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Alinestra Covelia
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Queen
Return of the son of the hat of taste
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Feb 2000
time: 22:17
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I've got a lot of free time over this summer and I want to do something with RONTAP. I'm hoping to work on a series of little scenarios linked together to detail the rise of the Chinese Communist Party in China during the 1920s through to 1940s. I have a fairly good understanding of the time period, based not least in part on Edgar Snow's classic journalistic reports "Red Star Over China".
The main problem for me is that I am not familiar with the scripting language at all. I understand a very very small amount of C++, so the layout of the functions is not alien to me. However, I'm going to end up with lots of questions. I hope I can ask them here.
Currently, the first scenario I'm thinking of doing is this. If any of you have ideas as to how to implement this in code, or design ideas as to what would be more fun to play, I'm happy to hear them!
Part One: The Shanghai Massacre:
Background:
In the late 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party had grown into a large political entity that was still largely civilian in nature. The Nationalist government ordered a large scale sweep of their main base, Shanghai, to eradicate the Communists. This action destroyed the Communists' urban support networks, forcing them into their communes in rural China. However, key personnel, including a rising leader Mao Zedong, managed to escape.
Gameplay:
This scenario would consist of a small map, filled almost entirely with buildings and cities representing Shanghai's many different suburbs. The gameplay consists of the human player controlling various non-combat units, including Scholars, Civilians, and maybe even a Spy or two, and trying to move them all to the western side of the city, where a friendly Fort awaits them.
This would simulate the evacuation from the city of key Communist personnel. The personnel would "pop up" at points in the city every so often (perhaps appearing garrisoned in buildings, if that's even possible) and the player has to get them safely across the enemy city and over to the Fort.
In opposition, the Nationalist forces will have foot soldiers performing sweeps of the neighborhoods looking for Communist leaders, and they will shoot on sight. The human player has a few Spies that cannot bribe, but which can plant informers in buildings. The Spies can plant informers at key locations around the city and suburbs, giving the player visibility of where the enemy's patrols are currently.
A canny player can figure out when the coast is clear to send the Communist personnel across.
The human player will also have some ability to "bribe" certain houses in the city, which will allow him to garrison units inside. This could be useful in areas of high patrol frequency, where a Communist personnel could benefit from hiding out.
As long as one Communist personnel member makes it to the fort, the human player can continue the campaign, but there will be benefits to be had if others survive with him.
What do you think of this idea for a starting scenario? How do you think I should go about making it? Is a script even necessary? (The first thing that springs to mind is that I'd need to disable the enemy's attrition, otherwise the player doesn't really have a chance.)
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Immortal Factotum
Livin La Vida Kitty Kat
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Jul 2000
time: 22:17
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Alinestra
We now have a news article and hopefully can get some qualified people on board to assist!
Best of fortunes and hang in there!
Grandpa Troll
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Co-Owner/ Administrator
De Hel van Enschede
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Nov 1999
time: 04:17
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Haven't modded RoN in years but it sounds like you're doing the right things.
The image you posted is JPG, is that the same file you're trying to import into RoN? I think that only takes PNG files. And even if it does take JPG, the JPEG compression does weird things with the colours which can screw up the map generation -- if you zoom in on the border regions of the territories in the image you posted you can see that there's odd artifacting going on there. PNG is lossless so it doesn't have that problem.
If you have a PNG, could you post it here? I'll see if I can find anything wrong with it, try to import it myself. If you're using the JPEG you posted, take the original, make sure it doesn't have any artifacts (clean it up if it does) and convert it to PNG, BMP, GIF or some other lossless format that RoN can handle (I'm not sure which are, other than PNG).
Edit: oh, you do need a rendered image as well, that needs to be the same size as the map image. Have you got that? And if you post the PNG, could you post that too?
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Co-Owner/ Administrator
De Hel van Enschede
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Nov 1999
time: 04:17
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Hmm... I tried loading the map, which at first seemed to go alright in that T&P recognised it as a new map for which new XML needed to be generated, but while loading I got a fatal error: no valid nations defined (well duh, that's what the XML generation is supposed to do). I tried the same thing in the original RoN and that worked fine, I could play a scenario and everything and the XML was generated as expected. Tried again in T&P a couple of times, including after copying the XML generated by the original game over to the T&P folder, but always with the same result: no valid nations defined.
That said, my RoN install seems a bit buggy anyway, tried to play a normal game but it crashed to desktop within 15 minutes, something which I never recall the game doing when I was still actively playing it. Maybe my install is just messed up.
Either way, I have the XML generated by the original game, I've attached that, maybe that'll help you along. You can easily see what the XML is 'supposed' to look like by opening the files of an existing campaign -- it seems like the bare minimum for a playable game is there in my attachment, but then I don't get why it's not playing. It's not a whole lot, but I hope this helps...
 Attachment: xml.zip
This has been downloaded 1 time(s).
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Co-Owner/ Administrator
De Hel van Enschede
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Nov 1999
time: 04:17
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Always happy to help if I can. T&P is supposed to be able to do it as well, I got the info on how to do it from a T&P document to begin with. No idea why it's not working, but I'm not complaining if the XML helps you...
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Co-Owner/ Administrator
De Hel van Enschede
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Nov 1999
time: 04:17
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Sorry, only ever modded the original RoN, never T&P, so I can't help you with that. I'm sure there's an element in the XML for it, you'll have to see if you can find a complete listing of all valid XML elements for T&P.
Stings.xml should only have localisation strings in it, I doubt that's the issue. The structure of the XML is probably just different in T&P than it is in RoN, you have to study the T&P XML files to see if you can figure out what's missing/different. Looking at that myself, I see that the default campaigns for T&P all have some TRIBE elements at the bottom of the main XML that refer to separate XML files with nation info, as well as some VALID_NATION elements which seem to set playable nations -- I suspect you may have to add both of those yourself to the RoN XML to get rid of the 'no valid nations' error (I tried just adding VALID_NATION alone but that doens't work, seems you really have to define the TRIBE stuff too, which takes a bit more effort).
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Settler
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May 2008
time: 03:17
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any chance i can paly this mod on RSTP?
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