Map Editor

the daimyo has touched on an area that maybe i shld clarify...legal stuff. and some of you may be wondering about this. first off, you CAN make maps to your heart's content. there is NO legal reason why you cant. if you try to package and sell those maps...you cant. a precedent was set not too long ago dealing with that. i think it was one of the blizzard software games. a group of players got together and made a bunch of mods, packaged them and put them on the market for sale. blizzard sued and won, citing proprietary product rights. blizzard won. on the other hand, if you dont try and make money off the maps and simply post them for use, there's no problem.

the license agreement also prohibits any kind of use of their code, or disassembly or reverse engineering of any kind. that belongs to them. it does NOT prohibit you from making NEW code that would work with their code, unless your code is altering theirs. and even then it becomes a VERY gray area legally. but, if you're not selling your code that alters their code, i doubt it would ever come to court. there's no profit in it.

as to getting the development team to do something re tools, patches, mods, i think that's prolly not a practical view at this point. from all rumors i've heard the main team is already moving on to a new project...something to do with the roman era. what few are left behind to handle shogun are doing the localized patches and new patches. that richie asked rob to start a new thread about mods somewhat confirms the rumors. my thinking is that they want to tweak the existing engine for the new project, the rome thing, not shogun.

remember here too that EA is NOT the development team. there are actually 3 companies involved in shogun. EA is simply handling the marketing and distribution. dreamtime is handling other aspects (i'm not sure what) and creative is the actual dev team, the coders, designers, studio folks and so on that actually made most of the game. creative is the group that needs to be contacted for any re-coding, patches, tools and so forth and frankly, they've been very careful NOT to be seen anywhere. there is no web addy or email or any other form of contact listed for them in the game, the manuals, the totalwar web site or anywhere else i can find. it would seem they dont want to be bugged by consumers and frankly i dont blame them much. we players can be a rather rude and surly bunch when it comes to our games.

the overall point here is that it isnt likely that we'll get many new mods out of the creative group other than a few patches to fix obvious goofs or tweak a few ratios here and there. the creative team doesnt want to be bugged, the other groups dont have the authority to change the code and there is little profit motive or incentive for a dev team to alter or add to an existing already sold game. we may not like that but that's the long and short of it. if they did nothing but pander to us on shogun and didnt put out any new products, it's pretty obvious they'd be out of business.

it would be nice if a small portion of their team could be dedicated to shogun stuff. that could work, and thus keep the create going on shogun itself. i'm just not sure how practical this would be from their point of view. coders dont come cheap. if i'm a game company president i'm going to put my resources where they'll generate the most survival potential to my organization. and i'm certainly NOT going to put my full team into tweaking a game that is already a decent seller. however, the online community is a relatively new market arena and i do think that some companies are missing the boat by not keeping a team devoted to their online products. the longest running online game i know of was island of kesmai. it ran for 15 years! it did this by keeping folks interested. someone at the dev team was always devoted to keeping the game NEW, with new features or areas or mobs (monsters).

but that was a pay game. most of the online games out there are not pay-as-you-play games. i would have loved to see railroad tycoon II do a LOT more with their game and they did put out an expansion set that did improve the game but that was it. shogun may yet do the same thing; patches, then an expansion game. i just wish creative would let us know so we act accordingly.

in liew of that, i think the best thing to do is to move along like we have been. make maps, make mods and have fun ;) if someone can get ahold of creative and we can work something out with them then fine; i'd love to see that happen, but i'm not going to stop everything else while waiting for that to happen.

K.

Exactly kraell, u have touched the point.

The EA, Creative and dreamtime are just doing their job and there's nothing wrong with that.
Instead of putting effort into improvements, they will just improve a little and put everything they have in an totally new (in the name) project that has the benefits of the old engine.

Our cooperation as players stops there. All the fixes and new ideas suggested will be put in the new project leaving stw behind...after all, from a company manager's point of view, that's already been sold...it's time to make new product and earn some new money from it.
(Curves of profit and loss are done just to calculate expenses at the beginnning and then the incomes projected for every subsequent month after the release so, believe me, they know what they are doing here).

I also completely agree on the "stealth" of the programming team. As we know, EA only works for the distribution and Richie as web manager, is something like the public relations between players and boss.
Richie has not answered to any of my mails and, of course, i was unable to find a workable address to any of the programmers (i looked hard to Matteo Sartori who is italian like me and maybe would have heard some reasons) so here you go Kraell, we are left unheard.
There is no way to directly talk to any of the developing team and as to me, i have been unable to talk to Richie either or whomever is in charge there.

The erado's site has a list with all the pleas of players, much of those are our same we posted in here (we are a bit more concrete though http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif ).

What i think is that they are getting our pleas for the next game while most players are convinced they will serve the purpose of bettering this one.

