The PON Leader Project Mod (Thread from Paradox Froums)

[lukasberger]

This is to announce the release of the beta version of the PON Leader Project. What is the PON Leader Project? It's an attempt to expand the leader pool for PON to include as many relevant leaders for the PON period as possible.

PON is a beautiful game, easily one of the best I've ever played and has the potential to be one of the greatest games ever. While the vanilla game provides a large amount of leaders that are well researched and beautifully implemented it leaves many important and unimportant leaders out. For most of the players of PON no doubt the leaders included are more than enough. That's not so for everyone.

If you've ever used any of my leader packs for HOI3 which have been included in I.C.E., H.P.P and August Storm you'll know that I love creating historical leaders, the more the better. So far I've added 165 or so new leaders to create the beta version of the PON leader project.

Preview Pics:







What should you know about the PON Leader Project?

As stated above PONLP is an attempt to expand the leader pool for PON to include as many relevant leaders for the PON period as possible. All added leaders will be as historically accurate as possible.

Thus each new leader will appear at or around the year of their actual promotion to the PON level 1 rank. This rank varies by country as is explained elsewhere on the PON forums. Major-General for Great Britain, Général de brigade for France, Regular Army Colonel for the USA etc. They are available for promotion at or around their real historical promotion dates.

There are several things you should know about the beta version of the PON Leader Project before you install it.

1. Over 160 new leaders are added and the mod activates a few vanilla leaders per country who would not otherwise activate immediately under the current leader system. Great Britain has the most new leaders with 66. So for the best taste of the PONLP experience load Great Britain. France has 33 new leaders, Prussia-Germany has 26, Austria has 41, and Russia 1. Additionally I've added pics and traits to a few of the leaders from vanilla who were missing them.

2. The PONLP leaders will run out around 1865-1870. After that you'll be playing with the vanilla leaders.

3. The eventual plan is to include as many generals as possible from as many PON countries as possible. I currently have all the info I need for Great Britain, France, Prussia-Germany, Austria, Russia, the United States, Italy, Spain, and Belgium. So PONLP will concentrate on adding leaders from those countries first.

4. My graphical skills are limited and sometimes it's hard to find good source pics. So most of the pics in PONLP are not nearly as attractive as the beautiful default PON pics created by McNaugton and the PON graphics team.

5. This is only intended as a beta. Installing the beta version of PONLP is not for everyone. Some installation guidelines follow:

-If you primarily play multiplayer be aware that PONLP unbalances the game.
-Before unzipping PONLP you MUST delete your Units and Models folders. This is crucial, otherwise your game WILL crash.
-Unzip the folder from within your PON main directory. When you are asked whether to overwrite files answer yes.
-You need to advance to the third turn of a new game before you see the new leaders.
-Enjoy!

http://www.gamefront.com/files/22210791/PONLP+0.2.zip

[Njordr]

Interesting!

[lukasberger]

Posted an updated version.

[Pocus]

No doubt you did a great job, care to post a panel showing some of these leaders?

[lukasberger]

Sure, I'll put a preview up a little later tonight or tomorrow.

[lukasberger]

Added a few preview pics.

[Pocus]

That's quite impressive!

Design note though... Not all leaders were included to force players using even the subpar commanders. If you include plethora of leaders, then they will always use the best ones.

[lukasberger]

Thanks!

You're right about using the best leaders of course, I remember talking to McNaugton about the leader system and that's something he mentioned too. It makes sense. In fact there were far more leaders included in the default PON than I ever expected or even hoped for. I figured it's be something like Victoria I where each country had maybe 20 leaders for the entire time period of the game.

From my perspective though, I really hate having corps and even brigades without leaders when it's possible to have them. Plus I love doing the research and having many more historical people involved really deepens the immersion for me.

I figure that most of the people who end up using this mod will be a little crazy about history like I am, so maybe they'll restrain themselves from automatically using the best leaders and instead respect the seniority rankings (which I'm going to a lot of trouble to make extremely accurate) and use the leaders in somewhat historical ways. Probably a forlorn hope but...

[lukasberger]

I'll be posting an update with another couple hundred new leaders within the next few days. Dunno if that gets anyone's heart beating faster!

