EB2 Dev Blog discussion

[QuintusSertorius]

It's funny, immediately after I posted that, I had another look at the Dev Blog thread itself (ie the one this thread is for discussion of) and the first post had a very good summary of where things were up to 18 months or so ago. It's notable that nothing has been posted there for months, possibly because of the effort required to put a preview together that's consistent with the ones already in there. Now I'm not asking for a weekly update on that whole list in the first post, but maybe a monthly summary of the change highlights. Not more than a paragraph or two, or a few bulleted lists saying "here's the major things we accomplished this month".

I appreciate there's the Twitter feed, but not only is it possible people aren't following it (I don't have a Twitter account, personally), but it isn't really collected/compiled/constructed into something meaningful. If anything the disconnect is that you've got another source of information that, barring the occasional post in the Twitter thread, isn't making its way back here. Again, I'm personally less interested in previews (I got the one I was most keen on - Pergamon - right at the start), especially if the creation of them takes people out of working on the mod, but summaries of what's been going on help build confidence that the momentum is being maintained. That's not to say mini-previews won't interest other people, especially if they're frequent enough to start generating that buzz we used to have around here.

Just to clarify, I'm not suggesting the team rush this or anything like that. I've waited this long and can continue waiting (I'm a father now, which I wasn't back in 2007/8 when I was first playing EB1, I barely notice the days going by any more!) because I know the finished product will have been worth it. I'm relieved that the team have managed to get it back on track and are so dedicated to that vision. Hell, some of the delays have been through adding even more richness to the experience, who can complain about that?

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well since I am mentioned I thought I'd clarify:

We have basically two kinds of "programmers". Those who do useful work on the mod itself. And me.

Me, I sort of run the tools department. The tools are about replacing the game itself for creating various binary blobs that the mod needs, wherever possible. Well that's not quite true. What the tools really are about is two things:

• Make sure that the mod actually will work out of the box when it is installed.
• Pruning and refining the mod so we apply as much of the tools (and resulting binary blobs) during development as well. This causes the team both joy and grief: joy when it works (far better than the game engine and bugs get caught), grief when bugs in the tools mess up the workflow. This is also about eliminating old cruft from the mod which we no longer use (or should use).

If that all pans out according to plan, the idea is that you can install the mod and get something quite close to installing an official expansion package instead of a copy of a development tree snapshot. Which should hopefully mean that the mod works out of the box, and installation is reasonably fool proof.

Now there are currently two big obstacles in this path (quite possibly more but right now these two are so big they kind of obscure any other ones that exist as well). One is in the form of a bunch of bytes from a largely reverse-engineered CAS (animation) file format as part of the animation packs used by M2TW. The other is the format of the skeletons in the skeleton packs, which is largely (if not almost entirely) unknown stuff.

So what am I working on when I have the time? On improvements to the existing tools to speed up building of the binary blobs (and also to make building an installer easier).

[burn_again]

I just dug out some of my EB1 saves from a few years ago and played a bit and immediately got back into that EB feeling. It will always be one of my absolute favourites, I had so many great hours playing this game. Thanks for that.
I check this forum every few months for news about EB2 and I have to say it is really amazing that you guys have managed to keep this going. I haven't posted anything in recent years, but I'm really looking forward to play EB2 whenever it's ready. It must be really difficult to manage a project of volunteers, who have real lives and real jobs, over such a long time, I admire your dedication. So don't get upset when people complain about waiting or lack of updates, every progress is quite an achievement and when there is a release some day, I'm gonna feel the same childlike excitement I felt when EB 1.0 was released: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...RE!&highlight=
I'm a bit more patient nowadays and check only every few months instead of seconds, but I still do appreciate your work very much, EB team!

[Cybvep]

More frequent but smaller updates is the way to go IMO. That way, the community knows that progress is being made and can comment on the presented features. Personally, I'm most interested in the new gameplay elements. New units are great, but pretty much every mod has them. EB1 had some great new stuff that made the game challenging and flavourful and I hope to see sth similar in EB2. RTW Vanilla was very bland by comparison.

The good thing about smaller updates is that they are not as time-consuming as standard EB previews. Besides, I think that the team members would like to read what other users think about the stuff that has been made so far.

[Skullheadhq]

• Make sure that the mod actually will work out of the box when it is installed.

Aha, so there will be a boxed version.

[LusitanianWolf]

Just to say I've been really enjoying the interviews!

[Cybvep]

Indeed. Very informative and entertaining. Who is next?

[LusitanianWolf]

Salveas!

As you all may have noticed we have stopped previewing our factions, that is because we are close to a release and also because we have covered most of them.
And for that reason we have decided to change other areas of the game which weren't previously planned for the first release, like the climates.

The climates suffered various changes, like new terrain textures, grass textures(with vegetation specific to the climate), geography changes(vegetation density, mountains and hills distribution, etc.) and in some cases even new vegetation.

First I will show a comparison with some of the vanilla climates and later I will continue covering(via eye-candy) the climates that you'll see in EB2.
So brace yourselves, image heavy

INCREDIBELICIOUSTASTIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[BroskiDerpman]

New textures and models!!!

How!?!?!?

Why you no tell us?????