From my experience, i seldom saw more than 3 patches for the same game, and accordingly, most of them are related to online gameplay and corrections in the use of bandwidth, so there's not much room for real improvement...the technical one.

The only chance then, lies in an unofficial patch/editor.
As to the legal issues: of course noone wanna earn money from something like that.
I believe that ppl putting effort in improving games are doing it out of LOVE and not greed. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif
From a manager's point of view, i would encourage unoifficial improvement by giving some instructions and tips...after all, its their game keeping to breathe and to sell...and they have no expenses, only a free earning from the unofficial stuff.

As an example, working onto the same model, changing just the sprites and fixing the bugs would let us play ANY battle, from ROME to Greece and this without any problem of development...just changing the sprites.
Do they need 3 more years and a new box, manual and ad campaign ? I don't think so http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif


Stay tuned, events will probably see an escalation when the 1.13 is released.

thanks yamagawa (did i get that right?) and i agree that nothing's likely to change till the 1.13 patch. and after that come the localizations, so, it's going to be a while.

since richie posted on their web site that he'd like to see some threads about desired mods, perhaps he is the go-between for the dev team. if that is so, and even if he isnt answering mail, perhaps he is reading it. with that in mind, it might be a good idea to send him some mail requesting that the dev team release some docs on the editor. we dont need the source code, just some docs about how to use it....these bridges are driving me nuts! aaarrrrrgggghhh! did they disable being able to place them in the editor? do you need a special keyboard? lol.

as a side note to bridges (and off topic here a bit) i found a way to look at a map from beneath the water line. it's really quite funny to see your troops all drowning in the tutorial ;)

oh, and rob, heights are near infinite. whatever the cap is on it i cant find it. and, it goes both ways. you can build a mountain to the heavens or a hole to hell. that may explain a bit about why there are 48 bits in the textures or heights or whatever it was you were telling me about. each tile/texture can be stretched one HUGE amount and that data has to be kept track of somewhere.

K.

I have been having some... interesting experiences with bridges.

The bridges on Anegawa can be moved about, but I can't create new ones.

I can't move the bridge in Mikawa at all. The weird thing is that the Mikawa bridge appears to be implemented as a model, whereas the Anegawa bridges are implemented as textures. I don't know if I've got that right, maybe I am jumping to the wrong conclusion. But certainly the bridge textures used in Anegawa are not present in Mikawa. Perhaps there is more than one way of making a bridge?

Of course that you can't save models, which is a bit of a problem http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

I will soon be posting some more info about the internal workings of the map file, hopefully this will help people spot details I have missed.

rob,

i noticed very similar things regarding those two maps. the textures under the bridges are diff in the two maps, but the same within each map. in anegawa the textures are 126 104 and 125 with 104 being the middle texture while in mikawa i believe they were 82 84 83. with 84 being in the middle. notice that in both maps the banks are in sequence, 125 to 126 and 82 to 83. 82 and 83 are almost exactly alike and so are 125 and 126 and i had thought, perhaps, that this was a 'signal' to the code to add a bridge at this point. i had even thought that perhaps one edge of each tile had to be aligned to face the other 'bridge edge' of the other tile before it would add a bridge, but in practice this has not been the case.

i am also convinced that you DO have to add 'water' into the map in order to get a bridge i'm just not sure what other requirements there are to this. when importing anegawa (or whichever one has the 3 bridges) i only initially had one bridge show up in the editor. after saving it IN THE EDITOR and reloading the other bridges showed up.

in mikawa i was able to stretch that bridge all the way across the map by altering the height of the overall map. and then to stretch it back smaller again. so the stretching feature is done automatically based on the conditions existing.

but getting the code to add a bridge is still eluding me. i've tested several theories all in vain. i've tried adding models at appropriate locations and then dropping the land down so that water would be under the bridge. you cant add models to a water tile. if you do the model will either show up off to the side or under the water, but still wont save.

also, one rather significant fact i've found is that water or sea level is NOT a tile. it's a plane that extends all the way from corner to corner and edge to edge. it is the reference point against which all other tiles are set or measured. think of a mountain sitting on a flat plate. the plate is sea level and CANNOT change shape or height. you can alter the mountain up or down or even below the plate, but you cannot move the plate. even if you raise or lower the entire map at once using cntrl-click, the plate will NOT change. you cannot add models to the plate. you cannot change the texture of the plate. if you drop a portion of the land below the plate you can actually go underwater with your view of the land and by doing that you can see the bridges overhead. a bridge will NOT drop below the plate if you move the land below the plate.

i've tried overlapping water just a bit from the middle tile so that it covers a portion of the adjoining tiles and underlapping it so that it doesnt. no go. i've tried having no water present at all, just the same textures that those other maps used, like anegawa. no go. i've tried placing bridge models on the right spot and dropping the water line. no go. i've tried adding models in the right spot and 'stretching' them using the < and > keys. no go. i've even tried using the 'high' (the blank textures above 127) textures of the same numbers as the other maps to invoke a bridge. no go. btw, those dont seem eraseable. once added and saved they cant be erased.

