Hello everybody, and welcome to our fifth development diary for ‘For the Glory’ (FTG).
Since this is my first diary, I thought I'd begin by introducing myself. My name is Michael Myers and I am the co-lead developer on the project. I have been playing EU2 off and on (mostly on) since early 2003. When Paradox offered the licensing deal, I immediately jumped at the chance, but then realized that I didn't really have enough time to improve the game dramatically by myself. So when YodaMaster suggested we join forces shortly thereafter, I was happy to accept.
I have focused mainly on three areas: the script engine, small interface enhancements (improving things that annoyed me about EU2), and bugfixing. Today I'll introduce some of the changes to the script engine, but not triggers and commands; there will be time enough for those later.
One oft-requested feature for events is to have the AI chance be coded in the event. This is a simple enough change; simply put
Code:
ai_chance = <number>
into all active actions, and the AI will make a choice based on the numbers. For example, if there are two actions, one with ai_chance = 150 and the other with ai_chance = 50, there is a 75% chance that the AI will choose the first one.
If at least one active action has no ai_chance defined, then the standard probabilities (which the player can change in the scenario options as shown in dev diary #3) will be used.
But let's back up a little. I keep saying “active” actions; what does that mean? Simply that each action can have its own trigger. If the trigger's conditions are not met, the action will not be displayed. This makes it no longer necessary to have multiple versions of the same event for different conditions (like for instance the Burgundian inheritance, which should behave differently if either France or Austria doesn't exist).
To facilitate this further, events are no longer restricted to four actions. They are only limited by the size of the screen; I've made test events with as many as 13 actions.
And did I mention that commands can have their own triggers also?
Finally, so as to make this diary at least a little visually interesting, here is the last new event feature. See if you can spot it:
Yes, you guessed it: your current domestic policies are now shown in the tooltip!
...Oh, yes, there's also that picture thing too.
And there are also a few other interesting things in the screenshot; can you spot them?