[Ares] New Countries tutorial
There are a few things worth noting from the beginning. All of this should be in the documentation.
- You can have up to 32 new countries, 16 of which can have taunts. I don't see this being an issue.
- You can reorder the country list. The old 9 countries have special Ares handling that tells the game to still use their old loading screen, flag, and strings.
- You can have 16 new sides, don't ask me why you need 16 though.
- You can add your new countries and sides either before or after the GDI,Nod,Special,Neutral sides. It has no special effect contrary to what I thought.
Countries
In order to add a new country, the VERY FIRST step will be adding it to the [Countries] list. I assume you don't need me to tell you how to make a number, equals sign, and the name of your country. For the tutorial, we're going to add New Zealand to the Allies, with an ID of [Zealand]
Your country entry will need to look something very similar to what's posted below. I'll be commenting each tag from Ares so you can draw what the new brings together with the old.
[Zealand] ;this is our new country
UIName=Name:Zealand ;the name string
Name=New Zealand ;this is used in FinalAlert 2 and WW editors
Suffix=Allied ;this is present on all Allied sides
Prefix=G ;as this is too.
Color=Gold ;this could be changed if you haet this color, but is for singleplayer purposes
Multiplay=yes ;need this in order to get the country to appear in the dropdown box.
Side=GDI ;this is the side that the countries belongs to. GDI=Allies
SmartAI=yes ;this is for the AI to use SmartAI. I've never experimented with the tag but ModEnc would probably tell you all you need to know.
;new Ares stuff
File.Flag=zealflag.pcx ;this is your flag. 8-bit PCX still.
File.LoadScreen=ls%szeal.shp ;this is your loading screen, it needs the %s to tell it size. This will be changed in future versions.
File.LoadScreenPAL=lszeal.pal ;this is your loading screen palette.
File.Taunt=tauam%02i.wav ;the taunts. the %02i tells it to read the 8 taunt files.
LoadScreenText.Name=Name:Zealand ;this is the name of the country that appears on the right hand side.
LoadScreenText.SpecialName=Name:BFRT ;this is the nation special, like the Tesla Tank or Black Eagle. It's in the upper left hand side.
LoadScreenText.Brief=Brief:NationBattlefort ;this is the description of the country, below the name.
MenuText.Status=STT:NationBattlefort ;this is the description of the country in the bottom of the skirmish screen, that generally provides something like "New Zealand can build Battlefortresses"
RandomSelectionWeight=1 ;this is the weight the country has in order to be picked at random. Yes, you can make other countries pop up more or less based on these numbers.
Now you just add the country to your sides list.
[Sides]
GDI=British,French,Germans,Americans,Alliance,Zealand ;new country is in
Now you should have a fully functional new country that can be selected. Based on where you inserted the country determines where the country appears in order on the skirmish drop-down menu.
I'll be writing a new side tutorial soon, don't worry.