another clue to all this seems to be the 'locked' heights you get on some tiles when you add water. i began to wonder if they purposely locked those heights because by adding water there was a signal that there was a bridge being asked for here. the odd part of it is that it will lock an entire row or column of tile heights and i still cant add a bridge. perhaps that locked row is the only place you can add bridges. i dont know.

if the models cant be saved then why even have them? to preview how a thing will look? and if it's only for preview then why add an enlarging tool since there is no way by adding any texture to also have it enlarge? and why add a model rotating tool that rotates other than 90 degrees at a time since by adding textures to get models you can only rotate that tile by 90 degrees?

i've almost begun to believe that they disabled the model saving ability for some reason, but that seems just about as odd as not including docs for an editor ;)

i've tried adding models and saving using the F9 and F12 keys...no go.

there also seems to be more than one demo game version...or did you guys patch your demos? tosainu and i seem to have diff versions. he can alter his batinit files and load other maps that way. i cant. i have to alter my map names to tutmap3.jjm. he mentions using the f5, f6, and f7 keys to eliminate some of the icons before saving a map. when i do that nothing disappears from the screen, though in the screenshot they will be gone. for me to remove the view of those things i have to use controlkey and some other keys (i forget which right off hand).

i wonder...is it possible that they did models similar to the way they did army units? could there be a text file somewhere that is saving the info on models. doesnt seem real likely since in converting a map from the full game and porting it over to the demo you arent also porting over a text file, but hey, i'm starting to reach for the desparate here ;)

K.

Well I haven't investigated models too heavily thus far. I had come to believe that all models were simply attached to textures. There certainly is 'free space' at the end of the map file to include model data (meaning, there is some data in the map file which I don't understand and may be related to models).

But presuming that the bridges are attached to textures seems wrong considering that different textures are used for the same effect. There may be some totally bizarre reason for this, since the developers never intended for us to know about it and therefore the map files need only make sense to them, not the rest of us http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

AFAIK models can't be saved. But I am curious about whether there are any maps that actually use models at all. My theory is that placing models in maps was just to allow the developers a means of testing the models in a WYSIWYG style. It's the only way of seeing what a model looks like 'in-game' since the textures don't show their models.

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Honour to Clan Akai Ken

I'm sure half a million Valve fans (Half-Life's makers)are glad that Valve and Sierra don't subscribe to what you were talking there Kraelin. If that kinda attitude about games is going to start going around, then a lot of game companies are going to sink or go over to Playstation 2. (EEK GAD!!! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/eek.gif )
I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying that it's not a good idea for the game's makers to renig on their deal with the players (consumers) who have held the torch for this game and the CA/DT teams (despite EA's bumbling support). I'm referring to their previous mentions of future releases of add-ons and tools for map creation and so on.
I presume that htey already know this, but perhaps there is something that is holding this back, something similar in likness to their decision NOT to include an open TCP/IP interface so people could play this game WITHOUT the damnable EA Servers.
I think that the couple of new features that we are all looking for are not too hard to do. Given the plugins and a couple pages of notes from the makers, I'm sure that there would be a slew of new features and add-ons made by the players within a month.
We all understand, or can call on logic to serve the purpose of understanding, CA/DT's need to make a new game(s) for mass retail, but we also understand that it is becoming standard practice to continue making new stuff, and patches - for games months after their release if they sold well to begin with. I'm going to guess that STW has sold near or over the 500K units mark by now. (Correct me If I am wrong!Ha!)
I understand that this game is the flagship at the head of what could be an armada of great games to come from these companies. I also understand that they are standing in knee deep murky water when it comes to their track record concerning tech support, patching turnarounds, online play, and replayability with this particular game.
If they ignore the current set of problems, and do not proceed to supply the demand of the players' need for more, then folks will be disallusioned, me included. This will result in poor attendance from this group next time around for sure.
Let's see what "THEY" have to say about this. (If THEY manage to come by here any time soon http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif )

Chin Up, Feet Forward....March!
http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif


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The Daimyo
Miaowara "Kakizaki" Tomokato
@http://www.planettotalwar.com

[This message has been edited by The Daimyo (edited 11-29-2000).]

the daimyo,

you seem to think that i was saying the dev team will do nothing more with the game. i'm not. and frankly, i hope they do tons more. all i was saying was that it sounded like you were saying we shld all sit on our butts and do nothing in the way of editors and mods because they 'might' do something and i dont agree with that at all.

now, if i read the intent of your original post incorrectly, well, ok, then i stand corrected. to wait and see what they are going to do before we do anything though is, to me, silly. and that's sort of what i thought you were saying in your original post.

K.

the world is moved by 3 things:

ideas

money

weapons


i am for the first one.
http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif