Rule the Waves 2 nations for Aurora C#

[thashepherd (OP)]

Now that Aurora C# has been released and is excellent, I figure the obvious next step is to start running Rule the Waves 2 to Aurora C# mega-campaigns. So I took some time this afternoon to put together enough portraits and flags to cover all of the nations and naval leaders in that game.

I discovered a hell of a lot about how Aurora works with pictures in the process, and I'd like to share that knowledge as well. Since most people reading this are probably die-hard Aurora fans like me, I'll dive into the lessons learned before talking about this pack's content.

Plan on seeing updates to this pack fairly soon. I'm especially interested in porting ship name lists.

Lessons Learned
Aurora's install directory contains 4 directories containing images:

• Flags
• Races
• ShipIcons
• StationIcons

I haven't played around with ship or station icons much yet, but I'd guess that they work similarly to the other two. Aurora is able to load .jpeg, .bmp, and .png files from all four folders. When creating and sharing new content, I recommend using the .png format.

Races
Racial portraits must be 215x175 pixels and I recommend that they be .png files. The player race's racial portrait can be changed at any time by clicking the 'Change Image' button in the Race Information window. Note that in 1.51 there's a small bug that causes the portrait in the left sidebar to not update until you close and re-open the Race Information window.

Racial portraits must be placed in a folder named Races. NPRs will randomly select portraits from files in the Races folder in Aurora's root directory, regardless of what they are named. A player can select a portrait from somewhere else as long as it is contained in a folder named Races.

Flags
It took me a while to figure out the correct dimensions for images in the Flags folder. The existing flags provided with Aurora have a variety of different dimensions. I looked up flags worldwide and it turns out that the dimensions of most flags are either 1:2 or 2:3. What I think happened is that Steve looked that up, split the difference, and used a 7:12 ratio. This means that just about any real-world flag you want to add to Aurora is going to be stretched unless you crop it yourself ahead of time. But - and this is the ingenious bit - only half as stretched as if he'd gone with 1:2 or 2:3. I have fantasies about convincing my PM at work to let me do cool stuff like that.

I recommend that flags be 515x300 pixel .png files, even though most of the existing images are .jpg files. Aurora will stretch any picture you provide to fit but I've found that 515x300 is a good balance of quality, size, and lack of distortion - it's near that 7:12 ratio.

Similarly to racial portraits, flags must be placed in a folder named Flags. NPRs will randomly select flags from files in the Flags folder in Aurora's root directory, regardless of what they are named. A player can select a flag from somewhere else as long as it is contained in a folder named Flags.

Naming
Use nice, human-readable filenames for your flags and racial portraits (and other custom content); that's what the player will see. If you use the folder structure I outline below you don't need to worry about using some sort of prefix or Hungarian notation so that you don't lose your custom stuff in the Flags folder. Aurora doesn't care about what you name your files at all; feel free to go wild with dashes and parenthesis. The screenshots below have crap naming in them. Don't name your stuff that way. It's late and I wanted to upload before sleeping.

Creating a coherent player race
When you're creating a world in Aurora it's helpful to tie a race's flag, portrait, ship, station, class names, and officer names together. NPRs pick their stuff at random, so we're really only talking about player and SM races here. But the way Aurora handles loading various images makes it possible to group all of those elements in a way that makes them easy to keep track of and share.

Here's what my Aurora install directory looks like with some of the nations from this nation pack:


All of my France stuff is tied together. I can zip that folder up and send it to someone and all of the different French portraits and flags and name lists will be included. I can leave the built-in Flags/Races folders alone or treat them as 'NPR-only' folders while working out of 'Custom Races'. And if I download new races that someone else has shared, I can just drop them into this directory without overwriting anything.

Content
Download

This pack contains around 98 new flags and 18 new portraits covering the RTW2 nations of Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It also includes a bit of an 'expansion pack' - kick off a new South American dreadnought race in space with flags for Argentina, Brazil, and Chile!

