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-=Cartoon=-
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 Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 02:21 Post subject: |
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Epsilon
Dr. Strangelove
Posts: 9240
Location: War Room
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 02:28 Post subject: |
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| -=Cartoon=- wrote: | | so close arghhh |
Close?, you can play it now  but yeah i'm awaiting my preorder aswell  |
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ginge51
Banned
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Location: England - Manchester
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Epsilon
Dr. Strangelove
Posts: 9240
Location: War Room
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 05:15 Post subject: |
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Modding Medieval 2 a guide blatantly ripped off a developer blog......
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Modding Medieval II
Epistolary Richard, the Modding rep from the Org, has been at the Brisbane studio getting some hands on time with the code. And this is what he has to say:
Hi all,
As many of you know I've had the delightful opportunity to spend a full week with the Medieval 2 Total War Developers in their office in Brisbane. The primary purpose has been to discuss what the modding community has achieved, what it's looking to do with Medieval 2 and explore ideas as to how CA might support this effort.
In addition, I've also had the chance to poke around at the game itself and quiz some of the developers directly with both the community's questions I'd previously collated and quite a few of my own.
Now, with a couple of days under my belt – and with the weekend coming up where the studio will be sadly closed (I will have my nose pressed up against the window until Monday) – I'm happy to be able to pass back some of my initial findings.
AI
Many of the questions which the community posed which I brought to Brisbane with me related to the AI. In terms of the Battle AI as Palamedes recently commented a lot of work has gone into having it react as an army rather than as a collection of units – and as he says this work continues. I've had several conversations on this topic which have included the new priorities incorporated in settlement defence and assault. I may have the chance to present some real life examples of AI behaviour next time.
For the modders, we have a couple of new files in the game to play with: config_ai_battle.xml which includes part of the AI's threat assessment evaluations for various different types of battle (settlements, river crossings, open field) and battle_config.xml with which we can alter several rules such as skirmishing distance, plaza capture time and soldier movement across ladders and towers.
But the Campaign AI has not been ignored – we have new files descry_campaign_ai_db.xml which allows alteration of a faction's approach to its long term goals and its approach to other factions – it's readiness to attack and tendency to trust and ally. When I mention that this file is nearly 2,000 lines long you can see that it is considerably more detailed than Rome's 'Fortified Napoleon' and 'Trader Henry' AI personalities.
Another new file descr_faction_standing.txt provides over a hundred triggers which impacts of faction's standing in relation to its fellows using a similar language to the trait and advice files.
Recruitment
One of the new features introduced in M2 is the idea of recruitment pools within settlements. I've still not had a chance to look at this in much detail, but from what I've seen the availability of units appears to be driven through the export_descr_buildings.txt file and therefore eminently alterable.
Models & Textures
As we predicted – the great advancements made in M2 that allowed them to banish the 'clone' armies and provide such graphical improvements as we've seen in the previews and demos have only been possible by taking a different approach in how model and texture information is stored and referenced. We should keep in mind therefore that modelers and skinner will probably not have as straightforward a transition as coders will from Rome to M2.
Scripting
Some very exciting news in terms of the scripts: the imperial campaign in M2 operates using a campaign script. I checked and confirmed that this means that you can run a campaign script and still save the game – and when the game is reloaded the script automatically reactivates. Though there are a couple of limitations, this means that script files can now be fully integrated within the game and be constantly running in the background of the campaign.
Aside from this, just from scanning the campaign script, there are several new commands used giving us intriguing new options in terms of manipulating the challenge of campaigns. More to come on this later – and hopefully CA, as they have done before, will provide us with the docudemon files listing the events, commands, conditions and console commands used by the scripting language.
And more...
This time I’m focusing on modding ‘straight out of the box’ – that’s the stuff that you can do as soon as you’ve installed the game (presuming that you didn’t actually want to have a go at it first!)
First off, let’s have a look at the Battle Editor:
Battle Editor
This is a feature many of you will be familiar with from Rome, and it’s good to see that it’s still included.
The Battle Editor allows you to create your own Historical Battles. It allows you to choose a battlemap tile, alter the terrain, buildings and vegetation on it, deploy each side’s forces and set time, weather and victory conditions. We also discovered that the battlemaps we created with it can also be re-integrated into the campaign game as custom tiles.
