General nation mod advice? (and specific nation idea)

[Belac]

I've never created a mod of any kind, and I'm not sure how to go about creating new units or any of the other stuff that goes into a nation. I read through the tools and tutorials link but am still confused about what I would need to know/download. Any advice would be appreciated.

My specific idea is for an Arab/Turkish/Muslim-flavor nation (call it Hajis). Any more details to flesh out the idea would be appreciated as well. What I have so far:

EA Hajis would be tribally-focused, with horse archers, elemental mages, and cultural influences from Caelum(Persia), C'tis(Egypt), and Ermor(Rome).

MA Hajis would be based on the Egyptian Mamelukes and other Crusades-era stuff, and would have good assassins.

LA Hajis would be based more on the Ottoman Empire, with Janissaries as a sacred, cap-only unit, some commanders with Sailing, and siege bonuses.

[elmokki]

1. Download the sprite dump to get sprites to edit for your units. Al-Nadim basic troops are iirc Hinnom or Gath humans with some recolouring and a scimitar from some c'tissian unit, while horse cavalry uses some Sauromatian cavalry's horse and feet and camel cavalry's camels are resized and heavily smoothened wasteland survival icons. There is absolutely no completely original sprite in the mod. All the djinns and some priests are edited from units from Burnsaber's Holy War mod, the ghul is a combination of EA Arcoscephale Oreiad and a werewolf and the dervish is a combination of a indy priest, oreiad's feet and scimitars.
2. Download GIMP for saving your sprites to .tga. Paint works fine for editing, but might as well use GIMP for it too to not have to have to use two programs.
3. Download some other nation mod and look from it how crap is done
4. Combine and edit a ton of sprites to make your units. Be creative.
5. Compile all of it to a nation file made by copying and modifying stuff from a nation mod you downloaded on step 3!

That got me far enough to make a nation mod. Beware though, there's a lot of tedious work ahead with sprite editing

EDIT: Feel free to use my sprites or parts of them as long as you mention me in the credits.

[Rysan Marquise]

Sprite editing gets far easier after you have made a dozen of them.

I recommend you read the modding pdf in your dominions directory, and down the proton app which you can find referenced on the guide list. The text highlighting is handy, you won't need to look up which abbreviations are used for most things.

[Gandalf Parker]

You might take a glance at TinyNation.dm on my site
http://www.dom3minions.com/mods.htm
which isnt very playable but it does create a nation and tries to explain each command. It should at least convince you that creating a nation is easy.

Then grab a more complete nation (Sombre's might be the most extensive unless someone suggests another). It might be daunting t grab his right off the bat.

The modding manual is in your games /doc/ directory. Something like this?
file://C:\Program Files\dominions3\doc\modding.pdf

If you make new units there are two sprites. Basically one standing, and one when it does its attack. Usually all you need to work on is the standing one. The attacking one can be a cut-n-paste where you move one arm, or add some glowing dots above its head. They need to be .tga files so you might need a program to convert the images after you edit them if your paint program doesnt allow "save as" in tga. I recommend always saving in the native format of the paint program, then saving one as tga since the tga copy can lose some data that makes it easier to make changes later.

One of the hardest things seems to be packaging the final product. Many modders first efforts seem to have trouble creating a compressed file that unpacks in a standard structure. IMHO it is best to create a file which can be copied to the /mods/ directory then unzipped to create a single .dm file and a single directory named after the mod with all the other files in it. Some end up in multiple subdirectories or even no directory at all which is confusing to new players.

[Sombre]

When I started modding I sat down with the mod manual and a load of sprites and just started a-typing. I didn't use anyone's mod as a base or follow any guides or ask any questions until I'd actually finished the first version. Honestly I think this worked out fine because I understood what the mod commands did individually and it gave me a good base to work from.

A nice exercise might be to try and recreate a vanilla nation (let's say EA Ermor) from scratch in a new nation slot with all new IDs for everything WITHOUT using copyspr or copystats. That would give you an excellent base to make future mods from. For this all you'd need is the sprite dump, a text editor (like notepad) and the modding manual pdf.