Modding Tool: Empire at War Story Creator

[Pox]

Hey guys,

I'd like to introduce a new modding tool that I am currently working on. I call it the Empire at War Story Creator and its purpose is to make the creation of story events a lot easier. I have tried to keep the design as simple as possible, so that even people who have never worked with story events before should be able to understand it, once they have read the tutorial that comes with the Story Creator. But I think even more experienced modders will find it useful. Although it is not possible to write "complicated" event scripts with the Story Creator, since not all Event and Reward Types have been implemented, yet, it can still be used to set up basic scripts pretty fast.

I have posted two articles about it on ModDB, so if you'd like to know more about it check out these two links:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/secret-weapons-of-the-empire/news/eaw-space-addon-news-no-17

http://www.moddb.com/mods/secret-weapons-of-the-empire/news/an-early-christmas-present-for-modders-the-empire-at-war-story-creator


As it says in the second article there is already a demo version available, this is the download link:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/secret-weapons-of-the-empire/downloads/empire-at-war-story-creator-alpha-022



I have actually received absolutely no feedback so far, so if any of you would give the tool a try, I'd love to hear your opinion.

Thanks in advance 

[Corey]

Nice, definitely looks like it'd streamline the process, especially for people without much experience with that kind of story scripting, but you might want to try hosting it somewhere else or contacting the MDB staff, it's not showing any mirrors.

[Pox]

Ah, good that you mention it, I hadn't noticed that the download wasn't working anymore.

Until it's fixed on ModDB, I have uploaded the file to GameFront for now:
http://www.gamefront.com/files/21311779/StoryCreator_alpha022_zip

[Corey]

I'm about to redo the hero spawning scripts for EotH so I should have some feedback on this soon.

[Pox]

I'm looking forward to it
Actually I have pretty much stopped working on it for now, since nobody seems to use it, but if you find it useful I'll consider continuing with it.

[Kalo]

This actually looks really cool. Nice job Pox, hadn't seen it before.

[Pox]

Glad you like it

Somebody has just found a bug that prevents you from opening XML files even if you have already set an xml folder.
This bug can be avoided if the following XMLs are in your XML folder:
Specialstructures.xml
UniqueUnits.xml
Speechevents.xml
GroundcompaniesEmpire.xml (or any other faction's groundcompanies xml)
Factions.xml
Planets.xml
NamedHeroUnits.xml
HeroCompanies.xml
SpaceUnitsCapital.xml (or any other xml containing space units)
Movies.xml

I'm going to fix that in the next version.

[Pox]

I have just uploaded a new version that should fix the issues that came up before.

http://www.gamefront.com/files/21571176/StoryCreator_alpha030.rar

The Story Creator can now also save your source folder path, so you only have to import it once.
Moreover, I have added the LINK_TACTICAL reward type and the STORY_TECH_LEVEL event type.

Have fun

[Corey]

Alright, so having played around with this a bit while working on some GCs for the mod, I finally have some feedback.

It's really useful for what it does, however there are some ways that usability could be increased, unless they're already there and I just missed it.

1. More reward types. Because some of the more common reward types are missing, you still have to go in afterward to add a bunch of events, and if those events were needed for prerequisites, you have to create some events in the tool of a different type so that you'd have access to them to be able to make them prerequisites, but then go back and recode them manually. Even a kind of dummy event would be enough to mitigate this, so you at least don't have to fill in more information, and maybe have it insert something indicating it's a dummy evenmt so it can easily be found in the XML.

2. Option to reorganize them in the GUI. When trying to add in new events before other events, I didn't see a way to re-order them in the file or on the GUI. This isn't as important but it'd still be more convenient.

It also seems to remove comments in the code, along with the XML version detail line at the beginning of the file..