MichuMod: Custom Milestone & Award Icons

This is a continuation of Part 2.

Getting the custom Milestones and Awards to work in the game was the tricky part, now comes some fun. I designed custom icons for Utopia and Cimmeria referencing the artistic style of the icons that are already in the game. After some hours of tracing and getting ideas down in CorelDRAW, I came up with these: Utopia & Cimmeria Milestones

Utopia & Cimmeria Awards

I exported the icons in png format (with transparency) and wrote a little helper method to generate Unity Sprites from external files:

public static Sprite LoadSpriteFromFile(string filePath)
{
    if (!File.Exists(filePath))
    {
        MelonLogger.Error($"File not found at path: {filePath}");
        return null;
    }

    byte[] fileData = File.ReadAllBytes(filePath);

    Texture2D tex = new Texture2D(2, 2, TextureFormat.RGBA32, true);
    if (tex.LoadImage(fileData))
    {
        tex.filterMode = FilterMode.Bilinear;
        tex.mipMapBias = -0.1f;
        tex.wrapMode = TextureWrapMode.Clamp;
        tex.anisoLevel = 0;
        return Sprite.Create(tex, new Rect(0, 0, tex.width, tex.height), new Vector2(0.5f, 0.5f));
    }
    else
    {
        MelonLogger.Error($"Failed to load texture from file: {filePath}");
        return null;
    }
}

I had to play around with .filterMode, mipMapBias, and anisoLevel a bit until the custom icons were as sharp/blurry as the original ones.

Each returned Sprite was assigned to a TM_MilestoneDataInfo_UI or TM_AwardDataInfo_UI object and passed to the new TM_BoardDataSet ScriptableObject at runtime.

To make sure that everything displays correctly (Milestone title, description, and icon), I had to do some extra patching of UI related methods, such as UpdateRequirements, SetMilestoneTooltipInfo, and SetAwardTooltipInfo.

This is how the custom Milestones and Awards appear in the game: Custom Milestones & Awards in-game

There is still some UI related work to do:

1. Design and add icons for the rest of Milestones and Awards (Amazonis & Vastitas).
2. Design and add icons for the custom boards (like Hellas & Elysium when selecting them in the game creation menu).
3. Understand how tooltips work for named locations and make them work for the newly added volcanic areas.

Utopia & Cimmeria are 100% playable now.

In the next post I will probably explain how I added Energy as an available Bonus resource on Utopia and how I added new volcanic areas on Cimmeria, Amazonis, and Vastitas.

I will also record and share some gameplay to showcase the mod.