Epistolary Richard
10-31-2006, 00:59
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.
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.