country.xml / qclocations mismatch in ETO?

[Daiwilletti]

I've just been tinkering in ETO, and something strikes me as odd.

In the global_layer.csv, there is a column where the "country" of the facility can be specified. I notice that a number of global layers use "Great Britain" for the country.

But in the country.xml, there is no such country as "Great Britain". Instead, "Britain" is used. Similarly, in the campaign.xml and the pilotconstants and the unlimited pilots xml files, the country is referred to as "Britain".

Yet going into the qclocations.xml, again the country "Great Britain" is used.

It seems to me that this inconsistency does not affect the game play in any way. It could be that the country reference in the qclocations file, only affects some of the fields in the User Interface of the game. Yet in the country.xml the names are very important as they affect things like the spawning nations, and need to match the campaign xml file names used for countries.

Has anyone encountered this inconsistency? As I say, so far I haven't noticed a problem, but am about to try using the same country names in all the files, to see what happens.

D

 

[Pat Pattle]

I think David that the country entry in the global layer is for information only, the qclocation entry is the important one.
The country.xml file I'm not so sure about, I always thought that 'Great Britain' was the correct term in the sim. Would be interesting to see what, if any, difference your changes make.

 

[Daiwilletti]

I think David that the country entry in the global layer is for information only, the qclocation entry is the important one.
The country.xml file I'm not so sure about, I always thought that 'Great Britain' was the correct term in the sim. Would be interesting to see what, if any, difference your changes make.

Thanks, Clive. It's a good question as to what entries/columns in the global layer are effective. You're probably right about the "country" column. I wonder if the "Spawns" column is active? I seem to remember Charlie played around with putting things like "air_def" spawns into the relevant column of the global_layer, for all the airfields. But when I've tried it, I think I get better results from putting in the spawn as a flag, directly into the airbase facility file.

But I haven't tried it for a while, must check on that sometime.

As for the qclocations entry, one possibility is that the reference to the "country" in that file simply is a reference utilised by the User Interface in the locations screen of the UI in QC mode.

AFAIK qclocations does not influence anything in the campaign, for example. So that inconsistency in the country name may not make any difference.

NBB, after some testing, I've found that I'm getting RANDOM allied nations as ground spawns in ETO in QC mode. Ground spawns are influenced by the country.xml, so its a bit of a long shot, but possibly changing all the global_layer references to "Britain" have enabled all the facilities in the global layer to be assigned to random Allied/Axis nations, depending on the context. This is in QC mode only so far, have not seen this in other modes.

Countries I've encountered whilst flying a German aircraft in QC mode include New Zealand, Australian, British and French invasion defenses along the coast!! (NB the reason why I know which nation "owns" the facility is that I've added a #flag entry on top of one of the bunkers, so I just check the flagpole in target-player view as I fly past).

However I do have a modded country.xml, so I don't know at this stage what the primary influence is - global_layer or country.xml?

David

 

[Daiwilletti]

Just to add to the mystery - about that New Zealand flag.

Of course I am pretty familiar with the flag so am sure it is what I saw fluttering above an invasion defense but.....When looking through my ETO files, I cannot for the life of me find any mention of New Zealand!!?? So how on earth is the game finding and picking up the flag???? Its not in the expected places in UIres folder, or even mentioned in the country.xml file.

I'm worried there is some wierd cross-pollination going on. One thing that has happened in the past is that desktop shortcuts get corrupted. This can cause hours of confusion as every time you run the config file for one install, you are actually changing it for something else. My desktop bdp zappers shortcuts are a case in point. That has slowed down problem solving enormously in the past. But this time, I am sure that the shortcuts are all pointing in the right direftion, to the ETO 1.4 install.

Hence the deepening mystery about how the hell a NZ flag can appear on a facility in ETO???? As far as I can find, there are no NZ flags in ETO. Unless (sudden thought ) there is a texture hidden away in a building file.

But again the main thing is that I am getting random allied flags over ground-based facilities, when flying a German aircraft in QC. Thats pretty interesting in itself. And it could be related to getting consistency in the use of "Britain" in all references to countries, removing the "Great Britain" entry.

Must pop open another bottle of Pinot and ponder it some more.. :isadizzy:

 

[Daiwilletti]

Just a quick update on the ground facilities spawning as random allied nations. I tracked down a nzl_flag which seems to be a defunct artifact in the ETO 1.40 install (there are no NZL vehicles or aircraft or ships in ETO). Its in the building folder as I suspected. Hence whatever is triggering the random selection of allied ground spawn representatives is picking up on the flag which is wierd.

As for what I did when tweaking the various files to get rid of "Great Britain" references and change to the nomenclature of the country.xml - ie. "Britain", - I've no idea!

One guess is that I saw there was a mismatch in the nations listed in the nek_eto.xml in the campaign folder, and the nations represented in the vehicles folder, compared with the nations mentioned in the pilotconstants.xml, the nations listed in the uires and the country.xml.

I tweaked them all rapidly, trying to get a consistent set of countries. Of course one must take care, because if there are no vehicles or other elements representing a country called forelsewhere, this puts a spanner in the works for ground/frontline spawns requiring those elements for facility files. What I found in low fly passes over some frontline facilities, was that the flag was flying over them identifying a country, but vehicles were missing.

But because of the speed at which I did the edits it is hard to track down what achieved the unusual feature of creating random spawns for an alliance (ie. Allied or Axis ground spawns). But its a very interesting feature, there must be some way of exploiting it!

FOR EXAMPLE instead of having a long lot of complex spawn files, it might be possible to simply run a batch file swapping over country.xml files, to control a single standardised set of spawns utilising #enemy and # friendly elements. This would reduce complexity. Hence for say the Battle of France, either the country.xml could make the spawning nations France and Germany, and in campaign play you could select English, Polish or Belgian or whatever you want, or if the random spawning feature could be identified it would be possible to get a list of allied participants in BoF and have the ground and frontline spawns become a random mix from the participating nations.

Anyyway enough rambling - there's probably only a very narrow audience out there interested in this sort of stuff.

 

[gecko]

The country.xml and the global_layer/qcloactions are completely unrelated and won't mess anything up. Changing the global_layer/qcloactions references will likely do no harm, but don't try to change the country.xml names - those get used everywhere and you'll likely have a big mess on your hands.

Spawning doesn't seem to be related to the above, though I believe the first allied country and the first axis country listed in the country.xml are the ones selected for spawning nationalities unless explicitly stated otherwise in the spawn file.