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Thread: CA Modding Summit

  1. #101
    ♘Top Hat Zebra's Avatar Praepositus
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Quote Originally Posted by Pesticide View Post
    am i the only one wondering why they just dont do this with a video conference via skype that costs zero dollars ? what are you guys thinking, looks to me your stuck in the 80ties where people jumped on planes for 'meetings' :o

    All that wasted money into plane tickets, venue, hotel ... all should be put back into the game and the modders ffs ...

    Y-y-y-you mean they have to.... SOCIALLY INTERACT WITH PEOPLE IN PERSON?!?!??!?!


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  2. #102
    Steph's Avatar Maréchal de France
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    If we meet them face to face, we can physically grab them and torture them until they release the information. I hope they will accept my pet goat in the flight. I plan to brought some salt with me to spread on CA team members's barefeet, and have the goat lick it until they confess.

    It would be harder to do via Skype.

    Oups, I shouldn't have said that aloud, now they'll think twice before inviting me.

  3. #103

    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Quote Originally Posted by Steph View Post
    It would be harder to do via Skype.
    maybe if you are 90 years old, my 12 year old cousin does webcam skype with his buddies all the time. and if skype is to basic im sure CA or sega has conference call technology or software to use at their disposal.
    Last edited by Pesticide; June 07, 2012 at 06:59 AM.

  4. #104
    Boustrophedon's Avatar Grote Smurf
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    I think this might be a trap, an elaborate hoax to get rid of dissent haha

    1. Invite all disgruntled modders
    2. Lure them into the deepest cracks of Activision HQ
    3. Kill every dissenting modder
    4. ???
    5. PROFIT!

  5. #105

    Default Re: CA modding summit

    ill be blunt and say my gut feeling is its just another a PR stunt, and i want modders to think about this before attending as it might be just that they will simply waste a lot of your and their money and time flying there, fancy venue, food/drinks telling you the same answers to pretty much everything you already asked them in the past for anyway which is no we cant do it, with a fancy reasoning not to be shared with the public as you will have to sign a NDA.

    They will probably also make a video from it and then use that video to promote their undying, always getting better, best mod support ever, brainstormed by the modders themselves, for their next game they will announce soonish.

    Just think about it for a second, why would sega trow ANY money at this at all if it doesnt have a pr/sales benefit. Any higher up manager who would have to approve this would have had 2 things on his mind, expenses and benefits. If its not a PR/sales benefit , there should be no expenses, hence he would have suggested conference calls himself.

    Unless CA is willing to cover some airfare/hotel of these awesome people who have volunteered to spend so much time into these games over the past few years thats my gut feeling based on what happened in the past. I have some understanding of how the industry works, i do not doubt some CA employees their sincerity but lets not be fooled by pretending we do not know what the bottem line is for some top execs.
    Last edited by Pesticide; June 07, 2012 at 07:18 AM.

  6. #106

    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Quote Originally Posted by Pesticide View Post
    ill be blunt and say my gut feeling is its just another a PR stunt, and i want modders to think about this before attending as it might be just that they will simply waste a lot of your and their money and time flying there, fancy venue, food/drinks telling you the same answers to pretty much everything you already asked them in the past for anyway which is no we cant do it, with a fancy reasoning not to be shared with the public as you will have to sign a NDA.

    They will probably also make a video from it and then use that video to promote their undying, always getting better, best mod support ever, brainstormed by the modders themselves, for their next game they will announce soonish.

    Just think about it for a second, why would sega trow ANY money at this at all if it doesnt have a pr/sales benefit. Any higher up manager who would have to approved this would have had 2 things on his mind, expenses and benefits. If its not a PR/sales benefit , there should be no expenses, hence he would have suggested conference calls himself.

    Unless CA is willing to cover some airfare/hotel of these awesome people who have volunteered to spend so much time into these games over the past few years thats my gut feeling based on what happened in the past. I have some understanding of how the industry works, i do not doubt some CA employees their sincerity but lets not be fooled by pretending we do not know what the bottem line is for some top execs.



    On a long enough timeline we will see, and hopefully this is not the bottom line. I am aware that this is a company we're all talking about here, and there are many good reasons to have doubts, but I for one don't believe in shooting down ideas before they've even gotten off the ground.

