A Treatise On Custom Banners

[Charles Edward Stuart]

A Treatise On Custom Banners

By Ove Gjedde Charles Edward Stuart

( [KOS] Kingdom of Scotland | https://bank.carrd.co/ )

 

There's a fair chance that you will by now have seen images where a player has a flag on their ship that is not the flag of their nation. This is because of a client-side modification to the game that in no way affects gameplay. Other players cannot see your flag unless they are using the same modification as you. One of the perks to Naval Action being entirely hosted and calculated on a server (down to the water and waves) is that it largely, if not completely, eliminates client cheating. Because of that, rules regarding what's done client-side are more lax, as it cannot affect other players.

Here's how to change your flag.

 

Things you will need:

• Naval Action.
• An image editing program. (This guide uses paint.net, which you can find here. )
• A Unity explorer. (This guide uses UnityEX, which is harder to find. Any Unity explorer will work.)
• Time and patience.

Step One:
Open your archive explorer and navigate to your Steam directory,
and from there to \steamapps\common\Naval Action\Client_Data\. Make a copy of "sharedassets0.assets" and throw it somewhere you can find it if you want to undo your customizations.

Open "sharedassets0.assets".

 

 

Step Two:

Find your nation in the list, and Export it as a .dds file. UnityEX does this automatically with the "Export with convert" option. This author suggests sorting the archive by Name to save time. (Nation flag filenames will be provided at the end of this guide.)

Having exported the national flag, we now need to navigate to the raw .dds texture and make the edits we desire.

I don't like the Danish flag very much in its original state, so we're going to improve upon it.

Discontinuity warning.
I'm not going to go into how to use an image editor, as I suspect people who have gotten this far know how to use one. But a few decent tips I have are: Do not stray from the resolution used by the game, or your flag will get cut off; and everything past pixel 422 on the x axis will be disregarded. Try not to forget to add a texture to your flag. Simply searching "Transparent flag texture" on Google will typically get you a good selection to pick from. Once you're done creating or choosing your custom flag, proceed to Step Three below.
 

Step Three:

Having now made the edits I desire, we need to get the file back into the Unity archive as a .tex file again.

Assuming we left the flag with the same name in the folder it was exported to, we can just hit "Import all files" in UnityEX and launch the game. Done.
 Please note, again, only you (and players with the same modification) can see your custom national flag. It will appear on all ships that are of your nation, or join a battle on your nation's team. 

Index of file names:
France - flag_0006_Fr.tex
Espana - flag_0005_Sp_00001.tex OR flag_0005_Sp.tex
Pirates - flag_0011_Pirate.tex
Great Britain - flag_0003_UK_white.tex
VP - flag_0010_Dutch.tex
Denmark - flag_0009_Denmrk.tex
Sverige - flag_0007_Sweden.tex
USA - flag_0001_US_v2.tex
Russia - russian_empire.tex
Prussia - prussia.tex
Poland - polish.tex
Neutral - flag_9999_NoTeam.tex

If you have questions about this guide, or anything else, please contact me either through the forums, in-game, or on Discord at:

Charles Edward Stuart#5482

 

 

And please like if this helped you.
Shameless self promotion is my thing.

Edited August 28, 2018 by Charles Edward Stuart

[VirtuallyIdiotic]

[Guest]

Are you able to change any of the flags on the fore mast or main mast as well? and what about sails, have you tried to change skin on those?

Edited July 26, 2018 by Guest

[Charles Edward Stuart]

16 minutes ago, Wyy said:

Are you able to change any of the flags on the fore mast or main mast as well? and what about sails, have you tried to change skin on those?

I'm currently under the impression that all the nations share the same generic signal flags, so while it might be possible to change them there would be no way of guaranteeing they appear on one ship or another, etc. But it's possible to change them, yes. | Sails are all using the same generic texture, so I don't think they can be made national edits, but it is probably possible to change some things on them using the same method.

Edited July 26, 2018 by Ove Gjedde

[3rdguards]

Excellent guide to performing the process, thanks for sharing o7

[NethrosDefectus]

On 7/26/2018 at 1:22 AM, Wyy said:

Are you able to change any of the flags on the fore mast or main mast as well? and what about sails, have you tried to change skin on those?

I think that would be somewhat more difficult as those ones are randomly chosen each battle I believe. And are different for each client

 

@Ove Gjedde I assume if I change my British flag to something then I would see ALL British ships with the same flag?

[Charles Edward Stuart]

1 minute ago, NethrosDefectus said:

@Ove Gjedde I assume if I change my British flag to something then I would see ALL British ships with the same flag?

That is correct. I suggest keeping a backup of the original file on-hand, so that they can be easily swapped out when you don't want to see your countrymen with the same flag.

[Wilhelm von Seydlitz]

Thank you @Ove Gjedde  for the good guide 👍

[Hethwill, the Red Duke]

[StaleMemes]

I suppose if one finds them self in messy brawls frequently they might want to change friendly flags to hunting orange or something similar to make it easier to avoid friendly fire and coordinate.

[Havelock]

Nice guide, the hard part was actually editing the image in gimp... used a flag texture and a linen texture on top to give it a fabric-like realistic look. Pretty!

Edited August 20, 2018 by Havelock

[Charles Edward Stuart]

Anyone who has requests can message them to me. I've got spare time.

[Wilhelm von Seydlitz]

Deine Anleitung funktioniert super, danke nochmal. 👍
Ich muss nur noch etwas mit der Transparente Flaggenstruktur experimentieren. 🙂

 

Your instructions are working great, thanks again.
All I have to do is experiment with the transparent flag structure

[Havelock]

9 hours ago, Ove Gjedde said:

Anyone who has requests can message them to me. I've got spare time.

I was wondering... how deep did you dive into those files? What else could be modded?

[Charles Edward Stuart]

8 hours ago, Havelock said:

I was wondering... how deep did you dive into those files? What else could be modded?

Anything that displays in the game as a client-side object can largely be modded. This game's unity is extremely open. I don't imagine it would cause any problems since this game is entirely run on the server-side and the only thing players can mod are what appears to them, and them only. Flags, banners, sails, paints, etc. | Textures for walls, items, crew, etc.

[Cetric de Cornusiac]

Nice. Now if only we could have individual flags just showing on our ship while allied ships have the standard one...

I am flying now the royal french colors as posted here:

 

[Hethwill, the Red Duke]

Individual player owned flags is planned.  

[Charles Edward Stuart]

I take credit for this.

Edited August 28, 2018 by Charles Edward Stuart

[jpjchris]

11 hours ago, Hethwill the Harmless said:

Individual player owned flags is planned.  

Three cheers! Huzzah! 

.....any word on timeline?

[Hethwill, the Red Duke]

admin posted it somewhere about that idea and development. 

[Christoph]

[Tomasso il Fortunato]

For UnityEX go here : https://yadi.sk/d/m3vFWoQ3j62Cr

[OjK]

Anyone know where are the DLC flags located?
Cause I'd like to swap one of those not the default one...

[Hethwill, the Red Duke]

45 minutes ago, OjK said:

Anyone know where are the DLC flags located?
Cause I'd like to swap one of those not the default one...

Can't do it afaik. Will be flat grey. Several fellows tried it already with zero success.

Which makes sense... if you think about it.

[Marquês do Bonfim]

Is this method still available for the default flags in-game?