For example when I use the Spearman armor (which is variation A in the Axemen Unit!), it has Armor/Spearman has the name of the Bin used for Armor.īy creating variations, you leave it up to the engine as to which variations show up in which amount in your unit. The available artbins are in the Unit_Bins.artdef and the way you can reference them can be found in the Units.artdef file. For each part ( Body, Hats, Shield, etc.) you reference an art bin. Here you can go nuts with attachments! What you do not define, will not show up in the game. The second also uses a different body model. I have two variations, because I have one variation of models that has a weapon and a shield and one that has two weapons. Each variation basically stands for a differently build model within your unit. Under Variations the fun stuff begins! I created two variations, A and B. Just use an example unit or the Axemen Unit mod. I’m now diving in a bit faster, because the parts Culture, Any and Variations aren’t very exciting and pretty straightforward to create and fill in. I again copied these over from the Swordsman. The UnitMemberTypes has a few for example. Make sure that you fill in the specific properties of each element that requires it. The Name of this element is what I used in the above explained Type property. Now here it gets interesting! First create an element and give it a name that’s useful to you, Axemen in my case. The Type is one I defined myself and aptly named Axemen. Of those there are 4 visible in a fully healthy unit, as indicated with the Count property. In my example the unit is composed of only one member type. Here you define of which members your unit is composed. Of those Members is the one important in this case. The branch is now called UNIT_AXEMEN in my example. Here you can also see that I based the Axemen Unit mostly on the Swordsman when it comes to basic definitions. Because of this, you also have to use the proper name here, it references the same name you use for the unit in the gameplay data XML. So the filename is actually mandatory here. It also assumes that models for units are defined in Units.artdef. Icons for example are often deduced by the engine based on the name. Sidestep: Civilization 6 uses assumptions on naming all throughout its engine and files. The Name property is important, because that's what you have been using in the XML files to reference your unit. This is what that looks like for the Axemen Unit. In this case, add an element and select the newly created element. Right click the branch to get a context menu, which usually has one or two options. There are two interesting places: Units and UnitMemberTypes. What you see here, is that I opened a few branches to show that there is nothing there. The actual interesting part is in the left panel, here in detail. Go explore that artdef-file and find what you can and want to use for your next mod! This requires searching, clicking and trying, but is definitely something I would urge you to do yourself. I used those files to see what was available to me and how the units in the game actually used the system. To speed us along, I already have the Units.artdef from the mod, the Units.artdef from the basegame and the Unit_Bins.artdef from the basegame open. You can launch it by opening Modbuddy and then (while having a solution open) click on the TOOLS menu. I am not very good with those programs and very much prefer to work with XML, SQL and other coding stuff.Īnd then came in the Asset Editor. To create the model for the Axemen unit, I didn’t have to work with a 3D imaging program. That mod can be found on the Steam Workshop: Axemen Unit & Copper Strategic Resource. I will take you through the basics of this powerful tool with my Axemen unit mod as an example. When we use the Asset Editor they become way more obvious. These artdef-files are basically XML files, but mostly unreadable when you open them with a text editor. With that asset editor we can create our own artdef-files. Now I hear you think: “But they have these specialized tools to make that work!” Well yeah, but since the release of the modding tools ( Patch modding tools announcement) us mere mortals get access to these tools as well!! There is an Asset Editor included with Modbuddy. And then provided a way to attach these different parts together at predefined attachment points. Think weapons, shields, bodies, hats, armor, etc. The artists from Firaxis Games have created a whole bunch of seperate parts. With the introduction of Sid Meier’s Civilization VI they also introduced a new way of configuring and representing art in the game.
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