Modding?

[Voivode of Romania]

I was just wondering about people modding MTW.

Does anyone know how to mod? What software is needed? How long does it take to create a basic mod? Can anyone make a mod?

[cegorach]

Hmm ??

I will answer this way:

1. YES

2. Check the forum for guides and tools

3. Basic 15 seconds. Anything larger - it depends...

4. Yes

[caravel]

Does anyone know how to mod?

Many of us have tried our hand at modding. Some have gone into more depth than others. There are several very good medieval era mods available and also a lot of total conversion mods. Have you checked out the MTW Mods forum?

What software is needed?

A basic text editor like wordpad, a paint program such as PSP or Photoshop and a few free tools available from the .org

How long does it take to create a basic mod?

A basic mod, probably only a few minutes, something slightly less basic, a few hours. Anything more adventurous and you're talking anything from weeks to years. It all depends on what you want to do, which is?

Can anyone make a mod?

Anyone with the will to try, and to learn new things, with an average computer knowledge and a lot of patience.



Gah! beaten to it by... a modder of all people?!

[macsen rufus]

As Caravel said.....

...a lot of patience

This is probably the most essential part! After that the modding guides in the appropriate sub-forum are essential reading. There is a huge amount of accumulated knowledge there, and I'm still amazed at the effort and determination of the pioneers who did all the "reverse engineering" of the MTW system.

Tools you really should have:
* Shogun's ReadBIF utility - allows you to convert between the .BIF file format used by MTW for review panel icons, info pics and unit animations and .BMP format, which will then allow you to edit in standard image processing software (I use Photoshop as that's what I'm used to and it's powerful enough to handle lighting effects, control pallettes etc, and will also save in .TGA format, which you'll need if you want to change battle flags and faction shields, for instance)
* Gnome Editor - allows you to open and edit the unit and building production files in an easy to understand format (although these are .txt files, the layout is tabbed, and it's so easy to make mistakes in a text editor, then suddenly your game stops working...) BUT having said that, you will also need to use a text editor (Notepad is fine) for copying and pasting entries, and CHECKING THAT GNOME HAS SAVED THE FILE CORRECTLY. Sometimes there's extra junk at the end from the clipboard that needs cutting out in Notepad before resaving.
* Ultimate Paint - for editing and converting images to .LBM format for battle unit icons.

To make life easier, a good spreadsheet like Excell (I use OpenOffice, which works just as well) comes in really handy when adding lists of names, setting region attributes, placing start units etc (the CONCATENATE function and FILL command do so much hard work for you!)

A handy tip to see how it's done is to have both MTW VI installed, and a previous mod - this will show up where the changes are if you compare and contrast, and will allow you to figure out how the mod was done (and you can also pick up a few tricks of the trade along the way).

But as with all things - start small, work upwards. There's an excellent little guide on adding a new faction available in the modding sub-forum. If you work through that and reproduce its example of adding the Dutch to the Mediaeval scenario you'll have really cut your teeth, and hopefully whetted your appetite for greater things!

And of course, there's always lots of help and advice available from regulars on these forums. Good luck, and welcome to the org!

[EatYerGreens]

the layout is tabbed, and it's so easy to make mistakes in a text editor, then suddenly your game stops working...) BUT having said that, you will also need to use a text editor (Notepad is fine) for copying and pasting entries, and CHECKING THAT GNOME HAS SAVED THE FILE CORRECTLY. Sometimes there's extra junk at the end from the clipboard that needs cutting out in Notepad before resaving.

I'm glad you've mentioned this, as I've been meaning to ask...

The stuff at the end of my PROD files isn't quite 'junk', it's just page after page of carriage-return characters. If I put a cursor at the end of the proper data, then press and hold the "Page Down" key, it is a full 10 seconds before it reaches the bottom of the document (on a 3Ghz PC)!

Is it safe to strip all that out?


I tried the "Add New Faction" tutorial myself, just yesterday. It wasn't too bad an experience overall but this is speaking as someone well familiar with computers.

