Wow, I just did an .xml binge...

Anyways, quick update:

I've been 'filling in the blanks' on the new Allegience (Banshee).  Essentially, I've cloned the Dead faction into another faction (wasn't originally the plan...).  So this has turned into a rather involved mod.

I added four techs to the Tech Tree (to replace the four techs that DLC04 took out).  Essentially, the plan is to have some structures that harvest beasts for sacrificial/ritualistic purposes (that wild game resource), and of course there will aslo be the Banshee Opera...

I felt that a move speed of 4 (from the 'Standard' Banshee monster description) in the opening game was a bit much, so I swapped out a bunch of general traits and dropped it to 2.  The Initiative bonus traits now also give bonuses to move (for the Banshee faction only).  I also managed to modify the attack bonus stat (now adds to cold, not pierce), I've replaced First Aid with a variation of Hallowed Rites, and I have some other traits coded.  Still working on filling up the Banshee tree.

No mounts will be available for this Banshee.  It would mess up her ingame animation... Hence this is why I added Move Bonuses via traits.

With the extra general trait picks that Banshees will very likely go after, I'm rethinking the XP nerf.  I may dial it down (currently have a 35% penalty to XP) and instead nerf the level increases (i.e. +1/level might become +.5/Level or some such), so that Banshee Mages can get the traits they need as they need them/aren't falling behind on the trait picks.

I'm thinking of some ability that allows Banshees to recruit Undead (similar to the Bandit Recruit trait).  Haven't fleshed it out yet, shouldn't be too hard.

Overall, players have some thinking to do on the trait picks.  At least I'm not finding a 'go to' trait right off.  The Special/more powerful abilities I'm thinking of putting a minimum level on, and am still contemplating the order.  The traits so far (these aren't the final names):

• Flight 1: +1 Move, +1 Initiative
• Flight 2: +1 Move, +1 Initiative
• Flight 3; +1 Move, +2 Attack vs. Lower initiative
• .
• Spirit Strength: +2 Cold Attack, 20% Cold Resistance
• Fortitude: +8 HP, +2 Cold/Fire/Lightning Defense
• .
• Spirit Feed: +2 HP, +2 Mana from Kills
• Spirit Drain: +1 HP/Level +1 per Death Shard drain from adjacent foes (may dial this one down)
• .
• Tinker 1
• Tinker 2 (This Banshee will NOT have many options for gear, this is by design, so accessories will be more important to her)
• .
• The +15% to XP trait

Note that the above General Tree is Banshee Faction only (the 'regular' General tree for Kingdom and Empire is still the same as it was before).

As for the Spirit Mage Tree:

• Spirit Flight: Move 4 in a straight Line, drain 1 HP per level +1 per Death/Air Shard and add it to your own HP.  Cooldown 5-8
• Spirit Shield: Costs 20% of current HP.  Opponents that strike Banshee take 1 HP/Level +1 per Death/Water Shard.  20 Mana. 3-4 Turn Duration
• Spirit Burst: Costs 20% of current HP.  Opponents take 1 HP/Level + 1 per Death/Water Shard.
• One of these 3 above traits replaces Knowledge (+25XP), as Banshees can hold their own in Melee quite well.  These 3 abilities will have minimum levels I'm thinking, and I may dial them down a bit, particularly the healing ones.  Still needs to be competitive in later game, of course!
• .
• Summons 1 (+1 to Summons)
• Summon Risen Brood
• Summons 2 (+2 to Summons)
• Summon Banshee ( 20% of current HP  to do so, plus mana)
• Summons 3 (+2 to Summons)
• Summon Cindercorpse
• Summon a few other things, preferably undead related.
• Summon Grave Elemental
• Summon Skeleton
• Summon Skeleton Horde
• Usual mix of other Mage traits, with some spells swapped out for more appropriate ones.  Spell Mastery Bonuses may also have some defensive bonuses (Banshees can't wear most armors).  Emphasis on water abilities (this particular Banshee died by drowning, hence she has an affinity for Water Shards).

The Banshee Staff (+3 Cold attack, -6 initiative) will be something that could theoretically be included in unit design, will be available in Shop for the Banshee once the relevant tech is researched.  NOTE that the Banshee can't use most weapons (she needs an ethereal weapon).  Not planning on other Banshees being available for unit design (one or two per player is ENOUGH!).