  7. #107

    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Please try and explain to CA why its a good thing to allow mods of the same quality and total overhaul as Stainless Steel, Third Age, Warhammer, Invasio Barborum on their newer Engines like Shogun and Empire.

    Please try and explain to them, their current course of arcade, shallow, eye candy engines lack the replayability of Medieval 2 Total Wars Engine, which, compared to Empires, Napoleon and Shogun, is looking more and more like the 'Golden Age' of Creative Assembly, and somthing we all fear, we may never see again.

  8. #108
    CraigTW's Avatar Ducenarius
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Hi all,

    Just a quick note to say thanks for all of the emails I've had so far. I'm out of the office until Monday so I'll reply to them when I'm back in, but it's great to see so much passion about this kind of event.

    We've been talking about having a line of conversation with modders for quite some time, and it takes time for things to come to fruition, but there's no shady motivation behind it - just a desire to have the conversations.

    Just to be clear on expectations: this is an opportunity for us to explain to you why things are how they are and get some key modders a glimpse into how we do things, and why we do them the way we do. That information will be useful, no doubt.

    Anyway, I'll flesh out some of the details in the next couple of weeks once we've sorted logistics etc. I should have more answers for you then.

    Craig
    Last edited by CraigTW; June 07, 2012 at 07:27 AM.

  9. #109

    Default Re: CA modding summit

    you have their email addresses now, email is a great tool for conversations .

    Let me state that i love the idea of modders having a chance to visit CA, and have better conversations, i just think the approach is slow and costly and will not be what the community expects nor some modders expect. Thank you for clarifying on the expectations, that makes it a lot more clear.

    Every time i play coop with friends we have very excited conversations with thoughts like wouldn't it be cool if this would have happened or that random event would have occurred. But in the back of our minds we full well know it will never happen for the warscape engine games. A modder in the past would have picked up these ideas and actually tried them to implement them in m2tw (stainless steel events for example) . These days so many ideas are out there but nobody can implement them. Its all in the small details for those who play these games years after release, details modders excel at! Modders who deserve the best! And this summit idea is cool, but not the best you can do in my opinion.

  10. #110
    Lord Baal's Avatar Praefectus
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Quote Originally Posted by Pesticide View Post
    ill be blunt and say my gut feeling is its just another a PR stunt, and i want modders to think about this before attending as it might be just that they will simply waste a lot of your and their money and time flying there, fancy venue, food/drinks telling you the same answers to pretty much everything you already asked them in the past for anyway which is no we cant do it, with a fancy reasoning not to be shared with the public as you will have to sign a NDA.

    They will probably also make a video from it and then use that video to promote their undying, always getting better, best mod support ever, brainstormed by the modders themselves, for their next game they will announce soonish.

    Just think about it for a second, why would sega trow ANY money at this at all if it doesnt have a pr/sales benefit. Any higher up manager who would have to approve this would have had 2 things on his mind, expenses and benefits. If its not a PR/sales benefit , there should be no expenses, hence he would have suggested conference calls himself.

    Unless CA is willing to cover some airfare/hotel of these awesome people who have volunteered to spend so much time into these games over the past few years thats my gut feeling based on what happened in the past. I have some understanding of how the industry works, i do not doubt some CA employees their sincerity but lets not be fooled by pretending we do not know what the bottem line is for some top execs.
    Pesticide... just.. don't. Like your name, you are killing this thread with that. This is not about if skipe allows a 90 or 12 years old to torture game developers with a goat. It's about CA reaching a hand to modders on how things are done, why they are done like that and hopefully for them to receive some feed back in how to improve things for future games.

    Besides, it's already been said that it would be either personal or online, because out of logic not all the players/modders live in or near London...

    1. Invite all disgruntled modders
    2. Lure them into the deepest cracks of SEGA super secret evil lair in an island with a volcano.
    3. Kill every dissenting modder
    4. ???
    5. PROFIT!
    There, fixed for you Boustrophedon.
    PROUD TO BE A PESANT. And for the dimwitted, I know how to spell peasant. <== This blue things are links, you click them and magical things (like not ending up like a fool) happens.
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  11. #111

    Default Re: CA modding summit

    my name stands for preventing, destroying, repelling or mitigating any pest, allowing crops, fruits, vegetables, flowers to grow and flourish. Any by god i want them mods to flourish for the warscape engine. (didnt preorder the most moddable game of all time for no reason goddammit )

    And i had nothing to do with them goats Lets not get personal here please...
    Last edited by Pesticide; June 07, 2012 at 08:12 AM.

