Questions re New Unit Types

[Nell Quick]

Hi, all.

I'm not doing anything particularly adventurous in R:TW - I'm new to modding, so at the moment I'm just messing around making myself ridiculously powerful troop types. Just for fun.

I'm taking existing unit types (say Praetorian Cohorts), duplicating them at the bottom of the relevant text files and modifying a few of their stats. The tricky bit is working out the hard-coded maximum values for things so's to avoid immediate CTDs on loading the game, but so far so stable.

I have hit a couple of problems, though: the first is the famous 'Unlocalised Placement Text' problem. Now I know some people have had this from errors in their export_units.txt file - my problem is that every unit in the game is currently giving me this message at the moment, and I'll be damned if I can find anything wrong with the file. So I'm wondering if the game simply can't read the file at all? It's currently \Data\text\export_units.txt - have I got the location or the filename wrong? Are there any file attributes I need to check? Aside from apparently not being able to find this file, the game has no problem running my 'new' units so far.

My second issue is with unit cards. I've followed the tutorials for creating new cards - my designs aren't complex, just little symbols so I can distinguish one unit type from another - but I can't seem to get the cards to display. I'm not actually getting the little grey peasant guy, so I figure the game is detecting my cards, but it can't seem to display them properly. The tutorial said I was to check that my TGA files were saved 'compressed'. I'm using Photoshop 6, but can't seem to find a compression option. Does anyone know how I can check it?

Sorry for the rambly post, but I'd appreciate any suggestions.

[Makanyane]

First to get new units with different descriptions and cards you need to have changed both the 'type' and 'dictionary' name in export_descr_unit.txt, new dictionary name is used for description in export_units.txt and for unit card name + #.

Re: export_units.txt, thats the right name / place assuming you haven't got multiple BI / RTW /data folders and mixed them up. Sounds like you've corrupted the file somehow, don't know all possibilities but generally you should open .txt files in Notepad or similar really basic text editor, to view you should have word wrap option off, and description lines shouldn't have line breaks in them i.e. you should have to scroll to read the end of long descriptions. My notepad default saves RTW files as Unicode that seems to work.

Re: unit cards, what is displaying if it isn't the peasant?
If you added your symbol outside the original area of the original unit did you also alter the alpha channel to include it? The variations for tga saving in photoshop I thought just related to the x-bit level and the default was usually correct.