How does one re-enable faction movies/videos (intros, victories, defeats, faction "deaths", etc)

[godspeed_]

Hi everyone! I have a specific question regarding the Stainless Steel mod, which is by far my favorite total conversion (thank you all for your hard work).

I have been trying to figure out how to do two things for about ... 5 years now, and I've decided to finally give up and ask for help.

1) Is there a way to re-enable faction movies (intros, victories, deaths of factions)? They seem to be disabled in the grand campaign.

I have tried modifying the default.cfg and the preferences.cfg in the stainless steel mod folder and main folder (respectively), with the movies=true and movies = 1 modifications.I have attempted to add in the videos to the SS.3 folder (under data/fmv/faction), tried to edit descr_faction_movies, etc, with no avail.

It seems like there is some internal setting keeping me from seeing the videos. Or I am just a big dummy.

2) Is there anyway to mod in a way to zoom into our cities, like with Rome Total War 1?

I remember there was a cool mod that attempted to do this with a scripted encounter when clicking some custom button (it spawned a militia unit somewhere in the city map, unreachable or whatever) and my attempts to add in something similar for SS.3 have utterly failed.

Anyway, have a wonderful day folks.

[godspeed_]

With the grace of God, I was able to find a solution to:

2) Is there anyway to mod in a way to zoom into our cities, like with Rome Total War 1?

https://youneuoy.github.io/M2TWEOP-library/

M2TWEOP-3.0.1

Veru cool. Seems like a lua conversion/extender of the med 2 base project. Really cool stuff, and works like a charm. Took me 5 minutes to install (watching the installation video is a good idea) and now I can see my glorious cities again.

I might try to see if I can use the same project to do an end run around SS.4's disabling of videos. Would be a bit of a tedious, resouce-consuming way to get around something that probably could be fixed by knowing what .cfg values to put in, but I'll give it a go.

Hope this helps someone. I'll update if I figure out the video stuff.

[godspeed_]

Gigantus is a ... giga chad. Helped me on discord.

For anyone else searching for the answer, it comes down to this:

1. movies = 1 is the correct term and it goes into the [video[ section. SS rewrites it's CFG file on start up (and when changing options) and so might change your entry. Try making the mod's CFG file read-only.

It might also be that intro movies were disabled (omitted) in the descr_faction_movies file in the imperial_campaign directory

There were a few other things I had to do (read only the two cfg files (default.cfg and preferences.cfg), then go and add in all the missing stuff in descr_faction_movies, then sync up some missing stuff in descr_movie_tracks (added in castille and I think Kievan Rus and Aragon, using Spain as the basis for Castille/Aragon and Russia for Kievan Rus, but subbing in the teutonic intro for Kiev's intro, etc etc)

It's coming along spledidly.

More work to be done but it's 90 percent there.

If anyone wants a breakdown of what I did, let me know in this tread; maybe I can bundle up my changes and show what it looks like.