  12. #112
    Steph's Avatar Maréchal de France
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Quote Originally Posted by CraigTW View Post
    Just to be clear on expectations: this is an opportunity for us to explain to you why things are how they are and get some key modders a glimpse into how we do things, and why we do them the way we do. That information will be useful, no doubt.
    I'd like to stress something. If you plan to limit the summit to this, it may be a failure. You had probably very good reason to have done things like you did in your opinion, but since your choices hinder our modding capability of make them quite painful sometimes, they are, in our opinion, wrong choices by definition.

    What I mean is that knowing why you did some things is not of paramount interest for us. But how you create campaign map for instance (so we understand your work process and have more information to design a way to make our own) is more interesting, how we can work around limitation or solve some issues which are hard to overcome without info from you, how we can avoid such situation in the future.

    When where's a problem, the why is only 10% of the solution, the how is much more important

  13. #113
    carricanta's Avatar Going Nowhere Fast!
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Quote Originally Posted by Steph View Post
    The main difficulty is not in the tools themselves, it's in understanding what CA did in the format, and what are the interaction between the elements.
    I'll give you an example. Years ago I had to retro engineer a binary files to decode all the information inside.
    To do that, usually you have the end result, with some information, and then you try to find it in the fie.
    For example, if you know the file contains a name, and when you look at the result in your game, you see the name is "Steph", you can try to find in the binary file where "Steph" is located. Then you say "this part is the name". Then, you find other parts, until you can decode the whole file.
    But sometimes it's not obvious. In my case I knew there was a date somewhere. But I couldn't find it in the file.
    After soome times, we finally found the date was coded with two information: The number of seconds since the beginning of the weeks, and the number of weeks since the 6 january 1969 (or something like that).
    Once you know it making a tool that read this two pieces of information and display them as easy to understand date is easy.
    But if you don't know the way it is coded internally, it can be very difficult and time consuming.

    Making a campaign map tools for instance is difficult because we don't really know how CA stores the information internally. If CA can give a description of their format (like the borders are described here, that way, then the rivers are here, etc), with enough details, then I have no doubt we could make a complete tool for it.

    But without info from CA, finding all the informaiton is extremley long. Especially as some information are redundant, or not obvious. If you change a value somewhere (like set the "can convert" flag to true for an agent in the campaign), it won't work. Because a far less obvious value also needs to be changed somewhere else.
    Thanks for the info.

  14. #114
    alhoon's Avatar Comes Rei Militaris
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    Default Re: Is it likely that Shogun 2 will ever get mod tools?

    Quote Originally Posted by CraigTW View Post
    There's a fair bit of misinformation flying around here. There's also some fact.

    We'd like to hold a modding summit here at The Creative Assembly at the end of July. Maybe we'll hire a venue somewhere. The main thing is we can have these conversations with you ourselves, explain why limitations are in place if they exist, and help if there's any way we can.

    If you're a modder yourself and would like to attend, drop me a line at RallyPoint@Creative-Assembly.com - else please pass this onto someone you know who likes to mod our games.

    Thanks,

    Craig.

    Will we be able to participate from Skype or something?

    Quote Originally Posted by Steph View Post
    Steph: Since you’ll probably do this in UK, it may be difficult for modders from around the world to attend (I suppose you won't refund plane ticket, will you?), do you plan to make it accessible with some kind of web conference?
    Craig:We will absolutely live stream it in some way.