As for miscellaneous modifiers:

• 3 Cold Attack (with the + 3 Cold  Banshee Staff (Ranged) this makes a 6 Cold attack/0 Pierce attack).  Staff takes 1 Sov Point slot.  May delay availability of the ranged attack staff...
• Banshee Wail (whatever that is called), available from start.
• Undead Abilities: may not give the Banshee all of these, as there are a lot of abilities already.
• Been testing at 95% Pierce Damage Resistance, thinking of dialing this down to 80%, with +5 Resistance for each level of Spell Mastery.  My Banshee has been down for the count a few times, low attack strength unless abilities are used.
• Only heals 1 HP/Turn
• -1 to Mana Regeneration
• 35% XP Penalty is a bit steep (see trait discussion above), may dial down HP/level and attack/defense level bonuses.
• -1 To Army Size
• -10% Unrest (might actually be -20 with undead and cruel modifier).  No thoughts on this as of yet/haven't played that far into the game.
• Undead growth model (graves, no food, etc.).  Food bonus structures to be substituted with other interesting things.
• 22/14 Initiative (undead -2, staff -6)
• Immune to Fear and Poison (usual Undead bonuses).  Also immune to knockdown.  Can still be knocked back though...
• Currently has Death Magic at Level 1.  Wouldn't mind adding Water 1, but that's a balancing discussion...

I'm thinking about having the Banshee 'eat' some of the 'reaped population' it kills before it is added to the nearest city.  Haven't done anything on this as of yet.

Well, that's what I've been working with so far.  Time to get some rest!

Just a quick note, which I think is HUGE for anyone who might be wanting to 'customize' the tech tree for your favorite/custom faction:

On top is the Civ tree we all know and live, and at the bottom is the Civ tree for my Banshees.  Note that I haven't assigned any buildings, etc. to the new techs yet (easily enough done), but my POINT here is that you can create new techs for your custom race, and take out the ones you don't want.

Yeah, the Spritual Pursuits tech is basically the Entertainment tech repurposed, but the concept is valid.  Essentially a suitably motivated modder could REDO entire sections of the tech tree for a custom faction if he wanted, WITHOUT significantly changing the current tree for Kingdom/Empire, and certainly/quite easily could add new branches along the way...

This method is already used to differentiate Kingdom vs Empire factions (note Wildland Allies vs. King Of the Wastes).  My point is that other factions can get in on this action as well, simply by assigning a new Allegiance or similar tag...

Thank DLC04 for reminding me r.e taking techs off of a tree, and making me feel the need to add new ones.  I've added a tech before in my own build, kind of by accident really (trying to get an old EWOM tech/ability to work, no dice), so I already knew this was possible, I just hadn't considered the ramifications until now...

While it is still probably possible to add another full tech tree (with subtrees; note that we used to have two tech trees in EWOM, and I did manage to build my own unique tree in EWOM that at was working ingame, albiet without all of the items, buildings, and such that I needed to assign after the fact), because of the sheer number (literally thousands at this point) of interdependencies on the existing Amarian tech tree (items and such), well it'll save you massive amounts of work by rethinking the existing techs, and only swapping out the ones you REALLY feel need to change for your specific faction.  Example: the Weapons tree has a LOT of items, weapons, armor, etc., and a fair number of them may depend on a tech you may want to to swap out, hence they will 'break/disappear'.  But for 'low impact' techs, where you only have a very small number of dependencies, well the sky's the limit!

Sure, Ability Bonus Options with the RestrictedAbility tag can 'disable' items and such, and you can repurpose a tech for other things, but if you had an entirely new tech concept you wanted to add, with it's own description...

Sure, the Allegiance tag has dependencies as well, but it has far fewer things directly tied to it than say some of the Warfare techs...

Apologies for sounding more than a little excited here, but a number of players have been asking for more tech tree differentiation.  Up to this point, the Modding community hasn't really tackled this issue, but I think this approach could change things.  I'm seeing LOTS of possibilites here for modders.

In short, this is HUGE!

Now all that would be needed is other suitably motivated modders... besides me!

OK, so it appears I had weird encoding going on or something when I was attempting to modify the Amarian tech tree to Banshee tech tree, but I have it all sorted out now.

Short form (see UnleashedElfs inquiry post) yes you can assign a new tech tree to a faction, including existing techs in the Techs file, and leaving off the ones you don't want.  If you have any tech prereqs that aren't part of your tree, this may 'mess up' your tree, but this is a little safer than modifying the Amarian tree.  I now have Techs_Banshee and BansheeTechTree in the Core/OnlySP folder, and it is working nicely.

Primal has already been doing a bit with his tech trees before I went down this path again, but this is good news for other modders out there that had issues with tech tree modding in the past.

So, I have a head scratcher here...

I've created an Ice Staff variant that you 'thump people over the head with' normally (Melee), doing Cold Damage, which is also able to cast in Ice Bolt with (Ranged), which does less Cold damage than you can do with it in Melee.

The Ranged effect is working correctly, and the model 'moves/takes a jab' in Melee.  However, the Damage Info when you hit another unit in Melee has disappeared, so the only time you see 'hit, 3 damage, dodged, etc.' is when you eventually kill the unit.  HP's bars also do not reduce immediately when you score a hit.  The weapon still does damage, you just won't see the effect immediately, or at least not until some other unit causes damage to the same target.

