[Updated] Elemental Faction Editor -Now with Random Faction Generator

Nice work here, I look forward to seeing it when your finished

excellent work, this will be handy to alot of players.

Thanks for the encouragement.   I can see now why they didn't continue to make a UI for it.  There are a ton of options.   I haven't even added in the racial bonuses yet and I am already having scrollbars all over the place.   

In any case, I'll get something out and see what suggestions people have and then go back and edit and make it better.

I can edit XML, but this looks far superior.  I'm really looking forward to seeing this in action.

One thing I really like in Visual studio developement are the tabs. For instance you would have a "Faction Options" tab and a "Race option tab"

Great Stuff. I still think we're going to see the "Customize Faction" UI come back that we had a few Beta's ago only it will be in the Tools Section. I guess we'll see. If it doesn't come back then I'm sure this will be very useful for some people. Good Work.

Yeah, I definitely will go with tabs as I continue to work on this.   It will be too unwieldy otherwise.  

RavenX, I certainly hope so, I would like nothing more than to have this tool made obsolete by SD produced tools.  :)   But it is my small contribution to the community.   

My egalitarian demon army that sacrifices goats is counting on this.

Good luck and nice job!

And a Very Excellent contribution at that, my friend.

OK - I've added a link to the initial version of the faction editor.   Obviously it is still a work in progress.  Right now it just lists the defaults in the base game xml (although you can type in your own values for anything).   You can't load xml (that is a bit harder than you might think, so it is on the list for the future.).   Same rules apply as in Frogboy's post, you can't just put any race down or logo down and expect it to show up if you haven't defined the xml in another file.  You can use the default values (in the drop down boxes) just fine however.

Future improvements:

Add modded values to the dropdown boxes

Add the ability to restrict point values on bonuses

Add logo editor

load xml files

add preferences to save user settings.

You rule, Murteas. Seriously, my gratitude is boundless. Thanks for putting in so much effort for the player community. Much as I love the devs for their hard work, I really, really don't care for text editing. I've done some 5th gen programming, and it pains me a great deal.

I don't know what to think about the devs' decision on this, but your decision to put together a user friendly editor on your own, despite the complexity, makes me wonder...

Anyway, thanks, and good luck. Even if it winds up being a terminal beta editor, it'll be better than diddling with notepad.

Oh, and have some karma. This is some serious 'good deeds' stuff.

Hey, very interesting mod

However, I've got some problem running it; it says "unable to find a version of the runtime to run this application". I guess it has something to do with .NET but I'm not quite sure.

thank you, and keep up the good work

harpo

Indeed, it does require the latest .net run time  which you can get here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/aa569263.aspx

I should have mentioned that in the first post.    

Other things that need to be worked on:

Adding ability increases (i.e. mana regeneration improved by 50%, strength by 20%) instead of just having pre-defined traits that do that.

I messed up the tab order somehow when I added the drop down menus, I'll fix that in the next version.    

I'll probably release the source code as well, so others can add more features as needed.

Hopefully, this editor will only have to hold us off until release, if not then I'll keep working on it and we'll make it what we need for the community.  :)

Thanks for the kind words.    I imagine that the Stardock team is going to release something that will make this mod obsolete, but I thought I could put something together for us to use until we get an official editor.    

Please don't mistake this tool for release quality.  Some cool things that we could add for example: a real editor would dynamically read in all the mod files and allow you to use your modded traits, in the editor, as well as show a model with the colors you chose, and would allow you to see what logo you are chosing.

All those things are possible with the resources we've been given, but they aren't in this tool yet.   If for some reason we don't get an official editor, I plan on adding those features.

Thanks, I did my research and noticed the new .NET version. So I actually had that issue fixed some time ago! Tried the Editor and then played with my newly created faction.

However I missed the color buttons, didn't think they were set to white... Pretty interesting colors as a result

Anyway, great job and keep it up, will be much needed if we have to resort to XML otherwise!

LOL.    

So do you think I should set the colors to some other color patter by default?  It's easy to change.  I was thinking of putting that in the player settings/options (preferred colors) so that it would set that to your favorites by default then you could change them.

I made some pretty ugly factions with an odd set of colors, maybe I should randomly set them each time to start just to make it interesting.  hmm....

What programming langage do you use ?

This was all done in C#.    Simply for the ease of use with Windows Forms and the easy interface with XML.    This could be ported to WMF or Silverlight, and I may still do that if I want it to be more visually impressive.   I may wait and see what editor tools we get from SD.

ooh, cool stuff. I need my Ork army to rampage the lands of Elemental

Thanks a lot

This should still work for the released version.  I will update once we get the day 0 patch.  

Sounds good. You might be many people's hero right now, lol. All those people drastically searching for a faction creator tool of some kind. Time to shine!

All i want, is a box where i can change the color, thats it