Attention: With the release of Piratez version .99A, Dioxine has integrated an excellent set of commendations into the main mod. As such, I have dropped support of this mod. If others want to work with it, they are free do so! Thanks! - Ivan :D
(In order to move to the new integrated commendations mod, you must clear out previous medals.
1. Enter debug mode in Geoscape. - CTRL-D
2. Clear medals - CTRL-C
Alternately you can remove all soldier diaries: CTRL -A
3. Leave debug mode: CTRL-D)
With the new inclusion of Soldier's Diaries in Meridian's latest build (https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,4187.0.html) (Jul 05, 2016) we are now at the point we can seriously consider/work on a Commendations Mod for Piratez.
There has been some initial work done by DracoGriffin as well as some brainstorming in the main Soldier Diaries thread.
I'll try to capture those items here to continue the discussions.
Where we are with Commendations:
- Shoes maintains a main Commendations (Soldiers Diaries) Thread Here (https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,1718.0.html):
- most of the latter pages of the thread are bug fixes/reports here or there.
- Commendations was written for Vanilla XCOM UFO, and as such features only those races/ranks/weapons/damagetypes in criteria, etc.
- The medals displayed after a mission are small ribbon graphics, that may get small stars, etc to indicate further awards
- DracoGriffin has done an initial re-write of names of ribbons and descriptions to be more Piratey. (https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,3626.msg56043.html#msg56043)
- Ufopaedia entries for the medals are were written for vanilla, as are the graphics for the medals themselves. (All the entries would need to be reworked, as would many of the graphics. At this point I have completed rewriting the Ufopedia text entries for the medals but the graphics are from vanilla.)
Discussions:
Replacing the vanilla ribbons with more piratey bling, eg, tattoos, or jewelry pieces.
- This would most likely require re-coding how the graphics are displayed, and would need Meridian or Shoes, or some other willing soul to lend a hand.
I would recommend a hard look at the amount of awards with an eye to reducing bloat.
Also: Is this Commendations integration something that Dioxine wants to handle without collaboration? Obviously, anyone can make their own mod for XPirateZ, as I did with the initial Ufopedia mod for Commendations back in the day. But if Dioxine wants direct control over this, then maybe it makes sense to only provide support where he'd desire it.
Spoilered below: Brainstorming from the Commendations Thread
Arthanor:
I think coming up with medals will be easy. It's not coming up with too many medals which will be hard ;)
It's true that making proper award graphics for everything will be quite a lot of work though.. But since pirates don't do medals, maybe there can be something easier. Like the Iconoclast award (for killing 1 of every church rank? Or X number of church people?) could just be a picture of a smashed up church, or, as a placeholder, just show the corpse of a church cardinal. This way, Dioxine's ability to find awesome pics can come to the rescue, instead of finely crafting military style medals.
Anyhow.. we should sulk back into our Piratez subforum for that topic ;)
jgatkinsn
Come on... tattoos...tattoos!
Arthanor:
Yeah, that would work too! And make it not too bad to implement: same background (skin, maybe 2-3 tones variations at most) for everything, then draw something on top (for people who are good at that drawing thing!)
I'm attaching a version of Draco's .zip, with a couple bug fixes, a bit of annotation, and some languages removed (all but En-US, the official XPirateZ lang).
Edit: updated the package with fixes to get it to work with PirateZ as master.
Edit 2: Adding new revamped mod package. "Piratez Commendations.zip" (use instead of Piratez_Trophies.zip, not both)