What i think will happen with modding M2TW

[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

[DukeofSerbia]

I am very skeptical about modding MII TW. If mesh/texture can’t be modded not even in future (one year) then Hosted Modifications subforum can be shut down for every conversion which will need new meshes and textures. Mods just use space in servers for nothing and community useless waits for great modification.

I don’t care any more will be modding possible. Europa Universalis III comes in market for two months. There can be modded everything; I will again easily create my own Realism mod, so why should I bother with MII TW?

Even now when CA is part of SEGA realm, it seems like both companies are (still) feared from nonexistent competition. I can’t explain it different (if we release code somebody will steal it and create better game).

Why should they allow modding of golden hen? Somebody (other companies) can steal golden hen. Calculation is easy: they know how many copies of RTW and BI they sold, how much time mods were downloaded and calculation probably said that profit margin from mods is irrelevant (I mean impact of mods in number of sold copies). The risk from stealing of golden hen (M2TW) is greater than impact of potential mods will have on numbers of sold copies.

I absolutely understand CA and SEGA (before that Activision).

P.S.
That are just my thoughts as student of economy.

I know what you are saying, and you are probably right, but isn't it a little bit ironic? The "hardcore" TW fans, among which I count myself, bitch and moan about the limitations of the AI and lack of realism of TW while conceding the graphics were pretty and state of the art. Later, when M2TW comes out and (worst case scenario) they find they can't change the graphics, they abandon modding the game at all.

I will say what an irony is. Irony is that CA didn’t provide any tools for modding RTW but in another hand in totalwar.com they advertise great modifications for RTW and BI like RTR.

With M2TW, we have better AI but (maybe) can't change the graphics. With RTW, we have inferior AI but can make even better eye candy. So the hardcore choose to stick to modding RTW. I'm not wanting personally criticise someone, but it seems almost hypocritical. To repeat - I am not criticising anyone: I guess it's human nature, we are preprogrammed to like eye candy, just like we are preprogrammed to have a sweet tooth.

AI is just maybe better from RTW but 1.5 and 1.6 patches improved both RTW and BI.
Look FIFA by EA and ISS Pro Evolution by Konami – the first always had much better graphics but because lack of gameplay ISS now plays everybody.
And CA had no direct competition in their market segment! In FPS market segment where competition is ruthless many games are open for modding.

Well personally, with the news that diplomacy and ai will be moddable to some extent in M2TW, i think it would be silly for modders not to mod M2Tw, as it will allow for so many more possibilities.

This is boring.

[Myrddraal]

how much time mods were downloaded and calculation probably said that profit margin from mods is irrelevant

This simply isn't true btw.

[DukeofSerbia]

This simply isn't true btw.

Interesting. Lusted in twcenter claim it.

Thanks anyway.

[Lusted]

Well i believe the issue with the models is to do with possible legal issues as its something new CA has done just for M2TW, but hopefully they will release a tool to allow us to edit the models. CA are certainly taking more interest in supporting the community, hopefully they will supply more tools than just the unpacker that we know is going to come with the first patch.

This is boring.

So being able to mod the ai and diplomacy to possibly act how you want it to is boring?

Lusted in twcenter claim it.

Im guessing, i do not have any hard facts.

[Neon twilight]

Agree with DukeOfSerbia

The most number of users just read what is behind the box, buy play, enjoy or not then go for another game, that's why PC game sales are going down as console sales are getting even better. Regarding mods people have often the same reactions : "oh no, mods aren't safe it often bugs and they have no guarantee, I don't want to **** my PC for this", "if you mix with the game files you'll break the original gameplay made by professionals" they simply can't belive that something made by an ammateur for no money can be better than something they paid for but it's more a society problem than anything esle.