Modding Summit and related discussion

[stevehoos]

Why more... they should be carrying less..For example Combat Trireme had just 15 marines on board... remaining men were rowers... What naval model really needs is adjustments to transport ships, creating the transport ship model based on trade ship, and also giving all large ships several small scorpions on board besides the towers with archers.. Ramming should be only effective against smaller ships or transports. heavy ships had reinforced hulls anyway, so it was practically impossible to sink them with rams.. instead, ramming damage should be linked with ship speed, so more damage ship takes, slower it is..

Wasn't it that there are not enough places to land for ships on the maps?

[Totalheadache]

I just want to make a quick post before I hit the road, but overall I believe the mod summit will have a positive impact on the future of modding. CA was very receptive to our request and took lots of notes on what needs to still be opened up to modding. The summit was also very educational, Guy Davison (lead programer) gave an excellent presentation on the evolution of the TW engine.

Unfortunately I only have my phone with me, but I will try to have my full writeup of the event posted by the weekend. Keep asking questions and I will try to address them as best as possible when I return home.

i'd really like to see that info about the evolution of the engine...

i dont see anything running worse than it's predecessors as "evolving". "stagnating" would be a more applicable term.

[Garbarsardar]

Gentlemen, given that there is already a sticky where any member can complain about CA, and approximately 5 threads every day where members can complain about CA, can we please keep this one to discuss the summit, especially after there is a write-up on it?

[Modestus]

If i remember correctly, they said something in the past:

First, there's a link with campaign and tactical map.

They have created a giant Rome II world tactical map with their map tools (an advanced Shogun 2 TeD), and split it in tiles. Each tile is assigned to a specific spot on the campaign map, and neighboring points on CM are made of tiles that are contiguous on the giant TM.
I don't have currently Rome II installed, but i remember that there were some GB size packs called tiles: that is the tactical map split in tiles.

It's not like Rome I /Med 2 engine, where you have a campaign map, and the tactical map in generated in real time based of the info on CM files: this way you could create a CM with you hands and not caring at all about the TM, because TM is generated in real time. You have a mountain in CM? A mountain is generated for you by the engine when you fight in that area.

That was a very powerful part of Rome I engine, it's a shame that they stopped developing and refining it and they choose this silly and time consuming way.
And this is one of the reasons why you'll not see a custom made CM in the future. There would be too much work for an amateur modder team.

Yes I remember talk about this, just wondering how true it is and what is the scale they are using.

Not going to explain this very well but it would seem to me that to have a continues tactical map for the whole of the campaign map CA could have decided that the area of the campaign map that will be represented by one tactical map will be much larger then in RTW1, that there is a lot less tactical area in RTW2 then there is in RTW1.

If this was the case and not saying that it is then you have a lot less tactical area to work with so if you wanted to add an extra town or city you may not have the actual physical space to do so. The Island of Rhodes is my favourite example of this and I think the fact that it has no major city hints at the real scale of the campaign map in RTW2.

[Mackles]

Finally got a train with free WiFi! The wonders of modern technology, eh? As soon as I get a proper keyboard under me I shall do my best to help bring you guys up to speed. Plenty of interesting oppurtunities afoot, and while not everything we might wish to accomplish is possible right now this has been a very useful event in terms of communicating the requests, wishes and questions of the community.

[chris10]

Hi guys,

I'd wait for the write-ups before jumping to any conclusions. Certainly it was a positive meeting as far as I could tell. Just having a conversation and sharing cool ideas with the modding community was a great experience in itself. If you read the forum (which was demanding yes/no answers about very specific things), you see only the negatives come through. Give it a chance!

We discussed some really cool ideas on collaboration and we took down a LOAD of notes on things we can do better. And actually, we said YES to a lot of things too.

I'll let one of the actual modder attendees write up their thoughts in detail though, it's not our place to steer. Give everyone a bit of time though, we flew people from Canada, the US, Finland, Czech Republic... and those guys are all travelling back and on downtime today.