For most nations I was able to include relatively period-accurate national flags, naval ensigns, and a few ideological variations to reflect revolutions that may have occurred during your RTW2 campaign. Portraits chiefly include heads of state and the major admirals used by default when starting RTW2 campaigns.

I've got your basics covered:






Some period-accurate flag variations:


An expansion pack for kicking off a new South American Dreadnought Race in space:


And some ahistoric flags that pose interesting questions. Why is Germany's post office running their space program? What really happened in the Italo-Abyssinian War (and where has the Pope gone)? Does Japanese Greenland exist in the same canon as Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home? How did they lose the War of Malvinian Restoration that badly?


Enjoy 4 dual monarchy palet-swaps, identify the true Texan flag from three equally viable options, and many other vexillological questions when you download this pack! Suited for all 7 people who have played both extremely niche games.

[thashepherd (OP)]

I was incorrect. NPR generation appears to be tied to specific files named 'flag0001', etc (I have not tested whether or not extensions matter). Filenames are picked using an RNG so an NPR may decide to use flag0110.jpg whether or not that file happens to actually exist in the Flags folder.

[Jarhead0331]

I would have loved to see a RTW style ship designer in C#. I posted as much in the suggestion thread. Alas, we are still relegated to spreadsheets. :-(

[Froggiest1982]

I was incorrect. NPR generation appears to be tied to specific files named 'flag0001', etc (I have not tested whether or not extensions matter). Filenames are picked using an RNG so an NPR may decide to use flag0110.jpg whether or not that file happens to actually exist in the Flags folder.

I thought Steve said C# was graphic mod-friendly and the images just have to be there for Aurora to use them. I'll have to test it out.

[thashepherd (OP)]

I was incorrect. NPR generation appears to be tied to specific files named 'flag0001', etc (I have not tested whether or not extensions matter). Filenames are picked using an RNG so an NPR may decide to use flag0110.jpg whether or not that file happens to actually exist in the Flags folder.

I thought Steve said C# was graphic mod-friendly and the images just have to be there for Aurora to use them. I'll have to test it out.

It is! But there are still some nuances here. New game generation breaks if you remove existing images (you get error messages saying something akin to `flag0331.jpg not found`) which makes me think that there's still code tied to image naming, and caused me to suspect that new images wouldn't be used by NPRs.

For PC race images (i.e. images that you pick using the Windows file dialog, rather than images picked automatically for use by NPRs) you get more capability. Aurora will basically load any bmp/png/jpg you have (with some resolution restrictions depending on image type) as long as they're in a directory that's named the right way (again, with occasional exceptions).

My main goal playing with this stuff is to establish what sort of subfolders or other organizational mechanisms we have available in terms of tying together the portrait/ship/station/flag/class themes/system themes of a cohesive civilization.

[Steve Walmsley]

For each NPR the game will randomly pick a image from the appropriate sub-folder and store the name. If you remove an image used by an NPR, that would cause a problem.

[thashepherd (OP)]

For each NPR the game will randomly pick a image from the appropriate sub-folder and store the name. If you remove an image used by an NPR, that would cause a problem.

Thanks for the response, Steve! The behavior I saw

• Remove contents of Races and Flags, replacing them with a few images of my own (with assorted names)
• Launch Aurora (this obviously causes errors if you've removed the flag/racial portrait used by the default game - via trial and error I made sure that those specific flags/portraits needed by the races in that game were present)
• Create a new game configured to have an NPR or two
• Modal errors occur during new-game creation saying "flag0331.jpg is missing" or similar

Not sure if that indicates some legacy code in the NPR creation logic that expects a hardcoded filename, or what. I haven't tested to see if Aurora will generate an NPR using, say, flag_bra_integralist.png (but those error messages cause me to doubt it).

[AlStar]

For what it's worth, my testing (notably only with race portraits and space stations, not flags, but it shouldn't be any different) shows that NPRs will correctly grab any image, regardless of naming convention, as long as it's in the correct folder.

My only guess for why you're running into error messages is due to the game assuming that certain default files are in place (perhaps before it populates the fields with new, random images?) because you removed those files.