DVK901's work on custom settlements,THE PICTURES

[dvk901]

Steam....yes. Steam has mucked up things royally for RS. In frustration I copied an entire working RSIII 'data' directory into my Steam copy of RTW. I disabled ANYTHING that would mess with the install by checking it or 'updating' it. Tried to run RSIII, can get into the game, run Custom Battles, got to the screen where you can choose a faction to play, chose Rome, clicked start, the map tried to load, and then crash.

I have watched the map load for so many years that I can tell, within a good guess anyway, where the map is crashing in descr_strat.txt, and why. The 'why' in this case seems to be when the game tries to load the 'Boii' as a faction. It is at about that spot in descr_strat that it crashes. It also crashes there even when I modfolder RS......so what this tells me is that Steam has done something that IMHO is patently illegal...they have 'changed the way the game works'. I've read a ton of times, CA reps saying that you can change RTW any way you want, as long as 'you don't change the way the game works'. Well, RSIII works fine on ANY version of RTW\BI\Alex EXCEPT ^&%$#@! Steam!! And this really pisses me off.

[Philadelphos]

Everybody wants to mess with my computer.At least I never allowed Steam to do so, but Microsoft isn't much better. I'd like to turn all upgrades off once and for all!

[GROB]

Steam might be good for newer games like RTW2 and ATTILA, but not good for the older RTW mods like RS, RTR, and SPQR and all the other mods that are available. If people think that $9.99 is alot of money to buy the RTW ANTHOLOGY gold addition disc from Amazon.com, then you will always have problems with these games. And furhermore, people who have Win 7, shouldnot be in a big rush to get Win 10, until CA and MICROSOFT, can make these games compatible with this new system. Win 7 willbe supported to 2020. I don't know about Win 8.1. Thats my 2 cents.

[MasterOfNone]

Sorry to hear that, especially as more people will be switching to Steam with the recent CD issues.

I wonder what is causing it? FATW is pretty complex and we've had no issues with Steam...

[dvk901]

Sorry to hear that, especially as more people will be switching to Steam with the recent CD issues.

I wonder what is causing it? FATW is pretty complex and we've had no issues with Steam...

THAT is but one of the mysteries about all this. However, FATW is a BI mod, and it's also modfoldered. That's the only difference I can think of. I believe that whatever was changed in the EXEs targets the internal name 'romans_senate', which we switched to 'boii' in order to get rid of the senate messages and weird behavior associated with that faction. If so...(sigh)

[20ninescene]

BI has no senate so if that's true it should work with barbarion invasion on steam and it doesn't. Also Europa Barbarorum has a faction called "saba" but EB 1 works with steam. Maybe they just targeted the "boii" faction so you can try to rename it to something else and see if it works.

[dvk901]

Hmmm....interesting.

[MasterOfNone]

Have you tried making error-reporting typos in the DS so as to track down where it goes awry easier? I believe putting an error in building names works iirc.

[dvk901]

Good thought my friend. I'll give that a try.

[Unseengenie]

When I saw the Legendary Carthaginian Harbor i feel in love!!!

[isa0005]

How's things? Any news for we loving fans? Any news on what the deal is with Steam being such a prick?

[LavaCreeper]

I'd like to hear some news as well, it's always nice to see pictures of the advancement of the update. I'm really excited for it .

[dvk901]

I am waiting for xxemoxx to finish the new battlefield environment. In the meantime, I have been experimenting with a new way to cause 'rebellions' that is totally random, based on a character becoming 'Dictator for Life, as did Julius Caesar, and based on the support (or lack thereof) for each succeeding Emperor. So far, the randomness is quite impressive...with relatively small rebellions, or fairly large ones, or none at all. So players would have no way to predict what will happen when a new Emperor comes to power....much as it was in real life. This would also involve a lesser rebellion of settlements 'outright', restricted to major cities instead...along with those that randomly revolt.

The interesting thing is that I've been testing this in an updated version of RS1.6 that I call 'RS2 Lite', and I've been using the old Senate faction as the 'rebel' Roman faction. So I'm thinking of renaming the current 'Roman Rebel' faction 'SPQR", or the Senate, making them a 'superfaction' over the Romans as the Senate was, and giving them the city of Rome.

We'll have to test this all, obviously, so it may not see this next patch, but a lot of new ideas are being worked on. Ur Lord Tedric has wanted a different way to cause rebellions for a long time, and I think I've found a very workable way to do it.

[Philadelphos]

New rebellions at random! That sounds really interesting.

[demagogos nicator]

That random rebelions would be impressive.

[ur-Lord Tedric]

.............. Ur Lord Tedric has wanted a different way to cause rebellions for a long time, and I think I've found a very workable way to do it.

[ferike_2007]

... So players would have no way to predict what will happen when a new Emperor comes to power....much as it was in real life. This would also involve a lesser rebellion of settlements 'outright', restricted to major cities instead...along with those that randomly revolt...

Great!!! I like surprises!!!
Thank you DVK!!!

[LavaCreeper]

Thanks for the answer dvk ! Random rebellions should prove pretty interesting indeed. Also, I'm eager to see how the game handles large battles with the updated & improved textures. It would be sad to not be able to use these textures just because of performance issues :/. I do understand rewriting the game engine isn't possible though, if need be I'll just diminish the number of soldiers per unit just to be able to use the upscaled textures.

[isa0005]

I like that the Senate might be returning. I always thought it was one of better features in vanilla game :-) good to hear from you dvk keep it up!

[_Tartaros_]

just a sidenote.

i´ve got a rtw/bi diskinstall (working for years) and a steam rtw since a year.
first rsII didn´t load via shortcut - so i used the bi.exe directly and entered in the options to start as the factions XY. this has worked for me.
but since three month nothing work at all except steam rtw vanilla...

i´m a bit pissed off...
can i delete the rtw steam version to refresh my diskinstall´s? has someone experienced the same?
regards