The ranged attack is also supposed to reduce the caster's initiative by 6 for one turn when it is used.  Not sure if that is working as intended, but that's not a deal breaker if it isn't working right (I would like it to do this, of course). (Note: after I posted, I realiized I forgot to add the 'apply to caster' tag to the .xml for this gamemodifier, have since added it, zip file has been updated, as of 4:22 PM US Mountain Time 6/8/2014)

I used one of the other Staffs (the one that Casts Flame Dart, which has a cooldown) as a guide.

Would someone be willing to look over the code on this, and see where I went wrong that broke the Melee animation/damage reporting?

You'd simply need to add this line to your Sov Unit code temporarily to test, in the appropriate spot.

        <AutoCreateEquipment>Banshee_Staff</AutoCreateEquipment>

Or, if you've designed a few weapons in Elemental in your day, maybe by just looking at the code you might spot the problem(s).

Updated File here:

Banshee_Ice_Staff.zip

Appreciate the help!

tjashen

Your staff is designed as a ranged weapon:

<WeaponType>Staff</WeaponType>
<WeaponUpgradeType>ColdStaff</WeaponUpgradeType>

Weapons aren't supposed to be both ranged and melee which explains why the melee attack is behaving so oddly.

Since the Icy Bolt is a spell and not a ranged attack, I'd suggest switching the staff to a melee weapon: 

<WeaponType>Spear</WeaponType>
<WeaponUpgradeType>Staff</WeaponUpgradeType>

Thanks Hellions, I'll give it a try!

Edit: Turns out that the  <TacticalRange>1</TacticalRange> tag was the culprit.  I had added it to reduce the range when not using the ability (the staff was attacking at range when I started down this road, so I was trying to limit that), but when I created a new new ability to replace a new ability that I was haviing issues with, well the Range problem went away.

Problem solved!  Carry on!

Edit Edit: This may not be solved after all.  Still investigating...

Edit Edit Edit: Found the problem!  Apparently I still needed to assign a GameModifier to Attack_Pierce, with a Value of 0 (this staff isn't supposed to do physical damage).  Now to get back to cleaning up and reorganizing my .xml, so that each type (spells, abilities, items, etc.) has it's own file... oh and finish up that Spirit Mage tree.

Then it should be ready for beta testing!

OK, so I decided to fill in a few blanks (i.e. make something cool), so it'll be a bit before I can post the beta.

THIS is what had me distracted...

Yeah, essentially your run of the mill Floating Rotating Mega Skull wreathed in dark energies, with blood bathing it from the sky, and skulls rising from the flaming pit into the sky...

And my Banshee Spirit Mage thrown in for good measure!

Interesting...I wonder how this affects life / death nodes changing depending on allegiance. I never liked that mechanic, maybe this could be a neat little work around if they don't change.

Well, in my case, I WANTED Death Shards to still be Death Shards, so after a little fiddling with the Shards improvements, I was able to design a custom shard harvest structure (see Rotating Skull above) that is tied to the Banshee Faction, but still able to harvest Death Shards.  That is (I believe) tied to the Grassland vs. Dead environment variables, and I was pondering a third environment (with different modifiers for terrain).  That'll take some work though so that's down the road a bit...

This goes beyond Life/Death Shards of course.  One of the things I've done is repurposed other resources.  The 'Wild Game' resource makes a great source of sacrificial animals if you aren't using them for food... I haven't had an opportunity to test this one yet, just the Death Shard thing mentioned above.

In my case, I'm envisioning Undead as a third allegiance (they want to rip out your soul, doesn't really matter how good or evil you were in real life, a soul is a soul!).  So far, diplomacy has went OK ingame, although at some point I may want to dig into the diplomacy modifiers and see if I can implement some 'Undead make us nervous' type modifiers to Diplomacy...

I still haven't been able to tie professions/paths to Allegiances yet... at least from a 'having them not show up as an option for you if you aren't that allegiance' standpoint...

One interesting side effect of my tweaks of the General tree is that all of your champions use the same trait tree as you do (Kingdom or Empire), which will affect some of my planning.  I had some subrrace specific stuff going on the General tree, and I had hoped that the Champions would have a tree more approprate to them show up/not share the same General Trait Tree for Banshees.  Ahh well!

I now have the Bane Spell tree done for now (albiet without many changes as of yet), and pretty much all of the abilities I had in mind are coded.  Now I just need to straighten out a little traffic jam on the Spirit Mage tree, decide on the last few things for the Summons branch, and finish up assigning new structures for my new techs and such.  I keep getting distracted with making new particle effects, and adjusting other particle effects to my liking... my Effects Folder in the LH Modding folder has a few things in it now...

Quick update:

I just spent the better part of 12 hours trying to 'fix' something r.e. resources, before I spotted a bonehead mistake.  I was trying to get a new world resource to show up on the map (never did 'take'), or convert an existing resource into another resource, as the buildings I had made for existing resources (wild game, wild grain) weren't 'allowed'.  I had changed the required tech, but failed to notice that I had subsequently changed the name of the relevant tech and tech tree (from Banshee to Revenant).  Sooooo, in the words of the immortal Homer Simpson...

