Alexander:Total War - update on Max script

[Duke John]

The reason is that CA is constantly upgrading his CAS editor. It happened with BI with the added RUM files. I believe they also used it for Spartan and now they have a new version for M2:TW. It's nice that they try to get the best out of it, but it's just bad habit not to say anything about the changes. It also happened with modding campaigns with the sudden need to have a map_heights.hgt file.

It is starting to look more and more as if CA sees modding support as including lots of things in text files and perhaps a few textures. The rest is all put into filetypes that we cannot read without having a programmer hacking the files. They responded to how moddeable R:TW would be with something like: "You can change the look, but not how the left foot looks like." That came across to me as being able to change the texture but not the model. And I was right. CA never intended to let the community change the models. It excluded the battlemap and campaignmap editor from public use.

Vercingetorix dived into the filetypes and made a few tools and everyone was happy. But it was sheer luck that the community had programmer who could make them. The CAS tool is far from perfect and if we had more such programmers than someone else would have helped Vercingetorix into making it flawless.

Imagine having no CAS editor or even the PAK tool. The only thing you could do was editing the textures of units and the text files. That is how CA thinks about modding support.

Meanwhile the hopefulls keep posting new mod ideas for M2:TW without putting any attention to the past.