    (note he did not actually rule out the question about refunding plane ticket )
    10 tickets from USA to UK and back, and it would be cheaper to develop DLC campaign map that has china and more regions for ETW, Extended map for NTW and Korea for S2TW
    Last edited by alhoon; June 07, 2012 at 08:20 AM.
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  15. #115
    Lord Baal's Avatar Praefectus
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Quote Originally Posted by Pesticide View Post
    my name stands for preventing, destroying, repelling or mitigating any pest, allowing crops, fruits, vegetables, flowers to grow and flourish. Any by god i want them mods to flourish for the warscape engine. (didnt preorder the most moddable game of all time for no reason goddammit )

    And i had nothing to do with them goats Lets not get personal here please...
    I was trying to be funny. I failed. I didn't meant to be pejorative or insulting, my apologies if I was.

    Ok, still, let's try to keep the thread on topic. I mean, it's not wise to berate why they don't use skipe or give us an all paid vacations for a week in London. About streaming the thing online I guess they know how to do it. In any case we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.
    PROUD TO BE A PESANT. And for the dimwitted, I know how to spell peasant. <== This blue things are links, you click them and magical things (like not ending up like a fool) happens.
    Visit my utterly wall of doom here.
    Do you wanna play SS 6.4 and take your time while at it? Play with my 12 turns per year here.
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  16. #116
    Humble Warrior's Avatar Vicarius Provinciae
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Quote Originally Posted by Pesticide View Post
    ill be blunt and say my gut feeling is its just another a PR stunt, and i want modders to think about this before attending as it might be just that they will simply waste a lot of your and their money and time flying there, fancy venue, food/drinks telling you the same answers to pretty much everything you already asked them in the past for anyway which is no we cant do it, with a fancy reasoning not to be shared with the public as you will have to sign a NDA.

    They will probably also make a video from it and then use that video to promote their undying, always getting better, best mod support ever, brainstormed by the modders themselves, for their next game they will announce soonish.

    Just think about it for a second, why would sega trow ANY money at this at all if it doesnt have a pr/sales benefit. Any higher up manager who would have to approve this would have had 2 things on his mind, expenses and benefits. If its not a PR/sales benefit , there should be no expenses, hence he would have suggested conference calls himself.

    Unless CA is willing to cover some airfare/hotel of these awesome people who have volunteered to spend so much time into these games over the past few years thats my gut feeling based on what happened in the past. I have some understanding of how the industry works, i do not doubt some CA employees their sincerity but lets not be fooled by pretending we do not know what the bottem line is for some top execs.
    Pesticide is probably completely wrong, but I myself also had these concerns. I know just how people can be bought into a cosy place then get talked around despite themselves. It does seem mighty magnanimous for CA to make such a move.

    But don`t get me wrong, if this is completely honest by CA then I give them a big thumbs up since they appear to be going out of their way to meet the actual people who make Mods, even though, it`s only to explain to them why more can`t be done. It`s highly unusual and I don`t think I`ve ever seen this with any other Devs in my time.

    Maybe that`s why part of me is slightly on yellow alert.

    p.s. Oh and if SEGA are behind this, I`m definitely on yellow alert.
    Last edited by Humble Warrior; June 07, 2012 at 09:02 AM.

  17. #117
    mattgoby's Avatar Campidoctor
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    Hope this works and you show modders how the map works, and how to add new animations etc, as quite frankly all everyone wants to do is to have large scale modifications for the latest games.
    "some people say the iraq war is unnessasary, however i disagree its good practise in case one comes along that we need to fight, just in case the germans have another go"-AL MURRAY

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  18. #118

    Default Re: CA modding summit

    I hope King Kong takes time to do this...

  19. #119
    Lord Baal's Avatar Praefectus
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    Default Re: CA modding summit

    He responded me by PM, I think he'll assist be in person or online.
    PROUD TO BE A PESANT. And for the dimwitted, I know how to spell peasant. <== This blue things are links, you click them and magical things (like not ending up like a fool) happens.
    Visit my utterly wall of doom here.
    Do you wanna play SS 6.4 and take your time while at it? Play with my 12 turns per year here.
    Y también quieres jugar Stainless Steel 100% en español? Mira por aca.

  20. #120

    Default Re: CA modding summit

    I will contribute to Darthvaders airfare but on one condition. He emails me a picture of him attending the said summit wearing a Darthvader outfit...(yes I do realise this might become unconformtable but it will keep safe his anonymity and also put the fear of the dark side into CA...plus if Mike Simspon a.k.a the emperor is there he will need to use a lot of the force).

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