Today the EB Team nominated LorDBulA, our tool creator par-excellence, as Best Modding Tool Creator (Total War series) for 2006. The nomination also serves two other purposes. It provides even more information on the problems the team had to overcome in order to achieve the EB v.80 release, and it offers a preview of the tools themselves, at least one of which will soon be made available to you, the EB players.

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This is going to be a rather unusual nomination insofar as the nominee's work is completely hidden from most of the voting public. But among the Europa Barbarorum Team, the name of LorDBulA has achieved near legendary status. There would not be an EB v.80 today without LB's dedicated effort to develop a pair of tools that allowed us to overcome two of our largest hurdles:

1) The EDB Recruitment generation program:

As every modder knows, RTW recruitment is handled by the export_descr_buildings.txt file (EDB). It's a rather onerous task for any mod to make their updates here, since even the tiniest error can result in a CTD. In EB, the problem is magnified because our recruitment text is set up by unit, by faction, by province, and by barracks level (or as we call them in EB, a Military Industrial Complex, or MIC for short). It took over a year of incremental hand updates to get us to the point where we had 280 units across 18 factions, 200 provinces, and 5 MIC levels. That is a LOT of text, something on the order of 13,000 lines.

Consider then what EB faced when the Building Conditional CTD (a function of the upgrade from RTW v1.2 to v1.5) forced us to wipe out our entire recruitment system and start from scratch. Except now the number of parameters had escalated to mind numbing proportions. 350 units, 200 provinces, 20 factions, and 20 MICs, each with five levels of recruitment. We were staring at the need to generate - by hand - over 40,000 individual lines of recruitment text. It was an impossible task.

Which is when LB rode to the rescue. He took our existing (and already massive) excel recruitment tracking spreadsheet, and added VB code which spits out a series of consolidated text files. Then he developed a C++ program which grabs these files and sorts and parses and arranges them into perfect EDB-ready text. If this seems in any way easy or trivial or quick, believe me, it was not. After over a solid month of sustained effort, the golden day dawned at last. In exactly 30 seconds, the EDB generation program spit out 40,000 lines of text that was dropped - completely unchanged and unedited - into the EDB file. RTW launched without a hiccup, and the in-MIC recruitment worked perfectly. It was and is a stupendous achievement.


2) The Recruitment Mapping Program:

We could now generate the EDB text we needed, but there was one major logistical problem that still lay ahead. Although we could now produce EDB text very quickly, we kept spotting recruitment problems in-game. Time and again, somebody would spot a province which allowed the recruitment of units that should not be there, or the reverse. Unfortunately, while a spreadsheet is a great tool for capturing data, it is TERRIBLE at presenting the visual cues for quick decision making and problem spotting. When each faction has its own worksheet, and there are 40+ rows of units and 200 columns of provinces, well, to the average person it just dissolves into a sea of numbers and text.

And once again, to the rescue came LorDBulA! He returned to the EDB Generating spreadsheet and added code which uploads selected data to an online repository. Separately he again wrote a stand-alone program that uses our strategic map as the graphical display, and placed controls at the top which allow the data to be managed. And what does this marvelous creation do? Why it allows you to select any faction and see an on-map graphical representation of where some or all of its units may be recruited. And further, it allows you to filter the data by individual unit, MIC type, and/or MIC level.

For the first time the EB team was able to SEE our recruitment on map, and we immediately discovered far more problems than we'd ever imagined. Now spotting problems is good, but then what? Manual updates to the Recruitment spreadsheet? No. The mapper has a powerful edit capability which allows the Faction Coordinators and Unit Experts to select a unit, and with one click to add or remove provinces from it's recruitment options. I'll omit the various security features that have been added to prevent accidental or malicious alterations, but suffice it to say that the tool is a dream to use, and has enormously enhanced our accuracy and ability to quickly make changes.

One last comment on the mapper. This is one tool that the EB team will be releasing to the fans in the very near future. Soon the EB player will be able to use this simple tool to gain a better understanding of his/her faction's recruitment options, and will be able to do so quickly and easily.