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[Mini]

muh opsec

[E. Albright]

I suppose the fairly obvious lesson is that if a bunch of fork-tongued lizards come to you talking first of partitioning a neighbor because they're weak, and then after you hedge a bit and avoid making any specific commitments, they conveniently return in their next message claiming to have received an ultimatum from them... it would do well to be more suspicious even if you do have political grievances with the local goblin tribes...

[Mini]

Oh, you're talking about that. Yeah, that's not some massive plot, that's me fucking up and not paying attention to the difference between a purple triangle and a purple rectangle.

[AlStar]

That reminds me - how robust is the flag generator? Because I feel like it's not quite up to the level that it should be. Too many nations have virtually identical flags, with only minor color or banner topping differences between them.

How tough would it be to throw in some more symbols? (I suppose a related question - how are they generated? Is it just a random flag image + random color + random topper? Or does it actually try to combine multiple images into a flag, if possible?)

What I'd love is something like Lands of Lords crest generator, since it seems to be able to come up with a bunch of unique icons.

[E. Albright]

Flags are another thing I've been meaning to pick at - they haven't had much attention in the last couple of years.

A flag consists of a baseflag (V, |_vv| or |_vvv|) in a given color, a recolored pattern (which would be various stripes, quarterings, etc., to include the possibility of none), a fixed-palate midicon (of which there really need to be more - there's only 8 ATM, plus none), a fixed-palate topicon (if there was no midicon; choice of 18 or none), and an optional border (which are all the same except for color).

All these graphics can be found in NG's /graphics/flags/ folder. There's also some raw flag dump graphics I threw in there long ago with sterling Good Intentions to work on them really soon here. It wouldn't be hard to throw in some more stuff, either more involved divisions of the field and/or lines of division, ordinaries and subordinaries, or charges (i.e., color patterns, shapes, and icons). Digging through really basic heraldry references make me wanna mess with this again; there's some stuff that wouldn't be hard to do but could look rather striking. Plus, ofc, there's the more-recent Dominions flags to be cannibalized, sigh.

But long answer short, it'd be extremely easy to add stuff. You just need to add the new graphics to /graphics/flags/foo (where foo is the flag part in question), and then add a definition in the corresponding /data/flags/foo.txt file...

[AlStar]

Since I'm the one being discontent, I thought I'd step up to the plate: (results of me generating 50 nations and picking ones that use my images)

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

link to new images: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qtlhhbna41kf1ii/newpatterns.rar?dl=0
link to updated .txt: https://www.dropbox.com/s/7v5zsmh6xr2p8nh/recolors.txt?dl=0

Only 12 images so far (4 for each of the three bases), but this seems like the kind of thing I wouldn't mind doing a bunch more of.

[E. Albright]

On a technical level - if we ignore some of them being off-center *twitch* - they look fine, but I'm not sure they fit cleanly with NG's sorta-heraldric-ish look-and-feel for flags.

Having said that, re-post them over here so they can get a fuller opinion cast upon them: http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/index.php?showtopic=1619

[AlStar]

On a technical level - if we ignore some of them being off-center *twitch* - they look fine, but I'm not sure they fit cleanly with NG's sorta-heraldric-ish look-and-feel for flags.

Having said that, re-post them over here so they can get a fuller opinion cast upon them: http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/index.php?showtopic=1619

Heh, that'll show me for throwing them together at like 1 AM - not anything that can't be fixed by nudging them a couple pixels in the right direction.

For what it's worth, I actually grabbed those designs from a site that was showing examples of heraldic symbols (although I just grabbed the easiest four that I found)... now, if they match with what's currently there - well, that's a different (yet entirely legitimate) question.

These were basically just a proof-of-concept - I'll revisit them when I get out of work. Probably scrap a couple that didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped.

It's surprisingly hard to get good detail into less than 64x64 pixels.

[E. Albright]

In re: 64x64, I feel your pain. It is soooooooo miserable.

I also feel your pain in re: the folly of doing anything like this in the middle of the night. It's possibly you've felt my pain in this regard in the past, as it's been one of the most fruitful sources of mind-numbingly stupid bugs in NationGen.

The main thing I'd say is that it's probably best to avoid anything too detailed as far as ordinaries go. With as little space as we have, really complicated geometric patterns will be hard to get right, even if you can manage to get charges to look decent at that size since those you can shade, etc.

The most straightforward stuff (aside from unused Dom4 graphics) that I've been looking to bash into NG's flags were from Wikipedia - it seemed like there would be workable imagery that could translate to our itsy-bitsy sprites, but could still be interesting and/or distinctive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(heraldry)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_(heraldry)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_(heraldry)

(Ofc, I haven't actually tried to cram any of this onto tiny sprites, yet...)

[E. Albright]

I bumped hosting to 36h (which means a 6h delay from the originally-scheduled host time this turn, though that may make no difference), but I'd like to keep it there for the next two years at a minimum.

[AlStar]

Well, that didn't work out so well: Hired elephant mercenaries to trample my enemies. So what does the enemy spellcasting AI bring out? Enrage!

I lost more troops to my own elephants than to enemy action. 

[Shadowgandor]

Hi guys, sorry for stalling so many times this week. It's been quite a hectic week and I keep forgetting to send a turn. However, I need another 24h before I can do my turn as I'm not home at this moment

[a1s]

Hi guys, sorry for stalling so many times this week. It's been quite a hectic week and I keep forgetting to send a turn. However, I need another 24h before I can do my turn as I'm not home at this moment

Turn 20 kinda already ran, sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

[E. Albright]

...though FWIW, there's something like 33h until the next is scheduled to host.

--

So the idea is to bring peace to your corner of the world by going to war with three nations at once and giving them a whole lot of common cause against a suddenly-huge enemy? That's a bold move, Ukubabbum, let's see how it plays out for you.

[ThtblovesDF]

I'm totally bringing peace ; ) - also all those wars need to be fueld somehowl. 4 enemys or 5, since some of the armys that where attacking you ran into my dudes.

Very little of me is "suddenly huge" - but, the harsh truth is that I control nearly all the wastelands on this goddamm map, for all that is worth (about 12 income/province actually - then add to that my death 3 scales and I'm basically not worth attacking back)