Tuesday's Report from Brisbane

[Epistolary Richard]

This time I’m focusing on modding ‘straight out of the box’ – a few of the things that you can do as soon as you’ve installed the game (presuming that you didn’t actually want to have a go at it first!)



The Battle Editor

This is a feature many of you will be familiar with from Rome, and it’s good to see that it’s still included.

The Battle Editor allows you to create your own Historical Battles. It allows you to choose a battlemap tile, alter the terrain, buildings and vegetation on it, deploy each side’s forces and set time, weather and victory conditions. We also discovered that the battlemaps we created with it can also be re-integrated into the campaign game as custom tiles.



How to activate the Battle Editor

As before with Rome, the Battle Editor needs to be activated before it can be accessed. This is done by adding two new lines to the medieval2.preference.cfg file

[features]
editor = true

With these lines in – when you launch the game, click on Options and the Battle Editor will appear.




Clicking on that will take you through to:



Do note the warning – just as with Rome at this time the Battle Editor is an internal tool CA created which they’ve kindly given us access to in order to allow us to make our mods. It requires steps be taken in a certain order to work and requires some dedication to become comfortable with. It says for Advanced Users for a reason!

You can either load a Battle already created or you can create a new one by choosing the tile you want to base it on and clicking on Next. This takes you through to the Battle Editor itself:



This will all look very familiar to users of the Rome Battle Editor so I’ll just highlight a few of the options and the differences.

Firstly, now when you place a building it actually attaches the real structure to the cursor so you can see how it will look in the terrain before you place it (in Rome it only appeared as green squares before you placed it). On the map above, I’ve now placed a monastery down the slope:



The ground is now more independent of the buildings – meaning that you can adjust the ground level without moving the height of the building at the same time. This makes it a lot easier to integrate the buildings into the terrain than in Rome, as you can see here as I smooth out the bumps.




Hit Control + F5 with the texture tool and you’ll see something like the below. Red denotes impassible terrain, yellow terrain where movement penalties apply and green where movement is unrestricted. These are all definable in descr_pathfinding where it can be individually adjusted for infantry, cavalry, elephants and different type of siege weapons.




You can now also add a variety of bridges to the map:



Then it’s just a matter of adding the factions who will be fighting there, their deployment zones, their units and victory conditions:



And there you have a whole new historical battle!




As with Rome, you can then go into the text files the Battle Editor creates, such as the descr_battle file and tweak units and characters and also add battle scripting that go to provide the cinematics and specific tactics and events used for this conflict.

A bit more technical detail:
- Structures can now be released and turned after they’ve been placed.
- You can swap between different tooltips with the [ and ] keys
- You can change the ‘strength’ of some actions (such as raising/lowering terrain] with the , and . keys. High strength will make the land rise and drop quicker. Shift+ those keys will change the strength in units of ten.
- The height of buildings themselves can be controlled by moving the mouse with the shift button pressed.
- Trees are now added through the Vegetation tool, rather than as part of a texture and therefore the Update Tree Outlines is redundant and deactivated.
- All structures including settlements are added through an Add World Feature tool and therefore the Add Settlement Plan and Add Ambient tools are deactivated.
- Roads are now all drawn by hand so the road tool is deactivated.
- There is now a Plateau tool which further helps to manipulate the terrain.
- Currently, the camera functions as it does in battles – limiting the height from which you can view the battleground

The gorgeous battlemaps of M2 come at a price though and a full historical battle file now weighs in over 10meg, most of which as before is the .wfc file, so they’re definitely worth tinkering with to get them right.





Mod Switch

Another vital feature for modders from Rome is in Med2 but again in a slightly different way. The Mod Switch allows you to have a separate directory of your modded files in your main Medieval 2 Total War directory and by launching the game with the right cfg line the game will access the files within the mod folder before looking in the main game directory – allowing you to supercede even packed files without problem.

The best way to set this up is as follows:

Create a new bat file in the top level Medieval 2 Total War folder (the one with the .exe in it) called Launch_MyMod.bat

Inside it should read:

medieval2.exe @mymod.cfg


Then create copy your medieval2.preference.cfg file and rename it mymod.cfg and include the following lines:

[features]
mod = mymod

Then create a folder in that directory called mymod and in that have your data folder with its modded files exactly mimicking the directory structure in the main game folder.

As you can see using a bat file to launch the game using different .cfg files allows you to easily swap between different mods and game configurations without wholesale duplication of your data folder, risking direct file overwrites or copying and overwriting your original .cfg file.

As with Rome, the mymod folder needs to include certain game files from the world folder to function. Currently, it also requires sounds/events.dat and sounds/events.idx to function. This should be borne in mind when writing mod installers or alternatively in install instructions.


Unlocking all unlockable factions

Hey, I know it wasn’t hard in Rome – but now it’s even easier. Just add the following to you cfg file:

[misc]
unlock_campaign = true

Extended Bug Tracking

A great improvement upon show_err in Rome – add the following to your cfg file:

[log]
to = logs/system.log.txt
level = * error

And the game will generate a list of the errors in text files it recognises and generate a text file report. Ideal for mod bug hunting! I used it myself and picked up a bunch of mistakes I’d made in a matter of minutes that would have had me scratching my head for hours otherwise.

For even more detail you can put in:

[log]
to = logs/system.log.txt
level = * trace


Windows mode and no movies

Non-modders never understand why we use –ne and –nm in our Rome command lines. All I say to them is that they don’t relaunch their game thirty times a session!

Again, add to your cfg file:

[video]
windowed = true
movies = false