Thoughts on modding in MTW2

[zakalwe]

One thing i really liked with MTW was that the BKB and VH mods were very much expansions of the original game. Rather than changing alot of the existing game they added - more factions, more units, more provinces, etc. I thought that this worked extremely successfully.

The far superior graphics of RTW has meant that historically accurate appearances have come to the fore and alot of time is spent re-skinning and changing the existing units. I imagine that this is an enjoyable and a creative job, but it does take time.

I'm hoping that one of the modding teams out there is taking the approach is primarily adding good content and secondly tweaking and changing the existing elements.

For instance - if we do have no hard code on faction numbers - it would be great to see a mod team work simply on producing an Aragon faction or a Kiev faction which can then be incorporated into other mods.

But this is just me being selfish and hoping

[PROMETHEUS]

Another thing that could be problematic for non Medieval era mods will be videos , how many of the modders have video editing and 3d creating movie abilities ? Since the Diplomacy seems will have video sequences or animated things this could be a problem for non Medieval settings....

[sunsmountain]

By the time you complete the artwork the next CA game already has a new graphics engine.

Community requests:

- Bug fixing, primarily to fix CA typing errors in character traits, buildings.
- missing faction data, making sure every faction has a faction leader pic & initial map area
- missing artwork in the original game: Glossy textures, LOD for all models, some extra added skeletons, animation data, etc.
- mods that help the AI... this is very game dependent.

Other, successful projects have been, primarily due to a better unit balancing, hitpoints, morale, etc., due to game speed and due to historical accuracy:

Rome: Total Realism
SPQR: Total War
Europa Barbarorum
Darth mod

and some others, probably. Mods that would have been nice because of artwork, if it would have been finished on time:

Blue Lotus: Total War*
4th age, LOTR Total War**

* has actually been finished, but the site is down very often.
** will appear as a serie of custom battles against the forces of Mordar, etc.

[Dol Guldur]

Fourth Age has also a demo, and will be a mini-campaign and eventually a full campaign. I believe lotr:tw also has a campaign (using me:tw's map) and is not therefore the "series of custom battles" it was initially intended to be.

Those who expect such full-conversions into such genres to be completed by now do not live in the real world. And that has been most of us at some time. One can only imagine such undertakings will take a great deal longer in M2TW :(

[Hepcat]

The best idea is probably to start early, if you start planning the mod out before M2TW comes out then you should be more focused in what you need to do and (hopefully) work more efficiently because you have already worked out what is going in it.

[Ra-az]

I think Zakalwe still has a point, especially for the tools.

I think that the people that build these tools or could potentially build these tools should get together now. Just get the people resources ready so that when the game comes out work on the tools can start immediatly. I think the main thing is the tools

My experience is that the information that is available, is still hard to find on the net, I have Googled a long long time and read many a dead forum before getting the knowledge that I have now (witch still is not a lot). There's so much non-sense about. But there is some stuff (like those 5 video tutorials on modelling) that saved me al ot of time.

People that are willing to participate in building the hard stuff should be able to find the place where they can participate.

Take me for instance...

I'm interested in modding and game design, I''ve gone a long way in a short time with modding Total war. Personally I don't care witch version I play (RTW, MTW2) as long as I can mod just about everything in the game.

I'm a pretty good programmer (OpenGl also) I'm not a genius but I usually get there in the end.
But I usually only READ the forums I never participate because as I said there's so many people that clutter up the forums with bs that has nothing to do with the thread subject etc. Let's face it I'm not a real forum/chat kind of guy, I usually think I can spend my time more effectively. If you could get more people like me actively participating (they're out there) with guys like Vercingetorix I think a lot's possible.

To sum up:

My Vision to game modding strategy as a community:

Concentrate on the tools.
Form team a.s.a.p.
Strictly mantained forum or preferably other means of communicating within the team.
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