Modding disasters

**Teleklos Archelaou** · 06-06-2007, 22:16

Actually, just opening up descr_disasters (the one in base folder) and increasing frequency to "1" for earthquakes, storms, floods (which should be in every year), I can go a decade in vanilla without any events. I don't see any .db files for it though - I can't understand why it's not working.

edit: also tried 2, 3, 4, and 5 as possible frequency values, in case there was a threshold and 1 was ignored, but I see nothing occurring after a decade still. Gah.

**Dol Guldur** · 06-06-2007, 22:45

I have modded that descr_disasters file down quite a bit and there is one thing I can say: the game pays not a blind bit of notice to it.

I will try and find time to look into it more but research time these days is darn hard to find :(

**Teleklos Archelaou** · 06-07-2007, 03:26

Well, I don't know what else can be done - I deleted the whole file and vanilla still runs fine without it. No error messages or anything. It's totally worthless it seems.

I just wish we could up the frequency a bit. They seem to very very rarely occur (floods I'm thinking) now and I don't recall seeing a storm in a year.

**Dol Guldur** · 06-07-2007, 10:09

Yes, TA, I renamed the file and the game works fine ;)

Floods were about the only thing we were getting too (rarely - and usually in the sea!) with the ocassional plague. Someone once said they got an earthquake.

I wonder if it's hardcoded to certain game conditions, floods and plague seem to occur when things are going well and population high and I wonder if it is triggered by such things in order to cut down population etc.?

**Teleklos Archelaou** · 06-07-2007, 14:14

I moved the 'earthquake in pontus' to the first year of the game and then tried it - I got a historical message, but I couldn't find the actual earthquake. Must be hardcoded stuff we aren't seeing somewhere. Really that is just too bad. Those features would have been really interesting to use.

I redid our disasters.tga map too, to match our EB map (disasters.tga is the same size as regions.tga, so it's pretty easy), but I have no idea if it will help. I have not seen any description of what the colored pixels do, but I assume the two blues are different intensity sea storms, that reds are floods, and that's all I can guess. Maybe the gold color is earthquake fault lines. There is a purple too that looks like maybe snowstorms were planned, they dot the alps and run down through the apennines, but they don't exist anywhere else.

Anyway, I'm still pissed that none of this works really now. Guess it's best just to forget all about it and move on to something else.

**I of the Storm** · 06-07-2007, 15:24

Floods are bugged, afaik. Once they have occured, the infrastructure of the province remains broken, i.e. any roads that have been built are useless - the army moves on roads like over wilderness. It's also impossible to build forts or towers in a province that has had floods. So be careful with the flood frequency.

**Teleklos Archelaou** · 06-09-2007, 22:31

Very interesting post at TWC:

Originally Posted by poliocratos

I saw your discussion at the org. You all seemed to be moving toward the consensus that the file isn't loaded. This isn't true, but everything in it is heavily bugged, and in fact, the vanilla file won't activate most of the events.

To start from the beginning with the parameters listed in descr_disasters.txt, the event frequency can't be less than 2, or else the event won't activate. Of the events listed, earthquake, flood, and volcano definitely work in the imperial campaign (ignoring the reported flood movement bug). I haven't tested plague, but my guess would be that it probably works.

The trick with the file is that each event is picky about whether position, region, or climate is used to specify it. Volcano only works with the position statement (and will only do the full eruption if you set warning to false, otherwise the volcano just makes puffs of smoke). Earthquake will take climate or region IIRC. Flood will work best (flooding most often) with the region statement, but there will be occasional floods if you use climate.

The storm event does not seem to work in the imperial campaign, but does work in the prolog campaign. Whether any of the disaster events work in a provincial campaign, I don't know.

Regarding the disasters.tga file, I checked my Sysinternals Process Monitor logfile for RTW and it wasn't listed as loading, but I am not sure at this point if that logfile is complete or not. It should probably be redone to confirm.

If you really want to know how to mod this file, you should ask The Border Reiver, he has actually released mods for it.

I'm PM'ing him now to see if he can give us some advice.