How to activate the Battle Editor
As before with Rome, the Battle Editor needs to be activated before it can be accessed. This is done by adding two new lines to the medieval2.preference.cfg file
[features]
editor = true
With these lines in – when you launch the game, click on Options and the Battle Editor will appear.
Clicking on that will take you through to:
Do note the warning – just as with Rome at this time the Battle Editor is an internal tool CA created which they’ve kindly given us access to in order to allow us to make our mods. It requires steps be taken in a certain order to work and requires some dedication to become comfortable with. It says for Advanced Users for a reason!
You can either load a Battle already created or you can create a new one by choosing the tile you want to base it on and clicking on Next. This takes you through to the Battle Editor itself:
This will all look very familiar to users of the Rome Battle Editor so I’ll just highlight a few of the options and the differences.
Firstly, now when you place a building it actually attaches the real structure to the cursor so you can see how it will look in the terrain before you place it (in Rome it only appeared as green squares before you placed it). On the map above, I’ve now placed a monastery down the slope:
The ground is now more independent of the buildings – meaning that you can adjust the ground level without moving the height of the building at the same time. This makes it a lot easier to integrate the buildings into the terrain than in Rome, as you can see here as I smooth out the bumps.
You can now also add a variety of bridges to the map:
Then it’s just a matter of adding the factions who will be fighting there, their deployment zones, their units and victory conditions:
And there you have a whole new historical battle!
As with Rome, you can then go into the text files the Battle Editor creates, such as the descr_battle file and tweak units and characters and also add battle scripting that go to provide the cinematics and specific tactics and events used for this conflict.
A bit more technical detail:
* Structures can now be released and turned after they’ve been placed.
* You can swap between different tooltips with the [ and ] keys
* You can change the ‘strength’ of some actions (such as raising/lowering terrain] with the , and . keys. High strength will make the land rise and drop quicker. Shift+ those keys will change the strength in units of ten.
* The height of buildings themselves can be controlled by moving the mouse with the shift button pressed.
* Trees are now added through the Vegetation tool, rather than as part of a texture and therefore the Update Tree Outlines is redundant and deactivated.
* All structures including settlements are added through an Add World Feature tool and therefore the Add Settlement Plan and Add Ambient tools are deactivated.
* Roads are now all drawn by hand so the road tool is deactivated.
* There is now a Plateau tool which further helps to manipulate the terrain.
* Currently, the camera functions as it does in battles – limiting the height from which you can view the battleground
The gorgeous battlemaps of M2 come at a price though and a full historical battle file now weighs in over 10meg, most of which as before is the .wfc file, so they’re definitely worth tinkering with to get them right.
Mod Switch
Another vital feature for modders from Rome is in Med2 but again in a slightly different way. The Mod Switch allows you to have a separate directory of your modded files in your main Medieval 2 Total War directory and by launching the game with the right cfg line the game will access the files within the mod folder before looking in the main game directory – allowing you to supercede even packed files without problem.
The best way to set this up is as follows:
Create a new bat file in the top level Medieval 2 Total War folder (the one with the .exe in it) called Launch_MyMod.bat
Inside it should read:
medieval2.exe @mymod.cfg
Then create copy your medieval2.preference.cfg file and rename it mymod.cfg and include the following lines:
[features]
mod = mymod
Then create a folder in that directory called mymod and in that have your data folder with its modded files exactly mimicking the directory structure in the main game folder.
As you can see using a bat file to launch the game using different .cfg files allows you to easily swap between different mods and game configurations without wholesale duplication of your data folder, risking direct file overwrites or copying and overwriting your original .cfg file.
As with Rome, the mymod folder needs to include certain game files from the world folder to function. Currently, it also requires sounds/events.dat and sounds/events.idx to function. This should be borne in mind when writing mod installers or alternatively in install instructions.
