==== Artillery of the Life-Guards Mini-Mod (1.006 compatible)====
---Description---
This small mod makes minor tweaks to the Russian artillery uniforms for ranker, train, and officer, to give them the impression of being members of a foot company of the Life-Guards Artillery Brigade (Leyb-Gvardii Artilleriyskaya Brigada) circa 1812. This entails adding the golden petlitsy of the Guard to the collar and cuffs overtop of the the black backing of the artillery, and adding the imperial eagle plate of the Guard to the front of the shako while maintaining the red cords of the artillery. The officer’s gorget has been changed to the "1700. NO. 19." style as used by various L. Gv. units, including the artillery brigade. The "8-B" on the shoulders has been removed. The artillerymen's pants are changed to white, as may have been more commonly worn (this is more of a personal choice of mine than hard fact – Oleg Parkhayev’s illustrations give green pants, for example); this change could be done in the uniforms.brf and save a few kilobytes, but I have used the texture file instead so that you can choose whether or not to install that aspect.
---Technical Function---
The files contained in this RAR archive are to overwrite files in your Napoleonic Wars folders. These changes are minor aesthetic tweaks and will not affect your ability to play on servers and it will not give you any advantage or disadvantage in identifying artillerists from a distance. Furthermore, the change is entirely client-side, so only users with these replacement files installed will see you as Life-Guards artillery - the average player will still see the default skins.
Before installing, it may be wise to back up the appropriate files that will be overwritten, so that you can revert to the stock textures and meshes at any time without redownloading or reinstalling the Napoleonic Wars DLC.
---Installation of Files---
- Place the "mm_russian_hats.brf" and "mm_russian_uniforms.brf" files into your "mountblade warband/Modules/Napoleonic Wars/Resource" folder.
- The other two files, "RUSS_art_Pants.dds" and "RUSS_art_ranker_officer.dds", all go into your "mountblade warband/Modules/Napoleonic Wars/Textures" folder.
---Credits---
All preexisting content being manipulated is the work of Flying Squirrel Entertainment and/or the Mount and Musket development team. Everything found in this mod already existed in some form in the DLC module as of the 1.006 patch.
---Changelog---
2.0 – Entire mod re-assembled using new assets
1.3 - Cuff braids added
1.2 - Better edging on the collar braids
1.1 - Mipmaps restored
1.0 - Base release
---Known Inaccuracies---
The particular eagle plate on the shako is ripped from the Preobrazhenskiy regiment in the game, which is not entirely appropriate. The artillery used a special design where the eagle sits on top of two crossed cannon barrels. Including this would require a new material in the "mm_materials.brf" file and would limit the mod’s compatibility with other skin and model modifications. For that reason, the generic eagle with flags and wreath is used.
The officer should have a unique style of petlitsy shared only by officers of the Life-Guards Engineers, yet since the ranker and officer textures are combined into one file, this is not possible without, again, creating new materials, and that would limit compatibility.
The 1.006 patch introduced a new historical error: the NCO (train driver) and ranker uniforms share the same texture, thus the NCO lacks the gold band on the collar and cuffs, yet his shako has the two-tone pompon that it should; this creates an incongruity which I have not yet corrected. Like the issues above, it would require a new material for the texture. Maybe in the future I will release a more comprehensive version that will fix both of these errors.
The train horse shares the same saddle cloth as the dragoon horse, and cannot be properly distinguished as I would like. It can not even be given a new texture in the materials, because of the manner in which the game spawns the horse and its carriage (at least, far as I can tell).