[How-To] Change/Add units in Forward HQ

[burtondrummerNY]

I've been asked this question a few times, so I felt it would be easier to make a tutorial than answer everyone individually. Hopefully this will help someone out!

Ok, first step, open mod studio. Load your mod.

Go to the following location:

ATTRIB/ATTRIB/RACEBPS/<RACE>

http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn271/freedomvipers08/tutorial1.jpg

Next, open up:

GAMEDATA/RACE_BAG/AMBIENT_BUILDING_UPGRADE_SQUADS/STYLE_01

http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn271/freedomvipers08/tutorial2.jpg

Now, add or remove any squads you want, as if it was any other base building:

http://i306.photobucket.com/albums/nn271/freedomvipers08/tutorial3.jpg

Have fun!

[Celution]

There is already an (undetailed) tutorial for this in the How-To's Section. This one is better though.

[Uccido]

style 1 is for skirmish, others are for single player missions? in the event that someone wants to mod the campaign? ;)

[burtondrummerNY]

Not sure, but modding them hasnt done anything for me.

[Uccido]

haha ok. was just looking at the styles thinking, style 2 is the armor factory from cherbough, style 3 has gotta be the church and town squad building from carentan, and style 4 i have no idea where from.

[sirpsychoj]

To be quiet honest, Ive always used a seperate number, reasons for this is, you can them have a more customable Ambient building selection on a map. By leaving the original normal play and buildings, they arent affected and in some instances as pe etc. they offer little in that area anyway, but then by adding an eg_group building to the map, you can allocate special or unique buildings to the map that offer extra goodies or unique units, these can be put in conflicting areas to create more of a battle over an area, great How_To though, maybe just add that people can make there own customable ones as well and maybe some info on that, then it covers it all

[Celution]

Correct, the first is for skirmishes and the others are used for campaigns.

[Lukasito]

thanks, this is exactly what i was searching, veery nice tutorial :)

[Kapp'n]

Moved to How-To

[burtondrummerNY]

Thanks kapp'n!

[jakewedding]

how would i get the commonwealth to be able to capture neutral buildings?

[burtondrummerNY]

I'm not entirely sure. There is an ability or two called something along the lines of "ambient_building_upgrade." try looking into those.

[Lethal Dosage]

From what i remember, all ambient buildings have some upgrades, which'll show up when the building is garrisoned and thus belonging to a player. From memory there are two upgrades, a regular one which shows up for Wehr and US which keeps the building ownership to that player and unlocks the ambient building production menu, and another upgrade which'll only show up for the PE, in which it'll just keep the building ownership to that player and apply a healing aura.

Find these upgrades, and in the desired one look into the requirements_ext. In there ther should be required_race actions (might be in an unary_exp or a binary_exp), and either remove or add the british faction to the requirements.

Sorry i can't go inot more detail, but i don't have the Mod Studio in front of me, and so i'm going off stuff i learnt about ayear ago when i looked into this for myself.

[Venusius]

sirpsychoj: Can you elaborate more on your mod for buildable units in ambient buildings? Or perhaps point me to the specific thread addressing this mod?



Here's a question:
- How do you adjust the position of units in the ambient building's UI? I've been looking for it and I couldn't find it. The UI group position of a particular squad is normally used for the spawner building UI. Ambient buildings seems to have its own. Some of my units are not appearing in the ambient building UI if that UI position is taken up by another icon (ie. MG armour piercing bullets if the ambient building is garrisoned by an MG squad).

I appreciate the help.

[Jagdpanther]

You can try to use the "ui_priority" like in the building menus to change the order.

[Venusius]

Did that, it didn't work. The UI position were in order from 1-7, then it skips to position 9, which is normally taken up by the MG AP bullets ability, I don't know why I can't fill up position 8 when it's not being used for anything, it's so strange and frustrating at the same time.

[Jagdpanther]

Could it be, that position 8 is used for unloading the building? I think, there must be anything in the warnings log about that "widget can't be used, it is used by another one - blah, blah" thingy.

[Venusius]

The unloading building icon is placed in a different position, I believe it's position 5 if I remember correctly. Position 8 is just empty.

For sure position 9 had that widget error and I want to move the unit to a different UI but I just don't know how. I'm stumped.

[Jagdpanther]

Mhmm, mysterious. Have you tried to simply place it in the racebps squad table on that position in there you need it.

I do not use so many squads this way, so I don't have noticed this issue before. Now I will test this for myself too. I report, if I found anything.

[Lethal Dosage]

The units in the ambient building production menu's are shown in the order their in the list, filling all available slots (it ignores the ui slot number). Slot 5 is reserved for the Garrison Unload button, but that's the only button that i'm aware of that's reserved. As far as i'm aware there is no way to force the building to show a unit in a slot it has reserved for something. If you are having a unit being hidden in the menu behind an ability (as almost all abilities were disabled while garrisoned, this wasn't considered an issue), all the unit into the list again, so that one copy is hidden behind the ability and the other is displayed next to the ability.

I do suggest however that you only have a maximum of 6 units in the Forward HQ building menu (using slots 1-4, 6 & 7), as the bottom row of slots (slots 9-12) are always used by abilities (and the Axis medkit is in slot 8 since ToV) and there can be problems with abilities overlapping the units meant to be displayed there. If you have to have so many units built in the field, i'd suggest making a structure that can be built by your main builder unit anywhere in territory, which you can then max out the production slots.

[Jagdpanther]

Have checked that too. For me slot 9-11 are available for units, 8 is blocked by somewhat (don't know what) and 5 is the unload button (as Venusius and LD says).

@LD When slot 8 is blocked by the medkid, then this must be hardcoded, or? I had nothing found, what can block this in PE, it is only empty but unusable.

The priority is ignored and the order is only like the order in the racebps squad table. Blank and skipped fields in this table are ignored. So it gives no possibility to assign a definite slot to a definite squad.

[Venusius]

Just as I had suspected. I'm still wondering what position 8 is used for since it's not taken up by the abilities or unload building icon.

Thanks guys.

[MikeWhiskey]

Can we re-visit the ambient building upgrade styles again?

It seem style_01 through style_04 have squads assigned. In the ambient building there is a production_style_ID. When I set this to number 1 through 4, I get the production list from the racebps ambient building upgrade style of the same number. eg. style_02 = 2. If I set it to numbers 5-8 I get no squads buildable, since there are none listed in ambient building upgrade styles 5-8. Rather than use any of the 4 unused styles 5-8, I created a new style_09 putting in my own list of squads to produce. But when I use 9 as the style number in the production_style_ID for the ambient building it reverts to one of the styles 1-4.

What am I missing with this approach?