History of TW modding...

[eadingas]

Well, I'm a relative noob to TW modding, I haven't been modding either Shogun or Medieval, so I don't know anything about how times were back then... I have these few questions, which would help me set my expectations a bit...

- when did the first full mods start appearing after release of vanilla game? Was it a matter of weeks, months, or years?
- what was CA's communication with the modding community? did they answer the queries eventually, or were you left in the dark with some things forever?
- when the patches and updates arrived, did they significantly change modding possibilities? I heard that VI introduced some big changes to the engine that helped mod more things...

[Silver Rusher]

I don't actually know of any real mods before VI, but I think that mods really did start to happen in the TW games with the arrival of VI. I haven't actually heard of any overhauls for STW.

[TosaInu]

Hello,

The first mods were made in January 2000 when the shogun alpha demo was released. I think it was Anjin san. The ability to do so was thanks to a crack made by Thorgrim (disabled a CRC preventing the use of custom files). Mod is a bit of a big word here, the demo offered 3 tuturial battles (~ compare to quick custom battles in RTW) and 3 maps. The game could also only have those 3 battles. So, what we did was making different army setups, swapping maps and making 'small' tweaks to maps (the mapeditor in the demo was actually pretty powerful, but also weird, so it took some time to figure it all out). Jeffe88 introduced bat files and this allowed to quasi create larger mods. I recall it was also him who figured out about weather effects. We found some special tricks by trial and error. Here are those old mods http://www.3ddownloads.com/totalwar/STW_Demo Shogcrack is required to run.

It was pretty basic though, speaking for myself, it was the best time I ever had around here. Everyone was looking forward to that first new game Shogun Totalwar and was just pleased with tiny things, forum accounts weren't passworded and no idea what a moderator is.

STW was released early summer 2000. I don't think anyone bothered to mod for a while, and why should we? STW was shipped and offered lots of fun. I reall it was Sonic_Nights from the zone (Italian site) who, after a few weeks/months asked whether it was possible to mod in STW. I had made a few mods in the alpha and tried whether those same things still worked in the full game http://www.3ddownloads.com/totalwar/...llKawanaka.zip they did.

The online players wanted some custom maps, so in fall 2000 working on that started. There were afaik some instructions on the official site in winter 2000 about how to use them, I'm sure there would be gems during the alpha days if any of us managed to understand it. We were really re-inventing the wheel using the demo editor, Kraellin added quite some knowledge. The expansion pack, shipped a year later, had a real map editor. Before that we had made 100 maps using the demo, including water, bridge, mountain, reinforement and flying horse maps. http://www.3ddownloads.com/totalwar/STW_WE/maps (the maps were served from another place back then).

STW WE offered some new edit options: unitstats and extra campaigns. The unitstats were blocked in the next patch, because of cheating reports in multi but were re-ativated again in the next patch.

More edit options, means that more people give it a shot and so we got more maps, tools (RSW bif, hecose campaigns) and campaigns. There was an extension on historical battles namely historical campaigns, which was a linkage of a few historical battles together.

I was thinking you could do something more with it and made Ikki http://www.3ddownloads.com/totalwar/STW_WE/hc It's a branched campaign, the outcome of a battle decides which battle will be next. It worked, but also didn't (only found that after it was released). STW WE wasn't really made for such a thing and it only works when you continue playing, some individual conflicts can take over one hour to resolve, so any player will quit and save , otherwise it would forget the progress status. Ikkibranches.zip contains an image to help play the scenario by playing the individual battles through the historical battles option.

Barocca was the first (afaik) to use RSW's bif tool to replace STW WE's naginata with the classic one.

Modding was picking up, and the lobby for moddingoptions (including mechanics) was intensified. It was not the first lobby though: Yama and TheDaimyo.

Lord Krazy added many new units to the MTW demo.

Hard to say whether any of the lobbies were the reason, as software is designed years in advance, but MTW offered much more and VI even more than that and modding was really booming. There was quite some valuable interaction with the devs (there always was): Giljaysmith, ECS, LongJohn and we got some official tools/templates. The total conversions, you could call that large mods, date from then.

-full mods appear. That's a hard call. Full mods are a MTW and mainly a VI thing. I think MTW modders can answer that better than I can. Months I'ld say.
-there was always communication. It was a bit less in the STW days because users were more focussed on playing the game than modding it. There was a CA organised contest for best map during winter 2000, but that faded. Interaction was at its best in 2003 for both MTW and VI.
-Yes, both patches and x-packs added mod options, quite some. It did happen once that a patch locked something because of a lobby about cheating.

I'm not really involved into RTW modding, it seems to me that it has a lot of potential but can use some refinements. RTW is a new branch on the development tree (unlike MTW/VI which was actually a refinement of STW) and needs some growing. How it grows depends on CA, but also on modders and users. Maybe it's all there already and just waits for some genius/hard worker to be discovered.

Have fun!