DOH!

Still tweaking my Spirit Mage tree, and contemplating how to implement the 'Subtrees' I have planned.  This particular tree favors Air and Water over Earth and Particularly is missing Fire.  That's the other half of the equation that I will need to develop (Fire vs Ice), but that can wait until I get some betatesting input on what I have so far.

To explain the 'Subtree' concept, this works in a Similar manner to how the various Elemental Spell Ability trees (Air 1, etc) appear, or more specifically, don't appear on the 'General' tree until you acquire the first one (via Sov creation or another method).  Essentially, the entire tree is tied to one ability, that you can picture as being placed to the 'left' of the first row of perks.  This 'perk' is actually placed in Row 6 (so if you scroll down you'll see it has been already picked), and is picked via a blood_race or other ability mechanism.  So Subrace A will have one version of the Spirit Mage Tree, but Subrace B has a completely different version.  I.E. in my case a Fire and an Ice version, although I'm thinking of 'merging' the Necromancy tree into this concept as well (assuming Dhuran likes the idea). 

Or an Undead Hunter could be implemented here, but that'd involve adding an ability to pretty much every other race/blood type...

The reasoning for doing this is to not tie up multiple 'Profession' slots in the Path picker, thus eating up valuable profession Real Estate, for those of us without an 'acceptable' Scroll Wheel  implementation on our mice (we do not have access to the second row of professions that appears below, and Primal's testing indicates that 10 paths wide is about the most that is practical).  This one 'profession' will have a more Generic name, but will implement multiple Specialized paths, depending on which ability you already have.  With the aforementioned 'don't pick me unless you are undead' warning of course!

Again, though, the multiple Subtree thing comes later.

BTW, the Bane Magic 'tree' appears in the same place as where Death Magic normally appears on my tree Implementation.  Bane Magic spells are often the same, but have been tweaked here and there for flavor...

I now have all seven versions of the Bane Shard and Bane Shard improvements (essentially still a Death Shard, just looks different) done, with GFX.  I also tweaked a couple of existing gfx to make the Banshee look purdy yet tone that Ice/Winter staff coruscating snow effect down a bit so it wasn't so overpowering visually.  The 'stock' Mausoleum looks like it needs a few Tombstones around it, but that can wait...

Still need to tweak a couple of gfx effects, decide on how to pare the 'combined effects' down a bit to save a little video memory overhead for other things (for those of us on 'lower end' systems). 

I also want to implement a resource that is used for Undead recruitment, but I still need to work out the finer points on that.

I'm still envisioning this mod working hand in hand with Necromancy Revamped (standalone and 'merged' versions), but that comes later...

Next two days are busy for me, so it'll probaby be towards the end of the week before I can FINALLY bundle this up and release it for betatesting!

Another quick update.  It is close to ready for betatesting...

I decided to more fully implement the 'two Mage Types Trees' thing, so people can see how this works.  I have a Cinder(corpse) Mage and a Spirit Mage tree working off of the same Path button, although I still need to fill in a few blanks on the Fire/Cinder Mage tree (essentially add Fire back in and delete Water/Ice, and cut/paste/adjust the code for the relevant spells).  Both of these Sovs will be unique for now, and at this point I haven't planned to allow for them in Unit Design (which wasn't really the plan anyways).  This faction does have 'Custom' Sovs as well, but those are essentially repurposed Generic Dead Sovs.

As mentioned above, this 'Arisen' path is set up for a couple of other classes to be tagged to it as well...

I changed the 'Path' button to make it a little more clear about the button enabling multiple versions of the Mage types, depending on which which sub-race you are:

At the very least, there will be two paths which are tied to the Male/Female versions of the Race (Male = Skellie type, Female = Spirit Type), but I'll work out more details on that once I get some feedback, so I can start tweaking the balance issues a bit.

The path/classes are actually tied to a separate ability from (Sub)Race, so theoretically I could implement a selector under Sov Creation, to allow for more than two classes (saaaaay, Necromancer).  Really any 'class' can be tied to this button/path for this faction, but I'm focused on mages for now.

Soon...

Well I WAS close to zipping up my mod and posting this today... Until...

As noted, I'm creating duplicate trees using the same trait trees for General and the Arisen (Spirit/Cinder Mage) Trees.

The way I was going about this was requiring me to duplicate a bunch of spells and abilities, which I was doing in order to completely clear the Arisen tree if you didn't have the 'parent' ability, which actually was working quite nicely.

Until the DEP errors showed up that is...  apparently I crossed a threshold somewhere r.e. ability counts or something, and my Windows error message thing is saying that E:LH is now trying to access protected memory...

BTW, DEP fixed some crashing problems I was having before, and my laptop hasn't crashed in months so I'm NOT turning it off...

