A few modding tips

[JeromeGrasdyke]

I've only just discovered this forum and have to say, I'm impressed at how much headway people are making already. So, here are a few quick-and-basic tips for making mods for Rome, which should tide you over until we can get a more comprehensive guide done:

1) before you start altering the game's loading scripts, which are all the plain ASCII text files starting with "descr_" or "export_descr_" in the game's main 'data' directory, make a backup .... it saves a lot of time later Note that the game won't run properly in multiplayer with a modified set of scripts - people who have modded Medieval will be familiar with this behaviour. There is a strategy in the works to deal with this, but it's not quite ready for prime-time.

2) when you're altering the scripts, run the game via a shortcut with "-show_err" on the command line when you are testing ... this will enable the game to display errors when you quit the program, so that if you've made an error in a script you can locate it easily; most of the game's script loading code is fairly heavily error-checked.

3) most of the loading scripts have comments at the top of the file which explain something about the format - it's worth reading as much of these as you can, since they will give you some insight into how everything fits together.

4) many entries in the loading scripts make use of 'tags' which refer to entries in other loading scripts; for example, the export_descr_units file, under the "soldier" line, gives a tag for an entry in the descr_model_battle.txt file (which in its turn has a line named "skeleton" which gives one or two tags referring to entries in the descr_skeleton.txt file). This is how the game links data together, to present a unit of men with all their stats, which use a certain model and texture set, which is then animated using a particular hierarchical skeleton and set of animations.

Hopefully that should help some in the great modding quest. If somebody wants to organise a poll on the five most-frequently asked 'modding questions' in the same mold as the one that was recently on the main forum, I'll try and supply a few answers.