cohort ii, soldiers 60 exp 0 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
unit roman praetorian cohort i, soldiers 60 exp 0 armour 0 weapon_lvl 0
end

The reason why unit and end appeared not to be recognised was because the data after and before (respectively) were incomplete.

This error is typical; understanding the Rome descr parser could have helped some. Essentially it works by parsing Words, which are letter sequences ended by whitespace, Phrases, which are word sequences ended by comma's, and Lines, which are word and phrase sequences ended by newline characters. In this case, there had to be a phrase terminator (comma) after the unit id, because otherwise the parser couldn't know where the unit id ends as a unit id is a phrase - a sequence of arbitrary words.

This is why some identifiers in the game use underscores and others not - internally some things are typed as Words and others as Phrases. If you look out for this kind of pattern it may help you spot wrongly-formed scripts... I'll see about getting you guys some docudemon files up-to-date for Barbarian Invasion.

[Stuie]

I'll see about getting you guys some docudemon files up-to-date for Barbarian Invasion.

Thanks Jerome!!

[Dromikaites]

Yes, I can confirm that Jerome's sintax works!


Thank you very much, Jerome!

[JeromeGrasdyke]

I gave the correct syntax above... look for the comma's

[The_Mark]

Beautiful.. Simply beautiful. Thank you, Jerome, we are ever in debt to you

I have one question about this phrase parser, would the SettlementName condition check a multi-word settlement name if it was fed into the command as a phrase? It's a curious problem we have faced, as having a settlement name with two words, separated by whitespace, cannot be checked with the condition. We're even more curious about why the SettlementName condition checks the external name of the settlement, as opposed to the internal tag.. but that's not relevant right now.

[SigniferOne]

Trying the new syntax with the commas, right now.


EDIT: Success! The syntax works just as Jerome said