The only real problem with the exercise was ME. I was "ever so good" for the first dozen or so edit & test-run sessions but tiredness was setting in and I got progressively more impatient to get the job finished. So I started making two, then three edits per test session (AND skipping 'incremental backups'), just as it was getting to the most technically tricky part. Inevitably, there were a few "unexplained" End-turn type CTD's but then I began to get useful "UNKOWN FACTION...Row xx Col yy" dialogues at startup and I was able to track down several missing commas in the PROD files, based on what those said (Town_watch and Royal_Palace are surprisingly tricky in the faction-specifications column).

The unexplained CTD's themselves were probably not even related to the tutorial. It had more to do with turning a fully working Sahara region into one which can only be invaded by sea and which gives the rebels about 10k per year. I'd only disabled the SetBorderInfo entries in one direction. Doh!

There is a minor contradiction in the section relating to SetStartLeader which leads to the first heir having the same forename as the initial king. There's an ongoing thread in the mods section about this problem, so I won't discuss it further here.

[caravel]

I'm glad you've mentioned this, as I've been meaning to ask...

The stuff at the end of my PROD files isn't quite 'junk', it's just page after page of carriage-return characters. If I put a cursor at the end of the proper data, then press and hold the "Page Down" key, it is a full 10 seconds before it reaches the bottom of the document (on a 3Ghz PC)!

Is it safe to strip all that out?

I've found that even deleting one of those tabs damages the file. I'd just leave it. The trick with editing the unit prod and build prod files is to never delete anything, not even tabs, only replace entries.

[EatYerGreens]

I'd like to simultaneously thank you for the advice but also let you know that I did a trial-run anyway. I made a backup of the files, in that state and tested it out with the excess stuff stripped out. (it was all carriage returns, not tab characters)

What I was still dubious about was, about a page or two down from the data were two rows of three of those box-shaped non-characters (I'll use D's to illustrate)
----------

D D D

D D D

---------

but I chopped them anyway, along with the rest.

The campaign still loaded okay but, so far, I'm only interested in the heir names problem and never progressed more than about 1 full turn. I'd really need to let it autorun for half the day to confirm that no lurking problems remained.

So, a caveat for anyone else - my junk characters are not necessarily the same as yours and I was lucky... this time.

Backup what you have, chop out the suspect stuff, then test thouroughly.

[caravel]

Programs like the gnome editor appear to use those extra tabs to facilitate the addition of new units. They are absent from the build prod file though. I tend to edit that with a text editor anyway, as gnome has an annoying habit of corrupting it a lot more than the unit prod. I've noticed some of those box characters in the unit prod before. I leave them there as they're not read AFAIK.

[macsen rufus]

Hi EYG,

I've never seen the pages full of CRs but the three little boxes do occur regularly, and they do cause crashes. Another handy tip: do your editing in Gnome, save, re-open the saved file in Notepad, kill off garbage, resave, OPEN A NEW GNOME editor (leave the first one OPEN) and reload the file. If you have fatal garbage in the file, or if deleting it affected the format, the second editor won't load it, but you still have a copy open. There's a few times I've closed Gnome and wished I hadn't as I was unable to reopen the file, meaning I've had to go back to a too-old backup and re-edit recent changes....

The sort of "garbage" I most often see is a short section of an entry from further up the file tagged on at the end. This is usually separated by a blank line from the last visible characters of the real data. But as Caravel warned the tabs are very important, and the real data can have trailing tabs, so don't delete everything back to the last visible character of real data, only to the first visible character of garbage. Since following this rule I've had far fewer problems!

If in doubt, take a look at the end of a default prod file using Notepad, and highlight the end of the data to the end of the file -- you should see a section of "blank" data highlighted.

[caravel]

This is why I always look my build and unit prod files over using a text editor such as notepad++. With this I can reveal tab and space locations. Every tab signifies a column (in the tab delimited list), removing a tab, any tab, sends the whole list completely out of sync.

[Raz]

I always delete those lines anyway. Whenever I put a new unit in though, I just copy and paste another unit and edit it in gnome, rechecking the file after editing just to make sure that no other lines (or characters) have been added.