The Grand Exhibition – Luxury Window
Hello everyone, it has been a while. Due to the COVID pandemic and the recent DLC controversies I will spend the rest of 2021 making updates to the Grand/Great Exhibition. As a sneak-peek to what is to come, here is a newly improved event window, and a roadmap of what is to come.
- 100+ Event Picture update, July 2021.
- Quality Update & Artist Plaques, July/August 2021.
- Flavour Events Expanded – Wide Support, August/September 2021.
- M&T3.0 Submod, Soon™.
- Way of the Dodo ALPHA, as soon as I find a coder.
Further Updates ~ More Relevant Images + More Regional Flavour, throughout 2021/22.
One of the issues I encountered when creating content for the Way of the Dodo is that my descriptions are rather on the lengthy side. The result being that these long descriptions would then extend the event window to go out of bounds. The solution to this was either writing shorter descriptions, or fiddling around for hours trying to bodge a static description field and implementing a scroll bar, as shown here:
In theory, you could fit a whole book in there. Depending on whether you guys like this new look; I will have this event window will replace the standard vanilla event window. Let’s have a vote. If 85% of people vote Yes I’ll make it the standard. Otherwise I’ll keep it as a submod. Leave your vote here![www.strawpoll.me]
In the future I will make variants for lower resolutions. This event window should work for anyone who uses an Y resolution above 800 (e.g. 1280×800 or 1440×900), in the future I’ll update it also function for lower resolutions (1024×768 1366×768).
In my absence, Aethernum together with the people over at the Aetherial Clouds Discord[discord.gg] have reuploaded the mod, and that workshop page will remain its new home. The old page will stay up, but it won’t be updated past v1.28 anymore.
I would like to thank the people that helped keep the mod updated, you can find them in the credits at the bottom, they have kept it updated and even had it increase in size by a third. There is still an update in the works, and that one will go out before the overhaul so stay tuned.
As most of you have noticed: The quality of the event pictures is kind of all over the place. In the past, the people working on this project (mostly myself) have done a poor job at saving/formatting the images and thus they experienced a loss in quality. Also, in the beginning of the mod we were partial towards using ‘etchings’[en.wikipedia.org] as opposed to paintings, which didn’t help. The images turned out too sharp, overly saturated, and/or very noisy. 
One of the more common requests we received in the past was; "Where can I find the images that you’ve included in the mod? I just want to look at them.". We would always tell people that there was no such a place, as the images we found on the internet rarely had an title and artist attributed to them. Luckily, as of recent, reverse-image engines have improved and it’s now a lot easier to find the original of the paintings we have used, together with the title and artist attributed to them. In the future, we’ll make sure to include titles below the images so anyone can look them up. 
You can see the progress of the Quality update here in this excel sheet[docs.google.com]. There are around 3,000 images that have to be replaced. The current pace is around 100 images per day, so it will take roughly a month.
One area which we’re still undecided on is Japan. Japan had a genre of art called Ukiyo-e[en.wikipedia.org], which has a vast library of images. For the generic events Japan will likely still share some overlap with the rest of Asia in its event images, but we wonder if you’d like to see Ukiyo-e prints, like the ‘famous’ Great Wave of Kanagawa[en.wikipedia.org], included in future updates. Leave your vote here![www.strawpoll.me]
Due to the modular nature of the Expanded Mod Family, it is compatible with the Grand Exhibition and a lot of our users use both. Due to mods like Flavour Events Expanded already changing the checksum it is somehow easier to assign event pictures to said mods, per example:
Flavour Events Extended, due to their historical nature, are a lot easier to find images for. And, because UberEpicZach has helped out with keeping the Grand Exhibition mod updated it would only make sense to collaborate with them. I have always been partial to expanding support for other mods as opposed to adding images to events that are locked behind a DLC-paywall.
While version 3.0 still hasn’t been publically released as it’s still currently in closed alpha (sign up here[forum.paradoxplaza.com]), there is a M&T3.0 submod in the works. I have been enjoying the mod, and would have made a submod for personal use. But, now that the M&T team has shown an interest in offering partial support to its implementation the development of such a submod has been in the works for the last couple of weeks. The release of this submod is entirely dependent on the M&T’s team and whether we can find volunteers in assigning images to existing events, but a workable version will be available on M&T3.0’s release. So, Soon™. Here is a spoiler for now[cdn.discordapp.com].
For those unaware: Here is the mod I’m talking about, which was promised back in 2017, but never saw a release. So, it is getting finished? Well, kind of. A hundred or-so of the events have had their flavour content written, half of said events are done-done localisation wise. They just have to be coded. Once the first 50 events have been implemented I will release the alpha version. Most of the initial events will be about animals that have suffered the same fate as the Dodo (extinction) since 1444. From the tiny 20cm tall Guam Kingfisher[en.wikipedia.org] to the Steller’s Sea Cow[en.wikipedia.org] which could reach up to 12 meters in length. These events require a lot of research, and if I had more help I’d be able to release larger event trees, like the one below (see full image[i.ibb.co]):
But, at least the Flora & Fauna events will get released relatively soon. If I can’t find a coder before the FEE + M&T content then I’ll learn to code them myself.
Credits:
Aetherum, Ernestico, Doan77, Firerozes, Don Quixote, (ReaPeR2039), Shwartz99, UberEpicZach