[McNaughton]

Very interesting! I did most of the leader pictures for the original release, if you want I can show you a tutorial for getting the same effect (deals with layering, resulting in the image of the general picking up the background colour).

[lukasberger]

I'd like that. So far I've just been using the sepia overlay in PAINT.net or photoshop. I think it works well enough but it doesn't quite match the look of the original pics.

I'm also curious if once you get to a point when you're finished with the Age of Revolutions mod you'd be willing to send me the excel files, so that I could combine that with my leader mod. Obviously they won't be compatible otherwise and I really love what you're doing with the Age of Revolutions mod.

I should be putting up a new version of the mod within a day or two with nearly 300 additional new leaders including many from some of the smaller/minor countries and some that are further along in the time frame that just guys from the 1850's and 1860's. Sadly it's taken a bit longer than I'd hoped to post it since I realized the next version is going to require the scenarios to be recompiled. And since I obviously can't include the recompiled DLC scenarios in the mod that means that whoever downloads the file is going to have to do that. I didn't realize that changing the id's would mess up the original scenarios. Oh well.

[McNaughton]

(Copied from the beta forum)

Here's a 'how to' in regards to creating general graphics according to a modified system from the style of the original artist.

Step 1 - Find an appropraite picture.

The best pictures are those that are crips with appropraite shadows and shading is best. The below example is a good start (if grainy or botched, some work will be required to smooth and re-shade).



Step 2 - Re-colour the picture.

The graphics work best when you change the original to grey-scale (black, white and grey). Even if it looks black and white, selecting grey-scale will make sure. When you do the layering later, the picture ends up looking sharp and consistent given they all are of the same colouring.



Step 3 - Selecting the profile.

Now you have to select only the head, and a bit of the torso using the select tool, this eliminates the background and the unecessary part of the torso. Try to ensure that you have a similar distance from the left and right side of the head, as well as not too much shoulder.



Step 4 - Contrast.

Graphics look the best if there is a good contrast (although not too strong) between the ligher and darker parts. The best is a contrast that the lightest part is white, and the darkest part is black, the layering will lighten up the dark somewhat, and darken up the light (so it will not look as contrasted when you apply the graphic to the layering). This image shows the before (left) and after (right) of the images contrasting.



Step 5 - Resizing and fitting

There are two different scales that are used, a Unit scale and Army scale, this means you have to do the following twice, at different scales.

A) Resize - Unit - Resizing the picture for the unit results in a resize to 50-60 pixels along the width of the picture (ensure that you have aspect-ratio selected).

B) Resize - Army - Resizing the picture for the army results in a resize to 26-32 pixels along the width of the picture (ensure that you have aspect-ratio selected).

In order to get the picture to work (which is currently a rectangle) in the portrait (which is an oval), you have to apply templates to the respective scaled pictures. Below shows the rescaled Unit Size picture with the Unit Template (in pink applied). You copy and fit this template over your picture to see if you have to resize (if the picture is too small/big) and see how the graphic will look. When you are happy, click OFF the picture so the pink template becomes merged, then re-select the pink template and click delete (Step 6 shows what this looks like after deleting the template).

For the Army Size picture you simply do the same, except use the blue template instead of pink.



Step 6 - Setting up the Layering

When you copy over the graphic, the oval template has to be prepared to accept the new graphic, this is through 'layering'.

Layering (found in PSP8 in its own box or selection, but should be in all graphic programs) results in an interesting connection between two different graphics, allowing for the desired effect.

A) Create a New Raster Layer (will be called Raster 2 in PSP8)
B) Customize the style for Raster 2 (I use Hard Light)
C) Customize the transparency for Raster 2 (I use 80%)



Step 7 - Applying the picture

The last step is to copy over the resized and trimmed down graphic to the oval template. Ensure that you are still in Raster 2 (the modified raster) which will apply the graphic using hard light and 80% transparency.

Save the graphic and repeat for the smaller scale picture.

[lukasberger]

Thanks. Would you send me a copy of the templates too?

[lukasberger]

btw. Is it possible for a mod to fix my typo of "Froums" in the thread title? It drives me crazy every time I see it!

Or else just remove the whole "(Thread from Paradox Froums)" part since that referred to an old version of the thread where I had only linked to Paradox rather than posting the mod here.

Thanks.