BTW, I have 4 GB of memory installed, 32 bit OS (Vista).  With some tweaking wizardry I actually have access to the full 4 gb, but the last 670 MB or so is it's own ram drive essentially.  Long story, but the short form is that Elemental has the full 2 GB it needs (Brad noted that Elemental isn't able to address more than 2 GB due to limitations of the Windows system or some such).  But back to the matter at hand.

If I shut off a couple of abilities that I added towards the end, everything works fine again.  Fortunately, I have a way to cut down on the duplication (mainly the Summoning and Prodigy subtrees for both Cinder Mages and Spirit Mages are essentially the same), so I have a plan to 'unduplicate' those perks/spells using a pre-assigned master ability.  This will still allow the rest of the tree to change depending on blood type.

This all came about because non Cinder/Banshee Champions that were being acquired via Fame had a rather empty General Trait tree (The Strength and Initiative Abilities are handled differently, with Spirit Mages getting Cold Attack and Move bonuses, while Cinder Mages get Fire Attack and Dodge bonuses).  So I needed to create a 'generic' tree, which is still a bit different than the 'stock' generic tree.   The only two abilities that carry across from the 'vanilla' tree for Revenants are Tinker and the 15% xp bonus thing... Oh and 4 of the 5 Elemental Spell trees of course (Revenants have Bane instead of Life or Death).

BTW, my Mod folder is relatively clean, with only a few of my own small mods (Monuments XP, etc) and such installed.  Oh and Parrotmath's River Bridge and Snaking Mod.  So the Revenant Mod is responsible for pretty much all of the extra overhead.  I may need to look at paring down some custom GFX and such (was planning on this to a degree already), but one thing at a time.

I do have all 5 DLCs (finally), but those are rather light coding wise.

Since I hit this wall, I'm sure some other players with 32 bit systems would hit this as well, so I'll need to spend some time to pare down all of the code I ended up generating.  Which is a good thing...  The .xml itself isn't that big in total kb's, but all of the 'addresses' that it requires to be set aside I'm sure is what pushed things over the top.

Re-Unifying the two versions of the Summoning and Prodigy trees should free up a LOT of space... now that I was able to completely separate these two trees using the same path, it'll be easy to put one common ability in to 'activate' these branches using one set of traits for both subclasses.  It'll add an extra initial ability to the 'perk clutter' that shows up on the Sov card and such though.  Can't have my cake and eat it too I guess...

I'm sure my choosing to go with a third Allegiance is pissing the game off too, but up to this point it has worked pretty well.  The only major downside I've found (other than making third versions of things that have separate Kingdom and Empire versions) is that a few more detailed conversation options (based on if you are talking to the same or a different allegiance) won't appear ingame.  You'll just have the default conversations.  The game still offers tribute and such much as it did before, and I even remember being offered an alliance/treaty once.  However, This faction hates the living in general, be it Empire or Kingdom, so I wouldn't mind seeing some negative modifiers when dealing with either Kingdom or Empire at some point.

In other good news, since I ironed out my Tech tree issues, the Tech Trees will now work from the Mods folder.  Two less files to put in the core folder.  At this point, the only thing that MIGHT need to go into the core folder is some .dds and .gif files, so that the game can find them.  I haven't figured out how to 'point' the model files to the Mods folder to look for these, and due to how particle effects and such are built, it just makes sense to put them in the core folder, so everyone has the option to use those if they ever feel the need to mess with the particle fx creater tool.

BTW, you can see the Spirit Mage and Cinder Mage trees in action in the first post of this thread (I've been adding pics to it as I go along).  You'll note some subtle differences, mainly in the placement of Geomancy and Areomancy, and note that one Tree has Hydromancy (no Pyromancy) while the other has Pyromancy instead.  With their own subtree abilities of course!  I definitely think this is worth the extra effort, as I can think of at least one other application for this approach.  As an example: the Paladin and Anti Paladin trees could be COMPLETELY different using this method, while using the same Path.

My mod has a number of of other things in it though, hence the current overhead.  I'm guessing you 64 bit types won't have any issues running it with a bunch of other mods.  So I'm guessing that you COS and XTra Deconstruct fans on 32 bit systems may have issues running this, standalone as it is... Heavenfall highly recommends 64 bit for his mod, no doubt the limitations Primal and I have come across r.e. resource/ability/etc. counts are in play here.

Ahh well... at least I'm getting MY Elemental game closer to where I want to see the game heading...

Honestly, how large are your XML files that this should be an issue? What I mean by this is that Children of Storm contains some 660 XML files totalling 66MB. And that's without adding in the 75MB gfx files.

I ran into a problem a long time ago, which I remember only vaguely. It caused some serious issues with the game that made it look like it was running out of memory. It was an unclosed tag in a mod file that someone else made. On its own, it did not cause an issue. But when the mod was installed at the same time as Children of Storm, it caused huge issues (because of how much XML data I had). Because the tag was not closed properly, it caused the file's content, and subsequent mod content, to be read as part of the original file (or something). This was, in other words, a result of not following strict XML in the mod file. Once the tag was closed, all problems disappeared.

