Official CA modding announcement

[edyzmedieval]

Repost from TWC.
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=463622



Total War: The modding situation

Moderators: Feel free to sticky or front page this thread.

Hi everyone,

The Total War series has a long and venerable history of modding, courtesy of yourselves. We’ve talked for a long time about releasing tools for your use, and as you’re (keenly!) aware this still hasn’t happened yet. We know you’re frustrated at the situation, and take it from us, so are we.

For this reason, we’re giving you the complete raw database XML (data from tables) and XSD (table structure and field properties) files for both Empire and Napoleon - they're attached to this post. Armed with these, you will have a ton of data to work with, and you’ll also know what’s in every field of every table. There’s an awful lot in there, and we sincerely hope this will help you in your efforts. If you have any questions concerning the XML and XSD files, ask away, we’ll do our best to answer them.

There are number of reasons we haven’t released tools yet, and to fully examine why, we need to wind things back to the Rome Total War days.

Back then, the game engine was a hell of a lot simpler than it is now. There was a fraction of the database table files we use today, and these were basic, easily-editable text files. Compared to today’s binary files, which we’ve had to implement to fight naturally expanding load-times, they were a doddle to mod. Likewise, today’s campaign map is vastly more complex and data-dense than Rome’s, which was basically a simple TGA file that could be edited in photoshop. Today’s maps demand way more complexity in order to allow for better path-finding and AI. In addition, Rome’s campaign map was tile based; today’s campaign map is seamless for better movement, making it that considerably harder to mod.

Back in the Rome days, Vercingetorix created tools that were absolutely key to the explosion of Total War modding; tools such as the CAS exporter and the unpacker. You were happy, we were thrilled and some fantastic mods (such as the breathtaking Europa Barbarorum) were born, and enjoyed by thousands, us included. We’re still in awe of what people achieved with Rome and Medieval II’s engines.

We would dearly love this to continue, and we’ve always aimed to release official tools to help you realise your own visions in the engine. But every time we sit down and talk about what’s actually involved (and we’ve had countless such meetings over the last couple of years), we hit a brick wall.

We have tools that work with our internal data processes, but wouldn’t work at all as mod tools. It would take a huge amount of development resources to combine them into something approaching usable. Many of our tools are just designed to work with our raw data formats and process them into something used by the game, not to take a processed item and view or edit it. Nor do we have tools to do most of the things you really want – such as model importing – as we have no need of them; we have the raw models, and can always export them and reprocess them. Creating a set of tools specifically for modding is never going to be the quick or simple procedure many of you would hope for, and between making games, creating new content and supporting each release with balances and fixes, our production schedules are fierce.

The unit editor we mentioned for Napoleon was such a case of ambition overshadowing reality. The unit editor we actually have is a tool used internally for putting the look of units together, but it never made the final cut as an in-game feature, as it was a completely new tool for Napoleon: very much in its messy infancy, and in no way fit for public consumption. The Avatar system (in particular unit colouring) in Shogun 2 is how this eventually made it into the game. However, it’s interesting to note how the ever-resourceful community has developed its own tools to edit the unit-variant files and texture atlases…

Please understand that we’re not trying to constrain modding in any way; we simply haven’t been able to support it as well as we really wanted to, and the increasingly complex Warscape engine is by nature much harder to mod. Also, this isn’t a conspiracy to make you buy DLC over creating your own content… if that were true, there never would have been the possibility of making unit-packs for Empire and Napoleon. The fact remains that modders have made many such excellent units, and enriched the game for thousands of Total War players. We still want to help though, and we think the best way to do this is to give you the raw database XML and XSD files.

We hope that by being more transparent about our aims – and abilities – in future, and by providing useful data such as this, we can show that we really do value your creativity and hard work. You’re important to us, and important to the ongoing success and popularity of the Total War series.

Going forward, we’ll be working on a better strategy to support modding, and we’re now planning what we’re going to do for Shogun 2. But we’re going to stop promising specifics that we’re unable to deliver, as we all know how well that’s worked out in the past.

Happy modding,

The Creative Assembly

[Populus Romanus]

Cutting it a little close, eh?

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

tl;dr: making mod tools is hard, we'd much rather you buy DLC units. But we'll give you limited mod tools for games we don't expect to sell more DLC units for.

[Gregoshi]

tl;dr: making mod tools is hard, we'd much rather you buy DLC units. But we'll give you limited mod tools for games we don't expect to sell more DLC units for.

tl;dr;gca - too long, didn't read, gonna complain anyway.

The gratitude is underwhelming. While it may not be much to you, I'm sure there are some who will appreciate the release of the data files.

[edyzmedieval]

tl;dr;gca - too long, didn't read, gonna complain anyway.

The gratitude is underwhelming. While it may not be much to you, I'm sure there are some who will appreciate the release of the data files.

I find it a good move, I appreciate what CA has done and the explanation they have given us. Surprisingly, the folks at TWC are very excited about this and have congratulated CA.

[Nelson]

I fail to appreciate how this can be seen as anything but good.

[Poulp']

Am I the only one who cannot access the link ?
The rest of TWCenter work fine though.

[TinCow]

Am I the only one who cannot access the link ?
The rest of TWCenter work fine though.

No, it's not you. There appears to be some kind of error with that thread.