[McNaughton]

Here are some of the extra bits I used to help make the images...

[ATTACH]20506[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH]20505[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH]20504[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH]20503[/ATTACH]

[ATTACH]20507[/ATTACH]

[McNaughton]

Here is the last one...

[ATTACH]20508[/ATTACH]

[Pocus]

Hi Jeremy, good to see you again!

[McNaughton]

Hi Jeremy, good to see you again!

Good to see you too!

[nadia911]

Unable to download, the link is down, please Fix it

[lukasberger]

Unable to download, the link is down, please Fix it

Works for me. Some folks have trouble with gamefront, I'll try to put this up on dropbox soon.

I actually have a much improved version with a ton more leaders that I should post. I'll try to get around to doing so.

[nadia911]

Thanks lukasberger, excellent work

[leaddernoir]

Works for me. Some folks have trouble with gamefront, I'll try to put this up on dropbox soon.

I actually have a much improved version with a ton more leaders that I should post. I'll try to get around to doing so.

Hey Lukasberger,

this mod looks great, just wondering if you ever got around to posting that update?

[Q-Kee]

Hi there, I'd love that one too, but the link above does not work anymore. Can I get it from somewhere? Or even the updated version, perhaps?

[Scipionminos]

Hello, do you have news about posting a link for the mod, the gamefront link does not work for me, thks

[Jim-NC]

welcome to the forums Scipionminos.

[lukasberger]

I haven't updated this in a while guys. Problem is that as I was adding more leaders, I ended up changing a lot of ids, not realizing that the game uses the ids to assign leaders in the scenarios. I thought it only used the aliases.

So though I have a lot more leaders now, there are issues with the scenarios and each of them needs to be re-compiled before they can be used with the mod. Once I realized this it greatly discouraged me given the extra amount of work involved in getting this useable now, and I haven't really done anything with the mod since.

I may take a look a trying to get a usable version out at some point, since there still seems to be some interest, but can't make any promises on that as I'm really, really busy right now.

[Scipionminos]

welcome to the forums Scipionminos.

Hello Jim,

Thks for the welcome, by the way did you happen to have downloaded this mod, because the link says files says it is not there and even after searching through the web with this title or on gamefront sill no mod to be seen somewhere, if anybody would be so kind to post the file in 7zip or rar to be able to download it I thank him/her in advance. And I do hope to see a new update one of these day.

In a different matter would you be so kind as to propose me a mod that I should download, Thank you.

[Jim-NC]

No, I don't have the mod. Someone else may have downloaded it, and have it somewhere.

The only other mods I know of were created by Kensai. He has one for Austria taking over Prussia, and I believe one for Japan. There are several scripts written to correct broken chains (for example, Loki100's script for Italian unification, or Christophe.Barot and his later year corrections). But no other mods. Hope this helps.

[lukasberger]

I haven't updated this in a while guys. Problem is that as I was adding more leaders, I ended up changing a lot of ids, not realizing that the game uses the ids to assign leaders in the scenarios. I thought it only used the aliases.

So though I have a lot more leaders now, there are issues with the scenarios and each of them needs to be re-compiled before they can be used with the mod. Once I realized this it greatly discouraged me given the extra amount of work involved in getting this useable now, and I haven't really done anything with the mod since.

I may take a look a trying to get a usable version out at some point, since there still seems to be some interest, but can't make any promises on that as I'm really, really busy right now.

Just happened around here again.

Obviously it's not looking good for my getting this posted again. I totally lack the time to do the work needed to make this playable. If anyone wants to try to do so themselves, I would be happy to post my db files with all the added leaders as well as the graphics for all the new leaders and those missing pics. I think I have around 400-500 new and modified pics and around 500-1000 new leaders. So let me know if you want the raw files and I'll post them here. Be warned, you'll have to do a LOT of work to get them playable, as there may be a few (not many, already fixed 99% of the issues myself) errors to fix and all scenarios will need to be re-complied.

I may be able to help a tiny bit with some of that, but you'd mostly be on your own. That being said, if you can do the work to get this playable, I'd be willing to keep working on adding new leaders and pics as I have the time. It's just the mess of getting them working in game with AGEOD's overly complex files structure that I don't have the patience or time to work with.

[Svidrir_Idol]

Mod abandoned? The download link is dead.