[S]Sowing The Winds - Alpha 0.3

Sowing the Winds
To whit, what is a king but a man of a greater family still than those he rules. So, then, were I to make this woeful clan of mine greater than the kings, would not I then be the King?"
Download Alpha 0.3.0:
Mediafire: SowingWinds A 0.3.0

What is it?
Farae.
The western most expanse of the ancient Gaelic empire. Once the forefront of the empire's ambitious expansion into the continent of Hearve. Left forgotten for centuries afterwards to develop independent of the watchful eye of the more 'civilized' nations. Then a hundred years ago the ancient trade routes re-opened, the wealth of fertile Farae became exposed to the world. Conquerers began to thirst for it's riches and province. So came the Xin Chi, and the Norse, bringing with them their swords and their arrows and their plague.

The red death began in the invader armies and spread throughout all of Farae. The afflicted were covered in bloody boils, and vomited blood in their beds and in the streets when caught unawares. Villages, cities and castles all became stained red with the blood of the afflicted. The plague continued on until one in four had been felled by it's cruel hand, and for a time a certain unsettling peace fell across the land. Lords fought the now epidemic bandits instead of each other, and lands left vacant became claimed by vultures looking for their chance at nobility.

Now the kingdoms remain fractured into many houses, each vying for it's shot at the throne. Each hoping to leave their lasting mark on history. Each sowing the winds in hope of their own final victory. Then again, we reap what we sow...

This release should also be considered somewhat of a skeleton of a mod rather than a full mod. Right now I'm focusing on getting the broad strokes in, though I'm happy to take advice on details, just don't get pissy about it.

Features:
-p: Planned
-i: Implemented
-pi: Partially Implemented
-b: Broken

0.3 Updates []
All lords are now correctly related to all family members except daughters. Daughters will be addressed in a larger reshaping of the roles of "lady" units.
The castles are distributed correctly once again.
There are now several more land disputes at the beginning of the game, resulting in a greater likelihood of war amongst the various houses.
Only villages retain their name on the map.
Lots of changes to flavor text especially around the menus.

13 New Factions which still pull from the original 7 cultures for troops. -i
(Each faction now controls 1 town, 2 on the outside, and a few castles.)
(I may add a 14th faction soon, a typo left me without a kingdom_7 so the Sarranids are a bit too much of a power block atm.)
New troop trees for all factions. -pi
(Troops will be more similar between the various factions, but not necessarily the same.)
(Swadian, Vaegir and Khergit trees have been implemented but still need refinement for stats and equipment.)
(Comparing the Swadian and Khergit trees side by side should give a good idea of what to expect for the factions.)
All companions are now females. -i
Can marry ladies as a female. -b
New Map. -p
(I don't really care about size, I just want to bring terrain into the picture more.)
Some lords are now female. -i
Titles are changed on many characters, pretty much anyone who owns a town has a higher title than in native. -i
Swadians have Dukes.
Vaegirs have Tsars.
Nords have Markgreifi.
Khergits are now Jueye by default with Wangye for higher ranked members.
Rhodoks have Princes.
Sarranids are now Beys by default, only the higher ranked are Emirs.
A variety of tweaks straight from TweakMB.
Eventually I'll rename everything. -p

Factions

Exact Unit Trees

Tools:
Notepad++
TweakMB
Morgh's M&B Warband Mod Tools

Final Thoughts:
There are some questions that I know I'll eventually come across the answer to on my own, but it would be considerably easier for me if some of the modding wizards around could just give me a concise answer on.
Is there anywhere with a good list of the native items and their stats? Right now it feels like I'm stabbing around in the dark as I try and equip the new troops.
Probably think of more later...
6/22/10
I was wondering if anyone who had spent some serious time with the marriage system at the moment could give me some pointers before I start to get serious about tackling it. I'm needing to add diplomatic marriages (inter-faction) and fix same gender marriages but currently don't have much of a grounding in the code.

Update 2.1
Mediafire: SowingWinds A 0.2.1



Renamed all of the towns and castles, updated most of the strings and conversations to be fairly correct.
The overall land is now named Farea.
All of the kingdom troop trees are now in their correct configuration, it only remains to refine their stats and gear.

Going into detail on the tweaks-
Leadership is +7 troops.
Tournament max bet is 300. (this will probably change...)
Cattle follows you.
Big recruitment is now a random value up to rel/2+15
Lords have larger armies, approximately 33% larger.
Schools give +2 relation a month
You will be hired as a mercenary for only 2 weeks with the option to extend week by week. (I personally hated the 3 month contracts, was always ready to move on to something better far earlier.)
Siege equipment builds faster.
Troops eat less food more often. (1unit feeds 8 troops as compared to vanilla's 3, but they eat every 8 hours rather than every 14)

Minor update:

SMDs aren't really working for me, but it seems that I can still make items such as one handed swords and simply attach them to the bone in openbrf. Now that I know this, I'll probably spend some time and see if I can't make some weapons and helmets, etc...

dowlands proplem

Fixed, thank you.

Sounds interesting. How active will the houses be in trying to get the thrones?

FrisianDude said:

Sounds interesting. How active will the houses be in trying to get the thrones?

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Depending on how quickly my scripting skills come up to speed, and if I can straighten out some of the non-functional bits, it can go a few ways.
Ideally, each leader will have a 0-99 value from clever to boisterous. The lower the score the more time they focus on expanding their power and making diplomatic connections, or oppositely they will focus on making claims and fighting with current kings. There should be at least 1 coupe every six months or so between all kingdoms regardless.
If I can't get that then I'll not focus on thrones so much and instead try and tighten up the code around the policy decisions. Right now the royal houses are still every bit as active as the kingdoms in native, while the lesser houses only go to war on occasion. Between 20 factions that still means a fair amount of fighting, but not enough to really execute the overall vision.
On the outside, if I manage the first option and find myself with lots of time left over, *dry*haha, I'll try and weave some quests and story lines around the houses. Get into more detail about the effects of these smaller scale politics and see if I can't leverage it so that the smaller steps come together to create even larger wars than are usual in native.

[Edit]
I found this while cruising the scripts tonight and probably wouldn't have noticed it if I wasn't directly involved in editing this bit of code, but there is a typo in the module_scripts.py file of the warband module system.
Now supposedly this starts a dispute over tilbault castle, but higher up we see,
Now putting aside the kingdom codes which I changed, these are both about the same castle, ergelon. This shouldn't do any active harm, but it does make it a wasted bit of code since it simply assigns Swadia as the original owner of ergelon castle twice. (they also spelled neighbors with two hs.)

About people not having hair, you men face codes do not work on ladies, that's why when you change the troop you need to get it a new code too.

Thanks mate, now I can fit that on my todo list.

I finally found the Warband familial relations code. Good news is I understand exactly what it's doing. Bad news is I'm going to have to essentially tear the whole thing out and completely rebuild it since it's based on a particular organizational structure that I do not now, and probably won't ever, follow.

I'm going to put up a poll about this in a second but, I wanted to give a more thorough update.

I was really hoping to get out a release tomorrow, but some real world concerns have just completely kicked me up and down the block these past few days. That being said, if people are interested in seeing just the progress, even if some of the systems are totally broken, I'd be willing to go ahead and post a release anyways. I did get all of the familial relationships working for the lords, fixed all of the bald females and now most of the factions start at war with someone or other. On the other hand, lord dialogue and castle distribution are completely screwed up.

I fixed both of the major bugs that had been holding it back so there is now a new stable (enough) release.

(Spoke too soon, a space in the menus file was causing a fatal error, fixed and re uploaded now.)


It's positioning is just comically wrong, but nonetheless it is a custom model, inside the game engine with a texture.

All companions are now females. -i

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Is this for some gameplay purpose or is it just because you felt like it?

TIDM2 said:

All companions are now females. -i

Click to expand...

Is this for some gameplay purpose or is it just because you felt like it?

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Hmm... Marnid, a women. 0-0

TIDM2 said:

All companions are now females. -i

Click to expand...

Is this for some gameplay purpose or is it just because you felt like it?

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It is, presently, purely a matter of aesthetics if that is what you mean.


Something of a rogues gallery of the new companion looks.

This may interest you.

After reading A brief history of cosmetics I came away convinced of something I'd already assumed; Taleworlds females looked very wrong to me, especially the nobility.  They all looked like attractive women who'd been asked to remove their makeup (and in the case of the African woman, you can see faint smears from her mascera, lol).

Call me sexist or whatever... but it just looks wrong, and I'm glad I decided to do some homework.  It turns out, according to other sources as well, that women have been doing fancy stuff to their faces for ages, primarily to make themselves attractive to men (and occasionally, women) and to socially differentiate themselves.

And racial / cultural diversity is lacking, much more than the men.  The Mongol girls look like Europeans, the Arab / Turkish girls look like Europeans, and the Europeans are all too drab and don't have enough variety (imo).

So, I've been working on face materials.  Here are the results thus far- a hennaed face with Egyptian style motifs and variations.  Keep in mind that this is not the in-game Warband skin shader, so it will look considerably more real in the engine, etc.  Still working on the other "makeup kits" for the different cultures, trying to find appropriate source images, etc.


This will be released OSP when I release my mod, which is very soon (this is basically the final stretch for me, as all the major things are done).  Anyhow, I think it's cool that somebody else is giving women a little more l'difference, good luck with your mod.

I have finally released my mod, and there are about 3 dozen new female faces to choose from, hope that they're useful to your project

do you guys want to hear a joke?

smurfin said:

do you guys want to hear a joke?

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Yes. But not from you and not here, because you are not funny and this is unrelated to anything.

LuckyDuckly said:

smurfin said:

do you guys want to hear a joke?

Click to expand...

Yes. But not from you and not here, because you are not funny and this is unrelated to anything.

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oh you made me sad

@Xenoargh
Sounds good I'll try and get in and check them out soon.

More generally, I've got a major programming project I was working on that I was expecting to finish last week, instead it's been ramped up and will continue for another week or two. Didn't intend for it, but it's pushing back my schedule for this by quite a bit. Still I'll see what I can get taken care of this weekend.

This project interests me very much.  I love civil conflicts.