With all due respect I would like to remember that its not rocket science to forsee or deduct what people want to access in order to do total conversion mods: map, textures, animations, UI, AI parameters, database and sound. This entire discussion about modding is ongoing for 10 years now (since RTW) and nothing has really changed and it seems that CA has still the same questions about what modders wanna access ? From a certain moment on these ever self-repeating debate start's to sound a bit stale. In the meantime other companys dont hold modding summits and instead give people a GECK, a Creation Kit, a Developers Kit or similar and they dont design their stuff to be completely locked up and inaccessible (As we just have found out with the games sound...Saints Row 3 uses WWise too and its sound is full moddable with the free WWise kit). Its not that I demand explanations, I only want to point out that its exactly that kind of stuff which is annoying people, especially when its stated that Rome 2 would be the most moddable game in the series. Thats a bold statement to say it diplomatically especially when looking at the total conversion mods for RTW and M2TW who feature completely new maps and since Empire there is nothing in that direction anymore. Coincidence ? Hardly.
CA cant possibly claim there was no time and/or money to put together a comprehensive tool in 6 years that would allow to access and edit the mentioned aspects of the enigne. It really looks like there is some sort of effort of not providing a comprehensive Dev Kit.
Not cause CA cant do it but because its not willing to.
Thats the summary of what I have perceived from all this over the years. I think people could perfectly accept that if CA only would say it loud and clear. After all its in the right of every Developer to provide or not provide a Dev Kit but what makes people angry is this swaying for a decade now and a company claiming to be so caring and mod friendly and then never really suit the action of the word meanwhile others just throw Dev Kits around not making any fuss about it. Thats not what I would call a coherent stance and people do perceive these obvious contradictions.

[=Vastator=]

Yes I remember talk about this, just wondering how true it is and what is the scale they are using.

Not going to explain this very well but it would seem to me that to have a continues tactical map for the whole of the campaign map CA could have decided that the area of the campaign map that will be represented by one tactical map will be much larger then in RTW1, that there is a lot less tactical area in RTW2 then there is in RTW1.

If this was the case and not saying that it is then you have a lot less tactical area to work with so if you wanted to add an extra town or city you may not have the actual physical space to do so. The Island of Rhodes is my favourite example of this and I think the fact that it has no major city hints at the real scale of the campaign map in RTW2.

Yes, tactical map of the 2004 Rome I is way bigger than the 2013 Rome II. As they said in the past, they didn't put a full walled city on Rhodes because there was not enough space...
This is a battle fought outside the city of Rhodes on Rome I vanilla: as you can see there's a lot of space

[Huberto]

Great points Chris10. It's obvious what people want in tools and documentation and it's been obvious for many, many years. The reason CA has done a few things here and there to support mods is that they don't want to alienate a lot of people. They must know the popularity of mods from their own metrics. They would be foolish not to pay lip service to mods.

They also sell a lot of DLC and they basically do a conversion mod of their own games on Warscape once a year. So there is that tension.

[zonks40]

Finally got a train with free WiFi! The wonders of modern technology, eh? As soon as I get a proper keyboard under me I shall do my best to help bring you guys up to speed. Plenty of interesting oppurtunities afoot, and while not everything we might wish to accomplish is possible right now this has been a very useful event in terms of communicating the requests, wishes and questions of the community.

I really appreciate your efforts mate, taking the time to go in and bat for us, I really do, but the thing is, we have been "communicating the requests, wishes and questions of the community" since well before release, and it has made little or no difference, I really can't see talking to them in person being any different to sending them a message via forums, we know Radious has been in almost constant contact with them for a while now, throwing a few beers back with them shouldn't make any difference.
Anyway, looking forward to seeing what positives came out of it.

[Noif de Bodemloze]

Hello dear Members!

I am back at home now. Sorry that I did posted any more after modding summit ended, but I can tell that whole journey was absolutely nice and meeting with CA went well that he had happy and serious conversation. It was positive that we had different modders with their own skills and knowledge, what we shared with each other and told for CA.

Like I told for you guys to wait for while when Wangrin get back to home and release these details, what we asked and how was answered. It was nice idea that I was here (because I was only person with laptop and internet worked on me so I was able to give some reports from summit and ask some question for CA and answered back for you).

I want say by my side that lets discuss well and gentle. No harrasing, trolling or insulting any modders or CA.

Noif

[JaM]

OH NO! THEY WERE INDOCTRINATED!!! (i really need a sarkasm sign) Welcome back home Noif cant wait for Wangrin's notes.

[Wintermist]

Locking away sound files could well be so that people don't go crazy and create a whole new game out of this Sounds files being locked pretty much limits Rome II to Rome themed mods, and not anything else. That's what I'm guessing. And honestly, I think that's okay. While I do appreciate mods of all types, this is a business after all. They have to think about themselves too and how they can keep on trucking, no business works for free. Of course I am speculating, but this is my guess.

[jamreal18]

Lighting in night battles?

[DarrenTotalWar]

WOW! That's unbelievable! Yeah, let's be more open to modders by locking the files!

What's the point of paying for a crypted format, instead of using an open free one, accessible by all?
No, no, don't use the silly excuse "for performance reasons" because you're using it too much and because it doesn't make any sense.

The answer is pretty straight: because "CA" doesn't want us to mess with audio files.

CA, i ask you this question then: why you don't want us to mess with audio files? What's the point? Is it some kind of Richard Beddow stupid request?

Didn't you see? He said they said it's for copyright reasons.

