Hello all,
Apologies for the delay since the last dev diary, I've been very busy with getting the work done for this new update, which is going to be absolutely massive. It's got three big features: the new UI, the ability to play as any Rephsian faction, and the modding tools. I've been making some really good progress with all three of them: the new UI is looking good, and there has been a lot added and updated to make the game way easier to understand and more fun, the ability to play as multiple factions is also looking great and doesn't have too much left to do. Hopefully I will be able to get a beta out this week or next at the latest, so that you will all be able to check it out yourselves.
Today I want to talk about the modding tools and how they work. They're really quite in-depth, so should hopefully make it much easier to author your own campaigns and content for the game.
Firstly the reason behind these tools: I initially attempted to make the game moddable through some custom Unreal tooling, but that's not at all conducive to letting players do anything - as it would require a build of Unreal Engine + the Angelscript patch + some custom features I added, you're looking at a 200GB editor and hours of compilation time, which will lock out all but the most dedicated modders. Currently the only things that are moddable are the Angelscript classes, which makes it pretty limited in what you can do, so I definitely wanted to expand that.
The new UI system will be a big improvement (considering that this game is 95% UI) due to being Typescript + React + web tech based (surprisingly performant), it will allow modders to just write new classes and add new assets to do basically anything, especially when combined with Angelscript - all kinds of new systems, custom campaigns and so on. But I also wanted to go further than that, by creating tools that will let you author your own campaigns without having to dig into code and data tables to be able to do so.
The solution I came up with is going to be called the World Editor. It lets you basically set up everything that a campaign would need: the landscape, heightmap, rivers, settlements, provinces, precalculated navigation data, cultures, characters, factions: everything.
The World Editor's province view, with settlements, ports, and geography editing available in one place.
The whole creation process should be pretty easy and should be able to be done entirely within the World Editor. First off you will add in your heightmap: this could be e.g. a map of Europe, Middle Earth, your own creation: anything. You can even use the inbuilt tools to make it from scratch.
At close zoom, the editor can show the height layer, river network, settlements, and ports together.
Then rivers, and landscape layers: forests, rocky terrain, deserts and so on. These will all affect in-game systems as well.
The surface layer view, where terrain types can be painted and reviewed before export.
After that you can place all the settlements and build provinces around them, then set factions for those settlements, pops and characters.
Province and settlement editing in context, including ownership, corruption, province IDs, and map position.
When you're ready to go, you can generate and edit the navigation data and some normal maps (adds a lot to the visual appeal) and export it, it will appear in the main menu.
Generated land and sea routing data, including the editable sea grid used for movement and pathfinding.
Looking forward to getting this beta out! Next up will be looking at the other two systems that will be included in the update.