Unlocking all unlockable factions
Hey, I know it wasn’t hard in Rome – but now it’s even easier. Just add the following to you cfg file:
[misc]
unlock_campaign = true
Extended Bug Tracking
A great improvement upon show_err in Rome – add the following to your cfg file:
[log]
to = logs/system.log.txt
level = * error
And the game will generate a list of the errors in text files it recognises and generate a text file report. Ideal for mod bug hunting! I used it myself and picked up a bunch of mistakes I’d made in a matter of minutes that would have had me scratching my head for hours otherwise.
For even more detail you can put in:
[log]
to = logs/system.log.txt
level = * trace
Windows mode and no movies
Non-modders never understand why we use –ne and –nm in our Rome command lines. All I say to them is that they don’t relaunch their game thirty times a session!
Again, add to your cfg file:
[video]
windowed = true
movies = false |
Include it to faq or whatever Let us see some nforce user maps or scripting kids at work.
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Baleur
Posts: 2343
Location: South Sweden
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 12:08 Post subject: |
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Dum di dum
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 RAM: 4gb Kingmax DDR2 800mhz Video: Asus GeForce 250GTS 1gb Sound: Asus Xonar.
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-=Cartoon=-
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 12:58 Post subject: |
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Surray
Posts: 5409
Location: Europe
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 13:33 Post subject: |
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fraich3
Posts: 2907
Location: Not from my mouth!
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Epsilon
Dr. Strangelove
Posts: 9240
Location: War Room
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 15:10 Post subject: |
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Well the strategic interface will still be German and everything else not in the demo
But it seems to me if you put the English localized.pack file which is approx 2mb in instead of the one which comes with the German release all of the interface would get translated, of course you'll need the English file for that, but 'someone' might put it up somewhere
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 15:29 Post subject: |
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better wait for a proper release, shouldnt be long now
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Bart1983
Posts: 1020
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Baleur
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Location: South Sweden
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 16:14 Post subject: ***** |
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*****
Last edited by Areius on Fri, 19th Sep 2025 16:03; edited 1 time in total
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CaptainCox
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Location: A Swede in Germany (FaM)
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 17:58 Post subject: |
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Got my copy at work today...forgot that I orderd it to that adress! Nice surpirse but....
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ginge51
Banned
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CaptainCox
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Location: A Swede in Germany (FaM)
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 19:21 Post subject: |
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Fucking great! The German copy also have English lang...phew!
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ginge51
Banned
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Epsilon
Dr. Strangelove
Posts: 9240
Location: War Room
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 19:23 Post subject: |
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| CaptainCox wrote: | | Fucking great! The German copy also have English lang...phew! |
Nah try installing English and see  |
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CaptainCox
VIP Member
Posts: 6823
Location: A Swede in Germany (FaM)
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 19:26 Post subject: |
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U JOKING!...  Well I speak german so no real biggy, but ...well not the same is it
Installing now...1 min or so I will see.
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LOTPJ
Posts: 20
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Epsilon
Dr. Strangelove
Posts: 9240
Location: War Room
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 19:37 Post subject: |
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No, I tried that release, installed English and got German, uninstalled installed German and got German. No matter what you do you get German
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 19:37 Post subject: |
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yup english and german. Hopefully someone will release a English only version..6GB is a little too big
Sig too big.
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CaptainCox
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Location: A Swede in Germany (FaM)
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 19:37 Post subject: |
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I am not so sure cause that's the release that have been on all German sites...so its a German Clone, and if what Epsilon is saying is true then its not complete English. Still installing my legit German version here, tell ya in a min.
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Surray
Posts: 5409
Location: Europe
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 19:37 Post subject: |
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the uploader obviously didnt really try because the JiNi release is simply the cracked german verison where you can select English but it's still german.
Likot Mosuskekim, Woodcutter cancels Sleep: Interrupted by Elephant.
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Bart1983
Posts: 1020
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 20:19 Post subject: |
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Does the clone version requires a loader? Or just need DT?
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CaptainCox
VIP Member
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Location: A Swede in Germany (FaM)
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| Posted: Wed, 8th Nov 2006 20:22 Post subject: |
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Yup, can confirm that 100% NOT ENGLISH! Epsilon was right! Any how, the game feels totally like RTW, OK newer graphics and some new units like princesses and stuff, but so far its basically RTW set in the middle ages.
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