Modding Region Attributes and Elements

This week I had a bunch of extra time and ended up doing a lot of work on the mod support front for biomes. The attached images are a preview of what can be done with them. Though with this particular mod I didn't do much other than alter the colors assignments for each biome on the biomes.json file. On a later devlog, I'll try to showcase a more involved biome edit and the mod data used for it.

Aside from modding biomes, it is now possible to also mod region attributes and elements. Region attributes are sets of qualifiers that are assigned to a region depending on its intrinsic characteristics. For example, a region that is mostly composed of forest cells will have the attribute 'forest' attached to it. A region that is mostly surrounded by water will be given the 'peninsula' attribute, and so on. Elements on the other hand are stuff that are likely to be found on a specific region. So a desert region will have the elements 'sand' and 'sun' associated with it, but not the elements 'rain' nor 'grass'. A rainforest region will have 'rain', 'trees' and 'wood'. 'highland' regions will have 'rocks', 'sky', etc.

Region attributes and elements are used by the simulation for the most part to name things. That's how the game assign polities names like "People of the Sands", or leaders names like "Born near The Forest", etc. Both region attributes and elements are highly dependent on biomes. And that's the reason I felt it was necessary to allow these two things to be modded along with biomes. Adding, removing, or altering biomes by themselves can potentially break the game.

So, all in all, the work with biome modding is basically done (the roadmap has been updated). Next, I want to add a framework to be able to load more than one mod at once. Otherwise the only way people would be able to mod the game would be to modify the base files. The other thing I want to do is to be able to associate mods with saves. This way it will be possible to load save files that were created with different mods than the ones loaded in the current session. Both these changes will also require to make some UI changes. I don't want to force players deal with configuration files every time they want to activate or deactivate different mods.

I don't think I'll get to do all the things I mentioned above next weekend but I hope I won't have to spend more than a couple of weekends on it. I really want to move on and start working on event modding, which, alongside decision modding, is going to be the real meat for this release.