Ready for beta-test

 Hello all,

I know, it's been too long since I last updated you about the progress of my work. There are several reasons, why I could not post earlier. I really hope that the results I can present you now were worth the waiting :)

I am ready to start beta-testing now and already contacted a few testers to see, how the new models play with the old engine on different machines. My goal is to prevent sending something out to you, that would only cause crashing or look ugly under special circumstances.

As a short teaser, take a look at the palace I am currently working on. Don't the banners fit in nicely?

By now, the townhouses, the common shops, the courtyard, the cult-temple and many other buildings have been partly or completely overhauled. I will continue as long as it makes fun and at the moment, I don't see a reason to stop :)

Stay tuned for the results of the beta-test. If you are willing to participate in testing, leave a comment.

Best Regards

Horus

Time for some updates

 Hello all,

work is making good progress on many sides, as I had to give up the approach to just focus on the townhouses. They are all done by now, but as I had to make some changes to the dbcopgraphics.db, I can't upload them as separate files. Instead, I have to make one project again, like I did with the H.T.O.P.

This is because I made every townhouse use it's own set of textures, to achieve much more diversity. Same goes for all the shops, that I was working on. They look great yet, but I am not finished with them, so you have to be patient a little bit longer, until I will upload an alpha-version of my current work :)

To give you some impressions of my work so far, here are some pictures:

The townhouses:

The Shops:

The bakery:

All screenshots were taken with the reshade-profile, that I created for COTN. It gives the game a much more modern and satisfying look, if you're asking me.

Here, for a quick comparison:

reshade on

reshade off

Once I find the time, I will upload my profile here under the post processing section.

I hope, you like what I have done so far and stay tuned for the next update :)

Best Regards

Horus

News, news, news!

 Hello all,

I know, it's been a very long time since I last posted here and to be honest, I actually gave up modding children of the Nile in the last few years, because of various reason. For a long time, I felt that this blog was more like an archive then something that would ever be filled with new content. But then, things have changed...

As you can guess by the title of this post, I have some very interesting news and I am very happy to finally start blogging here again about all my recent success in modding the hell out of this old game!

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First, I got my passion for modding back! I recently spend lots of hours investigating new ways of modding things, that seemed impossible in the past. Overall, I am yet very happy with what I found out and I am able to show you some examples here during the next few weeks, starting today.😀

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Second, thanks to the people who still mod Empire Earth today (CotN is build on the same engine), it is now possible to edit models like buildings and change the way they look or how textures apply to them in a much easier way. This works using an import/export addon in Blender and it works like a charm! I always wanted to edit models back in the days when I was working on the H.T.O.P and now it is finally possible without lots of effort and some complex tools.

I will write a short summary on how to do this and what tools you need here on this blog in the future.

Here you can see some examples:

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Third, I was literally able to find my personal holy grail of CotN modding: editing those nasty dat.files, that store the game's core mechanics. Yes, it is possible and I know how to. For all of you that searched the internet like me, desperately trying to find a way to get some insight on those gibberish files, trial and error is the key.

As far as I know, by now there are only two mods changing dat files. One is the prestige-level mod and one is the walker speed mod. I am pretty sure, that both authors did it just like me and spend a lot of time trying to find out what value they needed to change.

During the last few weeks, I got some insight into reading the hex-values inside some of the dat files and did successfully achieve the following:

- changing brick buildings costs for a lot of buildings 

- changing building costs for monuments and adding new costs, like food in addition to existing materials (late game difficulty can be raised 💪 )

- changing costs for palace enhancements

- changing the number of farm houses supported by palace and nobles

I am still at the beginning of modding and it is a very time consuming process. What I could find out by now will be posted here on this blog and also on Children of the Nile heaven.

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Fourth, to spice up the visual quality of the game, I experimented with the latest reshade build and found it to be a very powerful tool to make the Children of the Nile look much better. I will add some information about this on the post processing page here on this blog.

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So whats next?

To ensure that I don't lose motivation once again and to make sure that I can provide results from time to time, I decided to split modding into several smaller projects. The H.T.O.P was one big approach, now I will try to improve the game's building-models in smaller steps, starting with the

Townhouse-Project

There are many aspects that can be improved, starting with ugly pottery and ending with adding some decorative clutter to make sure, that these buildings better resemble the wealth and luxury of the ancient Egyptian upper class.

New screenshots of my work and hopefully some downloads for all, that still pass by here from time to time, will come very soon.

Stay tuned!

Best Regards

Horus