If you have a program that can check that your XML follow strict rules, I would try it out to see if you have any unclosed tags which may be causing this.

R.E. your comment about the open tag thing.  I think this is more of a 'stacking' issue (five different traits allocated to the same slot, all with prereqs that are 'offset' from the path display.

Essentially what I did here was along the lines of how the five Spell Trees work.   The reason that say Water 1 doesn't appear unless you've picked it in Sov Creation or otherwise pick up the ability (through a tome you find at a goody hut or similar) is because, while the other four Spell Levels have Unit_Spell_Rank and Unit_Level, Water 1 only has the Unit_Spell_Rank tag assigned. 

It still has coordinates assigned to it (say x3 y3), but since it isn't 'automatically' assigned to the Path tree via Unit Level, it only appears if you actually 'have' the ability.

Since the rest of the Water tree is tied to Water 1, if it doesn't appear, they essentially don't appear.

Sooooo, I did something similar with some other Abilities.  Essentially, I've 'addressed' several abilities to say x0 y2, but unless you actually have the ability in question, since the Unit_Level tag isn't assigned it doesn't appear on the Path window.  So I'm assigning trees to said abilities, so the rest of those trees don't appear unless you have the 'parent' ability.  Since I haven't assigned the Unit_Level tag to these abilities (say Blood_Banshee), they won't appear at all unless you have picked the said ability (in Sov creation or whatever).

I can also assign the first ability to appear farther down the tree (say x0 y6), so it doesn't appear unless you scroll down.  This makes an unconnected path line appear that angles up/down in the direction of the parent ability, but otherwise the first actual 'Tree' ability (with a Unit_Level tag assigned) can still appear in the first row.

So back to my stacking comment.  Since I have multiple abilities assigned to the same given spot in a tree (instead of just 1 or 2), well I'm thinking E:LH may not like that  a whole lot, hence my thoughts on maybe stacking being the culprit.  Whenever two traits try to occupy/appear in the same space on the tree, the trees get messed up...  Anyways, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that maybe I just have some 'loose tags' as you mentioned.  I've checked them off and on using an .xml editor, but I usually just code in notepad2 (which sorta kinda keeps track of tags, but not to the extent that the full .xml editor does).

Been at this for a lot of hours now, so it's nap time... thanks for the advice Heavenfall!  I'll check it out when I'm refreshed.

OK, now that I'm a bit rested, and have done some 'housekeeping' on the Regularly Updated Mods List thingie...

My mod zipfile is currently clocking in at 6.8 MB.  A lot of that is image related.

After I backed off from my latest changes (the ones that caused me the issues I mentioned above), everything else seems to be working fine.  I have the file out to a couple of people, so they can take it for a test drive and see if anything is broken.  If their initial testing goes well, I'll post up a link with my latest changes.  I just didn't want to put this out into the wild until I had some initial verification form a couple of people that things were working as they should.

Still haven't figured out how to 'point' the Cutscene file to the other images I had in mind, for the shop, etc.  The two background/foreground images are appearing correctly in Sov creation (you can see the blue chasm background in the first two images in the first post), but the other's aren't appearing yet.

This will be in 'Beta' for a bit, as I've made a lot of changes here, so there are a lot of balance issues and such to consider.  Thanks to all whom have made suggestions, encouraging comments, etc. so far!

Bad news.

So, I have everything working the way I was hoping it would.  However, after GFireflyE pointed out some issue with the savegame/autosave not loading/crashing the game, I myself have reproduced the issue.

I've tried saving a game, quitting and restarting, only to find that the game immediately crashes.  Same with autosaves.

So, despite this mod working so beautifully like I want it to, well you can't load saved games.  While any previous savegames (before you install this mod) will work, any games created with my .xml in place will 'break' the savegame file for those games...

This problem goes away if you remove my modfiles, so my modfiels are the problem.  They check out in .xml validation, and the debug.err is coming up rather clean.  one of my files are getting specifically flagged, although the Despair spell (core game spell) seems to be having a targetting issue...

So this is a deal-breaker.  No ability to load saves = not acceptable.

Are you in any way creating new shards? That can corrupt saves in my experience.

I did 'change' the shard art for death shards in my own install, so that a slightly different version would show up on certain terrain.  However, that would show up in my install and not GFireflyE's - he doesn't have my modified core file that 'triggers' the different unharvested shard art'.  He will see your run of the mill death shard in all cases until he harvests it.

As for harvesting the shards, yes I have a different building that does that.  However, I went through some of my earlier saves, and was able to successfully save and load said savegames with the modified Death Shard Altar improvement art. 

I haven't tried swapping out the improvent file art yet.  i've been removing files one at a time and seeing if that woud correct the problem.  I'll try that file next.

There is a new tech tree involved, that'll be one of the next things I try to swap out.

