What i think will happen with modding M2TW

[alpaca]

Or take Chivalry mod. It looks utterly gorgeous, I agree. And I agree Caius would have not bothered doing it if he could not use it to showcase his amazing skinning ability. But the concept of such a mod focussed on a particular part of the world, covering particular conflicts, with just a couple of factions etc is still a good and worthwhile concept.

I think you mean The Crusades.
Anyways, I'll be modding MTW2 because as a scripter I can already see it will allow me much more than RTW

[Lord Zimoa of Flanders]

Not really less dramatic - not much, anyway. A Rome mod - dead; ancient mod - dead; LotR mod - dead; any mods that require the ability to change models in some substantial way are going to be dead in the water.

A very sad and disheartning prospective, but the truth nevertheless unless they will release them in time.

[Bwian]

Lord Zimoa is exactly right about what I was saying.

The MTW modding field would be extremely limited if the only mods possible were medievel mods, using the stock units and buildings. You can re-balance....you can tweak stats....and then what?

For those of us who want to add new era's, build fantasy mods around our favourite fiction, or go into our own personal fantasy worlds....thats it.

Personally, I think there is an awful lot of pessimism, doom and general gloom that after a couple of weeks we don't have a full and functional toolkit to play with. People are commenting on how complex the models have become, and how you need more than one texture per model......that is NORMAL for most other games. The models and rigging is still far less complex than something like Unreal Tournament 2004.

The community cracked the code for RTW, and with the same determination and dedication, the same can be done. Quicker if CA help...but it's going to happen.

I'm building meshes ready for the day the Max plugin hit's the streets for MTW2.

[Darkarbiter]

who said theres not gonna be the ability to edit models and skins?

[Neon twilight]

who said theres not gonna be the ability to edit models and skins?

No one, but what is posted on the blog of CA is quite vague.

You can read the whole article here http://totalwardev.blogspot.com/


But what is subject of all this debate is this :

Meshes & Textures
The final area I wanted to talk about was the mesh/texture files used for soldier and siege engine models. These are a very different format to the CAS files with which Rome modders will be familiar. Currently, modders will not be able to edit or replace these files.

This is because the format is optimised specifically for rendering. We made this decision to enable us to ramp up the level of detail of the battles while retaining a good level of performance. We are investigating options to allow the community to create their own mesh files.

It looks good but as you see they want to avoid concurency to copy them and this is were it may be problematic I think not especialy from CA but more from SEGA who knows .

[Bangers]

I believe it to be the nature of many programmers to see that as more of a challenge than a clear cut impossibility. Very few games are released with official tools, and although naturally it's on the rise because of the foreseeable advantages of it extending a products lifecycle, many dedicated and talented individuals put the time into reverse engineering many formats and packs in order to develop tools for the community.

You can already see this happening in the MTW2 community, if it wasn't for the announcement of the official unpacker, a third-party compatible unpacker would still be underdevelopment. It's good to see CA have already acknowledged this but decided to directly support the community by releasing official tools for their game, as well as their optimistic view on providing additional, more advanced support for modders in the future. :)

Secondly, I'am going to wait until a few people actually manage to get their hands on the model files from the packs and experiment before passing judgement on how supposedly 'complicated' the format is.

[Lord Zimoa of Flanders]

We will wait and see, if they do not release those tools it is game over, if they release, than please I hope for the community they do not wait to long. Developing modifications for other time frames and periods, building new models, textures and animations is very time consuming and needs stable and persistent modding teams. For a good quality you need at least 18 months of research, developing and building, so if they release within a year, most real challenging mods will be hopefully at the end of development between 24-36 months. The only problem is that, we can expect the new TW game and engine around the corner by that time.

And reversed community build tools are all very fine, but look at the RTW tools, with all respect to Vercingetorix and other community coders, he was the first to recognise they contained many bugs, so much so I know he asked CA for help as he hit a brick wall. He never got a reply, because of that it was allmost impossible and very time consuming to produce bug free animations, basically we could only change parts and had to bug hunt every single change we made to see what parts of the animation we could touch and what we had to leave alone. This is something we at The Lordz decided we will never do again. Unofficial tools are tricky and by far not the perfect solution, good we had them for RTW, but very frustrating to work with.

LZoF