Mods talk about the upcoming MTW2 Demo – By Gaius Baltar
Having just accepted a writer’s position with the Eagle Standard, I pondered on how best to kick-start my new career. I decided to start by asking some well-known modders a question about the upcoming release of the MTW2 Demo.
For most of us, it will be a chance to see the latest reincarnation of MTW, and enjoy new battles, as well as a look at the eagerly anticipated faction reskins, so called “finishing moves”, new settlement plans, and whatever other goodies CA is willing to give us.
However, for the modders, it is a peak inside the machine, if you will, as they get to see new coding and graphics engines. As eagerly anticipated as the release of MTW2, the gaming community is likely to produce some more hugely popular modifications of the upcoming MTW2 release. I based my single question on this aspect. The responses were varied and interesting.
What features, in terms of modding, are you looking forward to seeing in the upcoming MTW2 Demo release?
Publius:
Game Engine: While the AI is not something we will really be able to see in the demo so much as battles will most likely be scripted, we can never the less see some of the new benefits of the reworked engines and most importantly what kind of performance we can expect out of our PC's from this game.
Graphics/Animations: Seeing the high detailed units, new assortment of animations and finishing moves, and especially the buildings (castles in particular) in a battle will be very interesting. Something tells me those screenshots just dont do them justice.
Coding/Formatting: Once we get the demo, modders will finally know what file formats and coding is necessary to actually begin the graphical work on modifications. The demo will signify the beginning point at which mods can actually dig in and start working on the actual mod instead of just doing background research.
Count Zimoa of Flanders:
Supported CA modding tools, like model and animation import/export tools.
DARTH VADAR:
Hoping that your question is correctly interpreted by me as "what I would like to see as open to mod features in upcoming MTW2"
Then I reply :
"RTW had a quite open source system to mod but not too user friendly in many aspects. But in some aspects it left you a lot of ground to begin your creativity and actually change the gameplay even by only changing some stats or internal code parameters with simple text editing. This was easy and difficult at the same time since the internal hard coded patterns were many so one must have exceeded his imagination to surpass the limits of the game.
This has to change and the developers have to provide more resources for the modders, now that they have realized how much better is to leave the community interact with their game and thus increase their sales.
-I would like to see a list of all the internal AI possible commands that can be given to units so that they can be manipulated with clever formation modding.
-I would like to see secondary AI manipulating tools (which actually are available by other games) so that it would be possible to control for example a command in formation and then this command to be manipulated by another file which will tell the unit to follow certain instructions (for example be passive, aggressive, stand etc.)
Then ...I could be able to produce miracles...I believe.
-I would like to see more detailed unit stat explain so that one can easily understand if he changes a parameter what is altered and not do this with many tests...but then we lose our strength don't we ?
-I would like to see a special mod file so that one can play several mods per version (done to many games) and not have many big installations of the game in his hard drive. Now that it is said it will consume around 13GB!!!... it is vital.
-I would like to see even more complex interaction between stats, terrain and AI decision which will create possibilities of an infinite dynamic system to mod and produce gameplay uniqueness.
I leave the other chapters to be possibly fulfilled by my other fellow modders...."
Lusted:
Personally I do not think modders will learn much from the demo. It will probably be like the RTW demo where most of the files are in a pack folder, and we are limited in what we have access to. So most of the things we will learn will probably be about the unit files, and possibly how the new no longer clone army units’ work.
Agraes:
I don't wait eagerly neither M2TW release neither its demo, because my main project on RTW is still not finished. I don't know yet if Ill mod M2TW, thought I would really love to play a good portage of Arthurian: TW on the new engine. I however hope M2TW will be more-modder friendly, with a better debug mode and modding tools already in. I doubt M2TW demo will feature a lot of moddable stuff - probably just like RTW demo had in the past.
I only contacted a few of the hundreds of modders available on TWC. Certainly from the responses we can see that all have their eye on the upcoming release. So while the rest of us are slugging it out in Flanders with the Longbowman, our modding community will be silently examining the files for clues to the upcoming full-game release.
Kor Khan:
Seeing as how my knowledge of modding centres around historical battles, this is probably what I'll mostly be concentrating on.
I'd be looking at how they are designed, scripted and balanced, as well as how to mod the demo in order to create my own setups. Naturally, this should also give me some insight on how they work in the full game, allowing me to start planning future maps already.
There is already a long list of historical battles that I believe should be included in the game (Manzikert, Stamford Bridge, the siege of Antioch, both sieges of Jerusalem, Acre, Bouvines, Bannockburn, Morgarten, Crecy, Poitiers, Orleans, Constantinople, Castillon... the list goes on), and some of these I have already begun to plan. A big question is how well some of these conflicts can be implemented (Stamford Bridge, for example, would probably require a one man unit, which wasn't possible in RTW). We'll see what the future holds.
One thing is certain, however: The demo will surely be an excellent opportunity to test both the gameplay and modding possibilities of the latest game in the Total War series. It should provide all of us, both gamers and modders, with some extremely useful information on the nature of Medieval II.