Post your "must-know" modding questions here!

[fenir]

moved to modding suggestions.

[komninos]

Hi,

Has anyone seen a way to landlock units? ie. make Spartans produce only in Sparta???

[Inuyasha12]

Hi

Can anyone tell me how to change the coloring of mercenaries, so that they take the color of the faction that bought it. It just annoys me to see my line's color messed up by tha one shade of green.

Thanks in advance-INU

[Encaitar]

My question:

What are the maximum dimensions for a campaign map?

[tombom]

You ahve to require a good in a province and then put that good in the province. This is how it currently works with spartans. Unfortunately you can't define new goods.

[khelvan]

Unfortunately you can't define new goods.

Err, why not?

[JeromeGrasdyke]

I would like to make some modifications to tone down slightly the negative loyalty effect of distance and squalor. Is this possible to do something like that? Additionally, is it possible to alter the effect of garrison in the same way, toning up or down how much one unit improve the public order?

Unfortunately these factors are all hardcoded. We are fine-tuning the effect of squalor on order for the 1.2 patch, though.

Can we edit the battle AI difficulty levels and their effects? If the answer is no, could you please tell us exactly what boni the AI gets on Hard and V.Hard?

Again, these values are hard-coded. The combat bonusses are easy; they apply to attack only, while on Easy the human player gets a +4 bonus, on Hard the AI is given +4, and on Very Hard +7. The morale bonusses are much more complex, as they work on a series of sliding scales, detailing which is beyond the scope of this document.

Would CA be so kind and move as many as they can (all would be the best!) actually hardcoded values/constants from the RTW exe file into an editable text file, to allow us to modify them if we really need/want to?

There's over 500k of setup scripts open to modding and you want more?!? Well, we'll see what can be done. All constants would be a bit optimistic, as there are an awful lot of them, but we may be able to extern a few more things.

I'm not sure if this has been answered already, but will it be possible to allow a starting faction to be a protectorate of another faction, or, like in the sons of mars campaign at the beginning, have factions with no lands but simply having armies marching around to create an RPG element before they gain lands?

I believe these things are currently not possible, except in the case of the human player surviving with at least one named characters and no settlements. AI factions must have both characters and settlements to survive. It is worth noting that there is a set of pre-determined likes and dislikes which is baked into the faction setup, as well. Nothing so strong as actual alliances, but it changes the likelyhood that an AI faction will go to war with another faction quite substantially.

We want to know if CA and Activision will release the Unit Editor, Terrain Editor, Battle Editor and Strategic Editor in the upcoming patches/addons... or not!

The battle editor (which contains the terrain editor as well) will likely be released with the 1.2 patch. There is no such thing as a unit editor - the units were created by adding a new entry and all of its corresponding artwork to the various setup scripts, mostly by hand. A decision has not yet been made about the campaign map editor, which would probably be of limited use anyway as it's quite a basic tool.

What about the weird texture colour effects?

It depends what format the textures that you are feeding into the game are in. The DDS files are compressed and so you can lose a lot of quality; the end result depends quite a bit on the compressor you use. The NVidia one is reasonable, but the one included with the MS DirectX SDK gives better results although it takes a lot longer to run. The game engine freely substitutes DDS's for TGA's, so if you have a texture which you absolutely cannot get right as a DDS, you can feed it in as an uncompressed TGA. But be aware that doing this eats up more texture memory, and you will notice that other things may start to degrade and get blurry if many DDS's are replaced with TGA's, especially on machines with little video memory.

Is it possible to make units available to factions to which they were not originally allotted?

Yes, it is possible. In order to do this, you need to change the 'ownership' field in export_descr_unit.txt for the unit you wish to change, make sure that the soldier/officer/mount models referenced by that unit have texture assignments for that faction (these are in descr_model_battle.txt), and modify the buildings files so that the faction in question can actually build the unit from the tech tree. If you want to give the new unit a description and a picture you also have to change the text which is linked in via the 'dictionary' tag and the image pointed to by the image field. Be aware that the game always first searches the .paks for data, so whenever you refer to a new file, give it a new, unique name to avoid any problems.

In my Citadel mod, I want the papacy to have the same sort of relation with the catholics as the senate does with rome. Is this possible?

You could make the three Roman factions look like Catholics, and the Senate as the Pope, and then alter the mission texts and so on to fit. So, doable, although a fair amount of work. As to having more factions have this relationship with the 'Pope', I'm afraid not.

Is there a way to change the names of regions and cities?

Yes, there are text files which contain the names which are linked to the Provinces. If you do a search in data/text for 'Domus Dulcis Domus' I'm sure it will show up, although you will need to use a search tool which can handle Unicode text files.

Will it be possible mod structures which are separate from cities, eg a structure which appears in a province and grants bonuses, but has these bonuses taken away if it is 'blockaded'?

Nope.

Will it be possible to mod different city sizes? eg, can I mod a city which is smaller than a town (and, inventively, call it a Small Town)? Modding the whole tech tree would be necessary after this...

Nope.

Will it be possible to mod in flying units?

To a certain extent - you can make them look as if they fly by changing the animation files, but the collision detection happens mostly on 2D planes, and so something flying over the ground will end up pushing things underneath it out of the way. You can edit the collision radii, so you could have a flying dragon which only has a tiny collision radius, but that's as far as it goes.

Will it be possible to mod faction leader's 'death ages'? eg, if I want a faction leader who can only die in battle, can I set his 'death age' to something ridiculously high?

Nope.

Will it be possible to mod in female generals or faction leaders?

Possibly, but only for an entire faction at a time. The models and so on which are used by campaign-map objects are set up in the descr_sm_*** text files.

