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modding stellaris is hard
Dec. 30th, 2018 07:32 amHaving completed my first playthrough (the Prethoryn Scourge is no more, and the galaxy is in stasis until I care to return to it and deal with the Awakened Empire who got mad at my fleet being bigger than theirs), I have turned to something I told myself I wasn't allowed to do until I'd proven I could complete at least one full playthrough from beginning to win year: making a custom species portrait mod.
It seemed a simple enough project. The aliens I want to play as in Stellaris are so humanoid as to be described by their creator as "not even [having] ridgy foreheads". Their only visible difference from humans is anime-bright hair that comes primarily in seven different shades. So incredibly Star Trek alieny. Simple, right? All I have to do is recolor the human hair styles into the seven primary colors of Amentans [see here], do some fussing with what looks like simple text files, and I'm done, right? Sure, it'll be harder than modding Dwarf Fortress, but probably every game is harder to mod than Dwarf Fortress.
Yyyyyeah. There doesn't seem to be any provision for static-but-customizable portraits, and animated portraits require fucking around with Autodesk Maya 2018. I can't even pick apart the vanilla files for the animations and meshes, because they're .anim and .mesh files that one can create from Maya projects using an exporter the Paradox people working on Stellaris have provided for modders. I did download Maya because there's a 30-day free trial, but I'm sure it's nothing so nice as Scrivener's nonconsecutive 30-day trial and so I'd best be brisk about this.
But I don't know how to start!!! I've only been up 10 hours, but this whole thing makes me tired. I could maybe cobble something together by guess-and-check, but I'm definitely too tired for that. Probably I just need to take a break on account of I've been recoloring hair for.... uh.... off and on for 7 hours, more on than off but probably at least 5 hours total of work. (-checks- I'm 3hr 25min into Magic Steps, and I know I spent some time at the start not listening to anything and probably half an hour's worth of Youtube videos on top, so 5 hours sounds about right.)
Ok, since I've seen it said that people can really only do (office?) work for about 4 hours a day I'm gonna lie down on top of the cat on my bed, and when I'm rested see how far if any distance at all I can get by fucking around with the .txt and Notepad++-readable files. Since I copied them all from the vanilla Stellaris files it'll be fine if I totally destroy something when I try to load the mod. Worst case is I corrupt my version of Stellaris somehow and have to reinstall it, which, 1, seems incredibly unlikely and most likely actual worst-case is I cause a CTD, and 2, would only be somewhat inconvenient.
It seemed a simple enough project. The aliens I want to play as in Stellaris are so humanoid as to be described by their creator as "not even [having] ridgy foreheads". Their only visible difference from humans is anime-bright hair that comes primarily in seven different shades. So incredibly Star Trek alieny. Simple, right? All I have to do is recolor the human hair styles into the seven primary colors of Amentans [see here], do some fussing with what looks like simple text files, and I'm done, right? Sure, it'll be harder than modding Dwarf Fortress, but probably every game is harder to mod than Dwarf Fortress.
Yyyyyeah. There doesn't seem to be any provision for static-but-customizable portraits, and animated portraits require fucking around with Autodesk Maya 2018. I can't even pick apart the vanilla files for the animations and meshes, because they're .anim and .mesh files that one can create from Maya projects using an exporter the Paradox people working on Stellaris have provided for modders. I did download Maya because there's a 30-day free trial, but I'm sure it's nothing so nice as Scrivener's nonconsecutive 30-day trial and so I'd best be brisk about this.
But I don't know how to start!!! I've only been up 10 hours, but this whole thing makes me tired. I could maybe cobble something together by guess-and-check, but I'm definitely too tired for that. Probably I just need to take a break on account of I've been recoloring hair for.... uh.... off and on for 7 hours, more on than off but probably at least 5 hours total of work. (-checks- I'm 3hr 25min into Magic Steps, and I know I spent some time at the start not listening to anything and probably half an hour's worth of Youtube videos on top, so 5 hours sounds about right.)
Ok, since I've seen it said that people can really only do (office?) work for about 4 hours a day I'm gonna lie down on top of the cat on my bed, and when I'm rested see how far if any distance at all I can get by fucking around with the .txt and Notepad++-readable files. Since I copied them all from the vanilla Stellaris files it'll be fine if I totally destroy something when I try to load the mod. Worst case is I corrupt my version of Stellaris somehow and have to reinstall it, which, 1, seems incredibly unlikely and most likely actual worst-case is I cause a CTD, and 2, would only be somewhat inconvenient.