My hope is that there is just one file that is causing this, but I'm afraid I'm trying things that Elemental quite simply does not like/understand.  GFireflyE has been able to play fortunately, but is experiencing occassional crashing (see other thread) and as far as I know hasn't been able to successfully save/load save with my mod in place.  As you noted, the save/autosave is corrupted in some fashion.

I do appreciate your suggestions Heavenfall, and hopefully that helps me figure this one out.

The reason I'm trying so hard to make multipurpose paths is so that modders can customize the General Trait tree and other trees (in my case Arisen) without having to create a whole brand new path each time.  For those of us without an acceptable scroll function, well we quite simply don't get to see the new paths if they appear offscreen.  I did note in another thread that someone (abob?) said you can actually have more than one path chosen for your Sov (i.e. be both a Mage and a Warrior), but that the button for path #2 would appear below the screen.  Again problematic without a working scroll, and besides we all like things to be 'obvious'.  But that is a slightly unrelated issue.

Plus, through Primal's work, he has demonstrated that 10 paths is the effective upper limit without a scroll function.  So I'm trying to not create 2 or more extra paths here, and instead just want to make do with a single path.  I think the current count on paths available via Modding is 9 (Ranger, Paladin, Summoner, Necromancer, not counting my unreleased path).  so with my path that makes 10, so what happens to path #11?  No scroll wheel, no path.

I HAVE successfully been able to create a 'Clean' PathOfTheRisen for someone without the relevant blood type (Cindermages see version 1, Spirit Mages see version 2, anyone else with Path of the Risen sees a blank slate).  LOTS of possibilities here, but I'm afraid that'll be what is corrupting the save game (the game is expecting only 2 states).  Which is interesting because my save from almost 2 weeks ago had the third state for the General Trait tree successfully working.  Of course, I now have 5 states that I've created for that tree...

One other note.

GFireflyE has graciously been still trying to playtest for me.  So I'm still trying to get some good info as I try to track down the problem.  So this mod isn't dead in the water so to speak.  I've found that if the game doesn't crash in the first turn ot ten, I can actually play pretty far before I eventually bail to tweak some thing or another.  I very much appreciate his efforts, and will continue to try to make this a reality.  As noted above, worst case scenario, I can always port the Banshee over to another faction (EmpireOfTheDead, Necromancy Reveamped, etc.) and abandon whatever is breaking the game...

I appreciate any continued interest in this mod, and any suggestions y'all care to throw my way. 

Brave souls whom laugh in the face of crashing games are welcome to get in touch with me via PM, should you be interested in helping hammer out the balance issues and such while I try to get a handle on this...

I think it's a matter of starting small.

Start with making an 'extra' for Necromancy Revamped. Combine it with Undead AI fixes. Then branch out into new/unique abilities.

Ummm, no.

I've currently cleaned out my mods folder, put the mods back in that I know have worked fine (Parrotmath mods mostly, plus Monuments XP 'cuz I know it's harmless), and I am now rebuilding everything one thing at a time.

I even created a new custom faction and Sov, mostly to make sure I had 'game approved' code.  I'll morph those files over to where I need them, but right now I'm taking another pass at the traits trees, to see if that is where the problem lies.  I was able to modify those fairly extensively up to a point, so now it's just a matter of figuring out where the 'break point' was, and then back off from that point.

BTW, I played pretty much a full game last night (tiny map).  Most heroes and the Sov were over level 10 when I finally wore myself out and called it a day.  I had taken out one empire at that point (they had built up to 4 cities at that point and had some decent sized armies).  I knew the savegame feature was broken, but I wanted to know if everything would otherwise work ingame.  Other than a couple of nagging issues (spell I need to fix due to a targetting issue and such) no crashes and played rather well actually.  My Banshee Sov got beaten up a few times due to me being overconfident, so I think she is fairly close to balanced currently.

More importantly, as I've said before, I'm enjoying the tactical challenges of the approach I took r.e. her abilities.  I think that one new ability I created (death flight) is overpowered, so I'll dial that down on the next go around, but otherwise it was fun to play.  Which is the point, right?

Still plugging away at the rebuild, although I'm taking it a bit slower this time.  I've been trying to find a way to implement the 'varied' General Trait tree in such a way that wouldn't require editing a bunch of Champion/Sov files, without going the third Allegiance route.

For those that have studied the conversations code, you'll know that there are more intricate conversation options are available for Kingdom-Kingdom, Empire-Empire, and Kingdom-Empire.  These are coded with options 0, 1, 2, 10, 11, and 12.  Well there's no setup for a third allegiance currently, so those conversations go to the 'default' responses.  Hence, a bit more repetitive and not quite as interesting when working with the conversation menus.

While I was originally able to get savegames to work using the third Allegiance (I went that route fairly early in my work on this mod), I definitely could see that factoring in to a corrupted save at some point.  The alternative (as I see it) is to code a bunch of duplicate abilities, wherein I do believe that there is an effective upper limit to what has been set aside r.e. the number of abilities the game can effectively track before savegames get corrupted.  That's just a theory on my part, though, based on some behaviors I saw when adding new abilities (I was duplicating a LOT of abilities at one point.

