I am making a mod with my friends (we treat it as a free dlc in scope) that introduces new civs, types of units, mechanics and other things to the game. It’s slowly making progress but soon enough it will be uploaded with changes to the British, Germans, French, Spanish, Russians and Portuguese, aswell as three new civs - HANOVERIANS, BAVARIANS AND SAXONS, with more changes and civs to come later on.
There are bugs and balancing is still being sorted out, but what i truly need is help with skins. I barely have time to code the mod and it’s killing me that i both can’t and don’t know how to make skins. I am making a big ask here, but is there anyone in the community that knows how to work with skins and could maybe create some (a lot) of skins and variants for me?
It’s not in the scope of mods like historical skins where EVERY upgrade has a different skin, but i sorely need skins for some RG upgrades and special units, and i don’t want to ape other people’s mods without permission, although in private tests i’m using some borrowed skins as placeholders.
Again, I don’t have the money to pay, so this would have to be a passion thing. Is there anyone there that can help me?
I am unfortunately unable to help with skins, but if you need any inspiration for units in a historical kind of way (e.g. what special units they would have had etc.) just message me!
First of all, paying for anything when it comes to mods seems quite strange to me. Unless ofc, if you’re willing to pay for someone’s time. Generally speaking, everyone does it for free and as a hobby (as you probably know). Especially when someone’s work takes inspiration from someone or is “inspired" by someone else’s work, and it is difficult to separate the two, which leads to conflicts.
^Thoughts from a low-level modder for 50 cents ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Secondly, in my experience, it’s best to rely on your own experience and learn on your own, repeating and developing the process from other modders. There are plenty of mods in DE that address this topic, so it seems like there are two approaches:
Creating textures and replace/add
Modifying existing textures and objects using code, but without having to add custom textures. At least not at the beginning of your project. Abstract Mod solves this issue very well, combining old with new (I like the Bavarian civ., though it’s a pity it doesn’t update with each era).
In both cases, the results can be very satisfying. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about this, so I’m not touching this for now. It’s good to asking @SealingEar046 how he does it, bcs he does an a w e s o m e job (sorry for ping). My experience in this topic are based of my small modz like the Oprchniks, the falconet and a few unreleased variants.
My respond probably won’t contribute much, but I really wanted to say something and support any project as enthusiastic as yours.