an attempt to animate spiders

[Bwian]

Can't help wondering, Jerome ...

When you and the team created RTW, did you envisage entering into a discussion on the possibility flying units, in a thread about giant spiders

[JeromeGrasdyke]

I can honestly say it never crossed my mind We did very early on consider flying units - briefly - but came to the conclusion that it would not be possible to justify the additional complexity and development time for Rome for a feature which would never be used in the shipping product. It's like so many other things where you think "now that'd be really, really cool" and then cold, hard reality taps you on the shoulder and you have to look carefully at whether you are getting value for your precious development time.

It's the same with things like modelling tools integrated into the game, and once the number of campaign maps the original game was going to ship with ended up being reduced to one, support for the campaign editor similarly declined, which is one reason why it was never released. And if you look closely at the text files you may still see hints for city buildings which you could hide troops in, which were going to be located in set spots within the layouts, or the Port settlement plans, or the on-battlefield supply trains or marching forts.

In the end though there were so many new features which went into Rome that i'm amazed we got as much done as we did... 3D men, procedural battlefields, a grid-based campaign map, hugely more complicated cities and sieges, much more complex interaction between campaign and battle, a totally new economic and battle simulation -- in retrospect it was a bit of a monster project, hehe. But as with all difficult things, also a really fun challenge, although it did give me a few grey hairs along the way.

[edyzmedieval]

In the end though there were so many new features which went into Rome that i'm amazed we got as much done as we did... 3D men, procedural battlefields, a grid-based campaign map, hugely more complex cities and sieges, much more complex interaction between campaign and battle, a totally new economic and battle simulation -- in retrospect it was a bit of a monster project, hehe.

Indeed.

But what happened with the testing?! Why are so many bugs?!

Never mind, really interesting idea with the spyders. How's about making a Star Wars: Total War?!

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Yeah, the bugs. That was a major disappointment in some ways, and in others also a technical accomplishment. Part of the problem is the scale of a Total War game in and of itself - these games are huge, come in two parts which with most other developers would end up being two complete, seperate games, and on top of that include some very complex game mechanics on both the campaign and battle sides.

We changed our working methodology quite a bit for Rome, and it paid off to the extent that the Rome bug database ended up being smaller than the Medieval one (while the code was substantially larger), the hardware compatibility was generally excellent and the number of crash bugs and severe problems very low. What kinda bit us in the end though was that a relatively low number of chunky mechanics and AI bugs and a few largeish technical issues (the load-save one for example) slipped the net... but in the greater scope of things, 50 or so bugs is not many

It was unfortunate that our publishing agreement was quite restrictive with respect to patch creation, and that a few of the bugs that did get through were so substantial.

[Frans Ubberdork]

I for one love Rome Total War. I played Shogun Total war on my older computer alot. Then I bought a new computer so I could run Doom3 before it was released, and the first game I bought was MTW...wow lots of fun, killing prisoners on the battlefield..YIKES.

Not long after that Doom3 and RTW were released fairly close together. I bought both...I have played RTW pretty much non-stop and I have yet to finish Doom3. I love Doom3 but I like strat. games more. I have mods, skins and all kinds of changes from Bwain and lots of other modders. When BI comes out I will get it as soon as it is released.

Thank you for all the work you have put into RTW, it has been my favorite strat game since X-Com (the first one).

I think the modability in these kind of games is very important and maybe you guys can push for even more on the next Total War game. Moddability sells games along with good gameplay.

RTW is my favorite game.

Thomas

[edyzmedieval]

At least it's good that no severe bugs that caused crashes. :)

And watch the BI bugs!!!!

[radcan]

Just an idea for flying units is it possible to have them say flying as there kind of idle anim and then as they charge to have them come down and land kida in the unit and then combat on foot so to speak ? just a crazy idea of mine .

[Geoffrey S]

It was unfortunate that our publishing agreement was quite restrictive with respect to patch creation, and that a few of the bugs that did get through were so substantial.

And now SirRethcir has added some more, by the looks of things!

[SigniferOne]

Jerome, thanks for the great candidness in your responses, on everything -- it's great!!! Please excuse me if I take this opportunity to sneak in a question, because you did mention the campaign editor: is there ANY chance of a SETTLEMENT editor being shipped in? It would add INESTIMABLY to the mods that are created, and I know that not only have you guys released one for MTW:VI, but also that you have made one in-house for RTW already... so it's a little lonely hope in my heart that keeps a small flame burning at the foot of the Jerome shine.

[Razor1952]

I would also like to thank Jerome for his candidness. RTW IS an awesome project when you see it compared to most other games and the moddability is something special a thing which is now only becoming evident. See RTR and Darth Mods as examples. I see many other mods in the future and heck I reckon some may even make it commercially by themselves making RTW a landmark in games platforms and reflecting great forethought and credit on its programmers. I hope your bosses are happy.!

I would also like to say I admire the way the RTW team has stuck with the forums despite many myopic criticisms.

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Thanks for the sentiment guys. However it may look from time to time, all of us here at CA *do* care about the fans, and we do our best to leave the doors open for people to tweak and mod and tinker to their hearts content.

Please excuse me if I take this opportunity to sneak in a question, because you did mention the campaign editor: is there ANY chance of a SETTLEMENT editor being shipped in?

Well, the way the settlements were done was by constructing them from stand-in pieces in Max, exporting a .cas and then running a small utility called cas_converter on it which would generate a large chunk of output for inclusion in descr_settlement_plans.txt ... nothing as complex as a whole "settlement editor" was ever written. But I will discuss releasing the utility and a sample settlement with El Queso Grande - no guarantees as always, as cheese is a curious substance and moves in mysterious ways ;)

[Dromikaites]

It's the same with things like modelling tools integrated into the game, and once the number of campaign maps the original game was going to ship with ended up being reduced to one, support for the campaign editor similarly declined, which is one reason why it was never released. And if you look closely at the text files you may still see hints for city buildings which you could hide troops in, which were going to be located in set spots within the layouts, or the Port settlement plans, or the on-battlefield supply trains or marching forts.

Even though it's too bad that those features didn't make it to the final product, you've done a really great game, Jerome. Speaking of abandoned features, do you happen to know what happened with spawn_character and spawn_army commands? Are they part of those abandoned features?

More speciffic questions:

1) spawn_character works OK for diplomats, spies and assasins. I works halfway when trying to spawn a captain or general (family member). A model af a soldier does show up on the campaign map but doesn't have a flag and seems to be just another piece of landscape. Since it does show up, maybe we don't use the right syntax for the command?

2) spawn_army command returns complaint about not recognizing the token "unit". To me this means that the command is recognized as a valid one and parsed till it gets to "unit". So it was implemented up to a pint. Again, is there a correct syntax for this command?

Thank you and looking forward to BI.

[SigniferOne]

So, any status on the Queso? :) I mean he is El Grande, after all.

[lt1956]

Jerome, thanks for all your support, you have been really good about helping us out when we need it.

These tools if allowed will help with that wonderful Camp you had for the romans that was not used. The pathfinding is all off and clipping through the corners arent great either. lol

I gotta ask though, why did you guys abandon the Original roman camp for the smaller one?

And a question about BI coming out. I read that some features of BI will be available in RTW acting like a 1.3 patch if BI is installed. Will the naming Legions and battle AI be one of those carry over features?

I hope they let you release the tool for us.

Thanks,

Lt1956

[JeromeGrasdyke]

Well, it turns out that the cas_converter utility currently also does a number of jobs for Spartan: Total Warrior, and contains a lot of proprietary things which we can't release into the public domain. So that scuppers that idea.

But our artists assure me that it would not be that hard to write a max script which does more or less the same job, ie scanning through the list of geometries and outputting a set of names, positions and angles as text for copy-and-pasting into descr_settlements.txt... for the time being I will have to leave that as an exercise for the reader, as max scripting is not really my strong point ^^

As to what's going to change with BI, well, essentially the Rome dataset will run through the BI exe. Some of the text files have changed format - not that many, but there were changes to descr_strat.txt for example, and installing BI will update your Rome data with these changed files. Hopefully this will not make too much work for you guys, but there will be some mods which will not support rtw 1.3 straight away...

But that does mean that all AI improvements, bug fixes and so on will become available in the Rome campaigns. Most of the new BI features like Hordes are controlled via options specified in the text files, and so can be individually switched on and off in future mods. Also, the new exe's will support keeping sets of save games, replays and so on for each mod, through the same mechanism that's used to seperate out the BI information from the old Rome information.

[Lord Adherbal]

little question: can a player choose to play RTW or BI without existing the game, simular to the Eras in MTW ? Or does it require restarting the game ?

[edyzmedieval]

Good info Jerome. Thanks a lot.

May I ask you, what's your favourite mod?!

[SigniferOne]

Well, it turns out that the cas_converter utility currently also does a number of jobs for Spartan: Total Warrior, and contains a lot of proprietary things which we can't release into the public domain. So that scuppers that idea.

But our artists assure me that it would not be that hard to write a max script which does more or less the same job, ie scanning through the list of geometries and outputting a set of names, positions and angles as text for copy-and-pasting into descr_settlements.txt... for the time being I will have to leave that as an exercise for the reader, as max scripting is not really my strong point ^^.

:(

Do any of these artists visit the forums... so that we can ask them more questions about how this works? I've half a mind to learn max script just for this one task. Also, if the cas_converter has lots of proprietary things, doesn't that mean it has a lot of complicated things? Or are those additional functionalities, and the actual task of exporting names and positions is still simple?