[Voigtkampf]

Well, I wrote a long post earlier and just erased it. Saw no point in bothering.
Now I went back to TWC forum, which is working now, and red the 10+ pages of comments. Most were brown-nosing of such a shameless variety that I might very well consider the possibility that the members there are being paid for such comments or maybe the staff themselves is "ghost-commenting" with all the member accounts.

First, let it be known that in the past decade I've written more than a dozen reviews and articles published in gaming magazines on the topic of Total War and CA. I have always been on the CA's side of the wall, defending them, praising them as well as the TW series, even when they were sub-par with quality or rigorously ridden with bugs.

Now I feel the urge to dissect this entire story, and I'll make it short and sweet. Pro and Cons, let's count it like that.

PRO: CA released some XML and XSD files concerning Empire Total War.

CONS:

1. It came two years after the game itself was released.
2. Nobody can tell with any positive certainty how useful, if at all, those documents are. There is talk about mercenaries and possibility to edit the map. Daisy, maybe therein lies even the fabled treasure of Sierra Madre! It cannot be denied that most of the files for E:TW have been peeked and probed and deconstructed by modders already through the good ol' trial and error procedure. These files will hardly add much to it.
3. The editing tools were promised; giving out couple of files years later and basically saying, nah, we'll never make promises again, we might just make a better strategy about supporting modders. How political can you get without running for an office, eh?

Nah, I won't even bother anymore... There was one poster at TWC saying:

we basically have a load of xml files which will gain us more types of religions for in game and we can also now identify some further "Unknown" columns in the db files?? and thats it? so we are all wetting ourselves over a bunch of files that really is not going to make that much difference to the ETW & NTW games?

That pretty much sums it up.

this isn’t a conspiracy to make you buy DLC over creating your own content…

I believe that... In regards to Empire and Napoleon. I suppose one needs not to be clairvoyant to figure out that there will be no such or similar files forthcoming for Shogun 2. Not until the title is milked for all the DLC's one can think of. Then the modders will probably get a bone.

Ok, and now in spirit of tl;dr : This is too little, too late. If they had released same or similar files for Shogun 2 along with these, it would have been different. But on some optimistic level, I'd say better this than nothing.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

Everyone just pretend I wrote what Voigtkampf said since he did it with elegance and without looking like a jerk

[Monk]

You've been hit by.

You've been struck by.

A promotion to the front page.

[edyzmedieval]

You've been hit by.

You've been struck by.

A promotion to the front page.

Thank you for the traffic to my profile page.

As for the news, while I say that it's good, I cannot help but agree with Voigtkampf who echoed my thoughts in a most gentlemanly way.

[antisocialmunky]

I'm glad they were finally able to deliver on those tools :)

[Furunculus]

thank you CA.

[Jacobin]

Way, way, way too late - the modders have almost all moved on to other games in disgust or are still tinkering with MTW.

Now if they were the STW2 data files that might make a real difference.

[Voigtkampf]

Read this, and it has reminded me of this thread. Basically, no modding tools for Battlefield 3 because "the power of the Frostbite 2 engine makes it tough to tweak".

"If you look at the Frostbite engine, and how complex it is, it’s going to be very difficult for people to mod the game, because of the nature of the set up of levels, of the destruction and all those things… it’s quite tricky. So we think it’s going to be too big of a challenge for people to make a mod."

Reminds me of the "our inhouse tools are not good enough for release as modding tools", just with the opposite twist; BF3 wannabe modders are too stupid to mod the l33tawesomesauce pie Frostbiting engine, whereas the CA would not dare put their fans through the horror of not perfectly polished editing tools they are using inhouse.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/07/05/ba...modding-tools/

Why are people making statements like this? Don't they understand how weak their cover stories are?

[Cu'Roi]

Alex, i agreed with your post 100%, and i didn't think u were a jerk. I agreed with volt even more. I was actually considering making a post like volts, until i saw he did it for me and did it better.

the truth is most people who know CA's talking points all too well are the same people that are too tired to bother calling CA on their BS. In their thread I was considering (for like the 1,000th time) of giving them some real suggestions, but they don't actually care about what is suggested to them. For example, making a way to detach units among other players and making a stop watch on replays and making the chat saved in the replay. All that is easy to do, very simple, but they won't do it. or they will do it one at a time so u have to buy the new game every year.

I like to think that the truth speaks for itself, but only to people who are paying attention and have seen the song and dance before.

unfortunately CA's market shifts somewhat with each game, and they focus on casual mass gamers who are majority children. Couple that with extremely lax consumer law enforcement inthis industry, especially over different nations, difficulty in developing video games over any other piece of software, Steam and other game download services, and DLC. you put all that together and you get games of decreasing quality, and it's a market wide trend, and not reversible.

this is a broad phenomenon which this modding tool fiasco is a good example of.

in 1998 Bungie released their developer tools for map making and for unit making with the game, then they integrated a "plugin" system so people could turn off 3rd party content on the fly in game. This is (literally) decades ahead of CA.

In the 90s the industry was in it's infancy, and since then over time game devs have learned they can keep decreasing quality without a correspondingly sever decrease in sales.

what all this means is, if you like video games, they are going to have less content/variation and even shorter lives tomorrow than they have today. this is good if you are in the business of selling games, but bad if you like to buy them.