[daniu]

Didn't you see? He said they said it's for copyright reasons.

I find that a very questionable reason and am looking forward to having it explained in-depth by the people who attended.
IMO, there can only be a copyright on the playback software (which is used by the game and licensed through it) and on the music.
If a mod were to include other music than the game files (which is the point of a music mod), then it wouldn't be CA who could claim copyright.

Possibly, they wanted to avoid people creating mods with music copyrighted by 3rd parties and putting it on the Workshop, which I assume is CA's responsibility to keep free of copyright violations...
That's no issue with for instance L4D2 WS items though.

[=Vastator=]

Didn't you see? He said they said it's for copyright reasons.

...
They can't release a converter, one part of "the program that cost a lot of money" that they have used because they don't own the copyright. Legit.

Then Why didn't they choose an open format such as mp3 like they have done for all past titles?

[Mackles]

Right, so Noif wasn't exactly on the mark on the question of music modding. The trouble atm is that we know that CA switched the program they were using for audio and music to wwise. The reason for this is simply that their previous program was no longer up to scratch and couldn't offer everything they needed, not just in terms of quality but also to help cut-down on file size without sacrificing quality. (Compression is a huge issue for CA and something I'll try and go into more detail later.) Now, we can't access wwise unless we do a whip around and come up with ~$100k. However, it is possible that some sort of arrangement between CA and Audiokinetic could be set up to allow us access to the tools we need to actually change up the music and audio. You'll notice I'm intentionally being very vague and that's because this is all just a possibility. Certainly we've let CA know that music modding is something very important to a lot of people and they will do their best about investigating this possibility.

Essentially, right now we still can't do more than mess around with the free trial version wwise but it may be something in the future. There is the example of Saints Row 3 having modding access for wwise so it could be a thing.

I really appreciate your efforts mate, taking the time to go in and bat for us, I really do, but the thing is, we have been "communicating the requests, wishes and questions of the community" since well before release, and it has made little or no difference, I really can't see talking to them in person being any different to sending them a message via forums, we know Radious has been in almost constant contact with them for a while now, throwing a few beers back with them shouldn't make any difference.

I'm being pretty vague at the moment, so that I don't say anything that could muddy the water or appear to contradict myself later. Trust me when I say there are very real options in the works for increasing direct communication between CA and the modding community, in order to enable us to do more. Also Radious is a great guy! Really enjoyed talking some Total War with him

[.Mitch.]

I find that a very questionable reason and am looking forward to having it explained in-depth by the people who attended.
IMO, there can only be a copyright on the playback software (which is used by the game and licensed through it) and on the music.
If a mod were to include other music than the game files (which is the point of a music mod), then it wouldn't be CA who could claim copyright.

Possibly, they wanted to avoid people creating mods with music copyrighted by 3rd parties and putting it on the Workshop, which I assume is CA's responsibility to keep free of copyright violations...
That's no issue with for instance L4D2 WS items though.

As you guess, and as is obvious to most informed people, it is absolutely nothing to do with protecting copyright, I don't know what Noif is on about.

They switched from Miles sound systems to the current system because the old one is now inadequate, although there was no exact technical specifics on the matter, I recall guy mentioning briefly about this new system being able to do certain things in 3D that the old one couldn't and the handling of MP3 format was also an issue.

How can we quell the endless misinformation going around if someone who was actually at the summit is posting things like this... Come on.

[Noif de Bodemloze]

As you guess, and as is obvious to most informed people, it is absolutely nothing to do with protecting copyright, I don't know what Noif is on about.

They switched from Miles sound systems to the current system because the old one is now inadequate, although there was no exact technical specifics on the matter, I recall guy mentioning briefly about this new system being able to do certain things in 3D that the old one couldn't and the handling of MP3 format was also an issue.

How can we quell the endless misinformation going around if someone who was actually at the summit is posting things like this... Come on.

Well... someone heared better than I when I was behind of room with laptop and internet.

[=Vastator=]

As you guess, and as is obvious to most informed people, it is absolutely nothing to do with protecting copyright, I don't know what Noif is on about.

They switched from Miles sound systems to the current system because the old one is now inadequate, although there was no exact technical specifics on the matter, I recall guy mentioning briefly about this new system being able to do certain things in 3D that the old one couldn't and the handling of MP3 format was also an issue.

How can we quell the endless misinformation going around if someone who was actually at the summit is posting things like this... Come on.

Thanks for the "new" info, though i think misinformation cannot be fought only with "rumors" and "no exact technical specifics on the matter".
For example, "inadequate" for what? For 3d audio systems? If it's so, paying for a expensive licence, in order to bring a little more quality for people that owns specific 3d audio systems (1% of players?), and making the other 99% suffer from limits, like that above regarding modding, seems a pretty stupid move.