Will it be possible to mod in MTW-style 'glory goals', or at least (heavily) mod the victory conditions of Rome?

'Glory Goals' not, but you can change the victory conditions. They are in the descr_strat.txt file, near the top. There are a bunch of undocumented ones which do not involve becoming emperor, for campaigns where it is not appropriate. I'll look into digging out the exact syntax.

Is it possible to include a Senate-like faction, which cannot be assailed without popular support and which makes requests or demands of various factions?

The behaviour of the Senate is unique and cannot be assigned to other factions, and is linked to the senate faction id.

Does the presence of an officer in a unit (i..e centurions & signifers in legionary cohorts) confer any morale/combat bonuses to the unit or are they just for show? If the former is true can these bonuses be modified for each type of officer?

They do look cool, don't they... but they are mostly for show. However, they do get an extra two hit points, so they're worth more than a regular soldier on the battlefield. Interestingly being close to a unit marked with the 'command' attribute does confer a morale bonus - for example, the Legionary First Cohort.

what thing would you dare the mod community to mod?

The whole Rome team is really waiting to see what the community is going to come up with, and we do follow closely the work by people like Vercingetorix (quite clever, isn't he) on the technical side, and things like the realism mod on the gameplay side. If I had to pick one that I'd like to see people attempt, it's a Lord of the Rings complete conversion - the engine is fantastically well suited to it, and it's something we can't do due to licensing issues.

[tombom]

Thanks for the reply Jerome :)

Nice to know that another patch is in the works and you're hoping to release the abttle editor with it.

[l3th4l]

i have a question concerning custom effects.
a couple of guys over at the twcenter forums including me are trying to figure (sp?) out how the effects (particle) system works. we have been able to create some custom effect but we are clueless as to how the effects are triggered. in other words we can replace/edit existing effects like the effects that occur when projectile hit but not add new ones. it is our understanding that there must be hidden tags/triggers like flaming_man_effect which oviously triggers one effect in descr_burning_men_effect_final.txt. is there a chance you might tell us where to find these tags or could you tell us for example how to link en effect to.. lets say an animation?

oh, and please excuse my english.. not an native speaker ;)

[Spino]

Does the presence of an officer in a unit (i..e centurions & signifers in legionary cohorts) confer any morale/combat bonuses to the unit or are they just for show? If the former is true can these bonuses be modified for each type of officer?

They do look cool, don't they... but they are mostly for show. However, they do get an extra two hit points, so they're worth more than a regular soldier on the battlefield. Interestingly being close to a unit marked with the 'command' attribute does confer a morale bonus - for example, the Legionary First Cohort.

Excellent! Yes, they look very cool, so much so that every pre & post Marian reform legionary unit in the game deserves to have them. Now that I know they don't boost a unit's combat ratings I'll mod them in. And I did know about the command status of Legionary First Cohorts. Thanks for the response!

[Midnight]

Will it be possible to include custom wonders of the world?

[SpencerH]

Would CA be so kind and move as many as they can (all would be the best!) actually hardcoded values/constants from the RTW exe file into an editable text file, to allow us to modify them if we really need/want to?

There's over 500k of setup scripts open to modding and you want more?!? Well, we'll see what can be done. All constants would be a bit optimistic, as there are an awful lot of them, but we may be able to extern a few more things.

Jerome

Glad to see y'all here. Contributing to these threads goes a long way toward releiving tension amongst the disgruntled (even mildly disgruntled). I'd like to point out to the moderators here that Jerome has provided a wealth of info here that isnt apparent to people who havent visited this modding thread (I'm only here because I'm looking for a way to turn off the damn floating pop-ups on the strat map).

I guess the request for moving the hardcoded values to a text file is based upon the fact that most of the game parameters that 'old vets' have the most problems with (such as cav turn speeds) appear to be hardcoded.

I havent done much to TW (yet) but have some experience modding CIV so my question is this, given that the game was 'meant' to be modded why are some things hardcoded at all. Going back to my CIV experience, the arbitrary nature of whether a game component was hardcoded never failed to amaze me. For example, the early CIV3 versions had limits on the numbers of units because a file 'somewhere' had a numerical limit. There was no reason to set the number at 80, it just was. From reading here, y'all have set a unit limit to 300. Is there a reason for that?

Just to be clear, I'm not complaining about this. I'm not a programmer and I'm trying to get some insight into the kinds of decisions that are made for my own interest.

[Jagger]

Jerome perhaps you can help me here.

It seems to me that snow covers way too much of Europe during the winter. So I decided to try to change the snow coverage.

First, I went to the descr_climates folder. I started experimenting. First, I removed "winter" from the temperate_grasslands_fertile climate area. Perfect on the first try. On the strategy map, primarily mountains and closely surrounding areas in Europe remain in snow during the winter-plus a good chuck of Russian. In the changed areas of the strat map, trees remain covered in snow but the ground is green. I like it.

So I test a battle in the newly altered areas. Not good. The battle map is complete blinding snow.

Next I go into the descr_geography file. Each climate type has different textures assigned dependent on whether it is summer or winter. OK, maybe this is it. For temperature_grassland_fertile, I replace the winter textures of grass, rocks, etc with summer textures. One texture is a pure snow texture. I remove it as well. I leave the winter "tree" and "shrub" textures. Back to test it. No go...still all blinding winter battlemap.

So then I go to the actual terrain TGA's contained in Data/battlefield/ temperate_grassland_fertile folder. Again the TGA's are divided into summer and winter folders. I replace the winter TGA's with summer TGA's. This has got to do the job. Back to battlefield test, sheeshhh...still blinding snow everywhere!!!

Ok, I have spent several hours this morning on this. Any ideas where I am going wrong???