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The following is a personal viewpoint written by Makanyane based on her experience with the new game.
Rome: Total War has remained popular despite being released way back in 2004 in part due to the plethora of mods available that can give completely different player experiences. RTW was the first Total War game to be modder friendly enough to allow 'Total Conversion' mods where the campaign map and battle environments could be completely redesigned. Since Total War: Rome Remastered was announced many in the modding community have been anxious to know if the remastered game would be as easy to adapt as the original.
Having spent a while working on Remastered I'm pleased to say that everything that was possible in the original game should still be possible and will come with vastly enhanced graphics and some lifted hard-coded limits. However, the vastly enhanced graphics will mean that there is more work (and HDD space) needed to make modders contributions match up to the new games' vanilla assets. Rome Remastered with its Steam Workshop facility also introduced a Mod Launcher system that has to be used for both Steam and locally installed mods, whilst some old disc base modders (me) might not like using Steam, this does though allow easier installation of mods for users.
The modding situation for Remastered has changed rapidly since release, the recent patch to version 2.0.2 has fixed some early bugs, raised some important hard-coded limits beyond those of RTW and provided new tools. Feral have also opened their Github repository which provides access to tools and modding information.
Major Feature and Limit Updates in 2.0.2
There are a lot of new features and improvements in the new patch; Feral have detailed them here.
The important ones that stand out to me are:
- Custom Campaigns - aka the old Provincial Campaigns, can now be added to the main menu, they can also use a different map mesh to the main campaign allowing completely different maps within the same mod.
- Combined Features Mode - Modders should be able to use all of the features (and higher limits) of Barbarian Invasion & Alexander in mods regardless of the game they are based on.
- PERSISTENT VARIABLES -
Any RTW modders here remember having to try to create special buildings or character traits to store information after game reload? Well now scripting improvements mean you should be able to store script information in counters M2TW style! Additional support for scripting also means scripts can run in the background automatically. Feral have provided details of the new scripting possibilities here.
- Expanded Logging -The first release had old style -show_err enabled which would generate one error message in certain circumstances. The Remastered game now has expanded logging which, if enabled, writes very detailed logs to text file. Again this new feature is similar to that of M2TW and can help in a variety of ways to find and fix problems within a mod.
- Regions, Resources and Unit/Model Limits - The patch notes detail a lot of limits that have been adjusted and the Github shows many that are still being investigated for patch 2.0.3. The main ones that I think will affect a lot of mods are: the regions limit being increased from 200 max to as many as you can fit into a map; hidden and on map resources limits being removed; unit and unit model entry limits being removed.
Text File and Folder Structure Differences
For the 2.0 version Suppanut carried out a very detailed file comparison between the original game files and Remastered, the differences found, together with some subsequent information found by others can be viewed on the wiki at File Differences - Rome Remastered. Modders will find this useful to see where there are areas of new possibilities, such as the addition of ethnicity attributes to units in export_descr_unit.txt, and where minor adjustments may be needed to get mod files designed for the original game to work, such as the 'hold_regions' issue in descr_win_conditions.txt.
Battle-Map Units
The new units use the same scale, skeleton bone positions and animations* as the original game.
*Please note that modded animations packs will require conversion from the XIDX produced pack format with Feral's SkeletonConverter tool (this simply changes the pack format, it does not provide a new method of producing new skeletons).
The teams of Rome Total Realism and Roma Surrectum have combined as "RTR: Imperium Surrectum" to work on a new mod for Rome Remastered. They have been successfully porting and adapting units for Remastered. The below image shows their Spartan Hoplites:
Any unit models that modders added to RTW should work in Remastered but the new game allows more potential. Texture materials now include PBR versions as well as the base colour images. The PBR textures give control over the 'normal' to create the illusion of more detail than is actually in the mesh, and can add roughness and metallic effects. The most detailed model for a unit (the _lod0.cas) can now also include weighting of each vertex across two bones, throughout the non-weapon sections of the mesh. In the original game, despite the model_flexi_m setting, most vertexes had to be weighted to only one bone at 100%.
Feral's guide to asset creation for Characters details how to unpack existing unit models from the game, provides links to tools and explains the new uv mapping system. Feral's Cas Converter tool converts .cas files to .fbx which can be edited in Blender or 3dsMax. IWTE also converts Remastered unit .cas files to .dae (Collada) and can combine the unit model with unpacked RTW animations.
The new systems for ethnicity allow 'body parts' to have multiple textures applied to the same model, whilst this is usually used for skin colour, if you do not need variable skin colours within units/factions you can adapt the function to use that section of texture for variable shields or other elements that can be shared through the factions using them. Rome Remastered units have their hair and face elements mapped to separate zones of the uv map which allows them to use multiple face textures and multiple hair mesh variants on the same unit model, the hair colour can also be varied using the ethnicity system. This very rough attempt at a unit for our proposed medieval era mod shows shield variation using the body section of texture, and model variation by (mis)using the ethnicity variant system.
Unfortunately there are only a limited number of ethnicities to work with so this sort of system will only suit mods where a lot of units and factions can share some similar styled components.
As always modders are perhaps surpassing what the game creators thought likely. Sirrianus Dagovax has been porting his Naval Battles and 1942 mods to use Rome Remastered, resulting in some 'units' you probably never expected to see in a Rome Total War based game!
The Campaign Map
One of the areas modders' had been most worried about was whether the game would support completely redesigned maps now that a 3D modelled mesh system is used for the campaign map. A quick look in the data/world/maps folders will reassure RTW and M2TW modders that the map image and text files they are familiar with are still there. Modders should be able to use their existing map_heights.tga, descr_strat.txt etc to launch a mod for Remastered with only minor adjustments needed, however if the map is a different size or shape to the vanilla game's they will find the visuals on the campaign map do not automatically re-generate and will mis-match with the underlying mod information. The Creating New Campaign Map in Rome Remastered page on TWC Wiki attempts to explain which elements come from the base map files and which from the separate mesh system.
The new mesh components use a .cas format which can be converted to .dae for Import/Export to Blender or 3dsMax using the IWTE tool, or similarly, to .fbx using Feral's Casconv tool. Viewed in Blender a selection of the vanilla tiles, the frame, coastline and river mesh are shown below:
It is possible to make minor adjustments to these components but for a completely new map mesh you need a more comprehensive process. Feral have released their Campaign Map Tool this provides a plug-in for Blender which will separate a large mesh covering the whole map area into the equal sized chunks required by the game and export them as individual .fbx files ready to be batch converted to .cas format for the map pieces. This does obviously require you to have modelled the whole map mesh first!
For those looking for a more automated process Wilddog has been working on updated versions of IWTE that will generate mesh tile pieces for you using map_regions, map_heights, map_features, map_climate and map_ground_types tga files. See IWTE - Rome Remastered Functions for details. The IWTE_ version 21_08_A will generates the mesh .cas pieces, river_mesh, coastline mesh and, if given base textures will (slowly) generate textures for each tile based on your map_climates and ground_types tga files. The latest tool also includes files that align the visible region boundaries to the generated river shapes where the two coincide.
This picture shows a version of the vanilla Rome Remastered map with all of the 3D mesh components and textures re-generated by IWTE from base map_heights.tga type files, with no 3d modelling or image editing required:
One of the nicest features of the new modelled map is that you can now rotate the camera to view the map from alternate directions...
One of the nastiest features of the new modelled map (for those of us that economised on polys by deleting the rear facing elements of our static strat-map models in RTW or M2TW) is that you can now rotate the camera to view the map from alternate directions!
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