To explain the 'duplicate abilities' dilemma, as I noted a number of posts back you can break down abilities by Allegience, but if you want to get more specific, but want that ability available to more than one faction, well you can't list two separate race prereqs in the same ability (the game only 'sees/uses' one of them.  RestrictedAbility still allows the ability to show up unless you tie it to another trait that is 'creatively' placed, so you'd have to add said trait to all Sovs/Champions.  Or, say if you wanted 3 of the 6 Empire factions to have said ability, but not the other 3, well you'd need 3 versions of said ability (tied to each Race type that you want to have the ability). 

Since my goal here is to NOT have to edit a bunch of Sovs/Champions (this requires maintenance as new versions of Elemental are released, and also when other modders make changes to the core Units/Race files), AND not to create a bunch of duplicate abilities, well there's the crux of my dilemma.  So far I'm finding that trying to create abilties for some Empire Trait Trees, but not all of them is not an ideal choice, hence why Allegiance #3 works so well to solve this problem for my custom faction at least (none of the existing Sovs/Units are Allegiance #3, hence no need to change their code).  Doesn't quite solve the Morrigan & Wraith versus other Empire factions issue though, should I want to 'customize' the general trait tree for those factions a bit.

Trying to do this via the five existing paths is an even less attractive option, as you'd need five versions of a given ability that you otherwise would put on the General Trait tree.  To be clear, this dilemma I'm having is a 'Monster Sov' issue, i.e. for Sov types that may not have mounts available, may not normally use attack_pierce, etc..  Yeah, I'm picky that way...

But I digress.  Came up with a new Profession for the Sov Creation Picker, Spirit Shaman.  Similar to the Summoner pick, but swaps out the Shadow Warg for a Poltergeist.  I'm envisioning the Poltergiest as a mischevious summoned spirit, tactical summon only, with low attack strength but some annoying effects.  Thinking of making the effects a bit random. Still vulnerable (although resistant) to most attack forms, so it'll survive a couple of turns to wreak minor havoc.  The Poltergeist is working ingame, and now I'm just working out the spell effects I want.

I also created a variation of the 'Eagle Eye' spell (Whispering Spirits), wherein you instead pick a 'known' tile on the map (instead of just boosting the sight range of the Sov), and it reveals the map for 2 tiles around the selected point.  I tried putting a range variable on this (so you'd have to cast it within 'x' tiles of the Sov), but that didn't work quite as intended.  I'll play with that a bit later, but for now it's a working spell, and the 2 tile radius seems to be 'small enough'.  The intent here was to simulate a 'spirit scout unit' heading off in one direction and checking out the lay of the land, but in this case it's a disembodied spirit, not an actual unit, and the spirit only scouts for that turn.  Mana Cost and Cooldown will of course need to be appropriate, so subject to playtest feedback of course.

As I said, I'm taking my time with the recode, and as usual getting distracted by shiny things I want to add along the way.  I finally did get most of my other backgrounds to appear ingame (trading window, etc.), although this involved adding a subfolder to the core gfx folder.  I wasn't able to get the 'paths' to take using the Mods folder, and no one seemed to have an answer for this.

Back to the grindstone!

Can you explain this further?

Hey Primal!

So, I was trying to work out how to 'tell' the game that some of my graphics (for say a background for shop_low_level) were in the Mods folder.  The game simply was not automatically substituting them, even though I had mentioned said filenames in the 'new' cutscenes.xml files.

Certainly the game 'saw' the custom backgrounds I had in LH/GFX for the Sov Picker (first screen after you choose a new game, with a different background for each current Sov choice), but once I was ingame, yean it stuck with the default barracks, shop, etc. background no matter how I tried to tell it otherwise.

How I solved it was to to add a folder to the core gfx folder (in this case Gfx/Revenant), and then point the tags appropriately.  Since I couldn't work out how to 'point' to the mods folder, I simply added a folder to the location that the game was already pointing to.  Simply change the subfolder name and voila!

I HATE putting files in the core folder, but in this case at least I can add a new folder, appropriately labeled to make it clear what the folder is for (in this case Core folder addy/Gfx/Revenant), so no core files are getting swapped out.  I'd still like to figure out how to change the tags to see the other backgrounds via the mods folder though (one less step for the install).  Simply placing the folder in LH/Gfx/Revenant (to mirror the addressing in the core folder) hasn't worked, except for the new game Sov background (Sov_Cutscene_BG_Oracle or whatever, etc.).  In that single instance, I didn't even have to correctly address the tags for those backgrounds, the game found them right off.

Suggestions, your experience, etc. on this is always appreciated.  I prefer placing things in the Mods folder when practicable.

Hum, that sounds about right. You do put single quotation marks around 'new'... Are your CutSceneDataPack + CutScene really new?