could you point me in the right direction (about modding history)

[Heinz Guderian]

hey guys, long time reader, first time poster.

i was wondering if you guys could help. I'm pretty interested in the modding history of CA games. I was wondering if you guys could link me to a concise history of how the modding scene developed for each game since Rome TW? After CA released Rome, how long was it before a deveoped mod was released? how did things change after CA released "modding tools" (k i dont know what this means) and patches?

I remember reading somewhere there was a demand from the community for CA to patch it up. Did CA release these "tools" after a community demand or was it scheduled? How did things develop after the release of M2TW? How long was it after release that "tools" were released? Again was this in answer to community demands or scheduled?

There is no mention of CA releasing tools for Empire right now. Does this follow the concise history or is this something different?

Also TWC Hall of Famers. I know of a few such as Halie Satanus, MCM, Lusted, GrandViz, GED, Miraj, King Kong, are there modders who were like the Forerunners in Halo that dragged the community into the light? I would like to know about these people, especially if they are from TWC.

Finally, if i may ask (please delete if not cool), what input has CA/Activision/SEGA had in the development of the mods here on TWC? Did they help positively or was it like blood out of a stone? This question may be related to my above questions (such as "modding kits/tools").

Any general info would really help. Sorry about the long post.

[Aradan]

Moving to the appropriate forum.

[Killerbee]

Also TWC Hall of Famers. I know of a few such as Halie Satanus, MCM, Lusted, GrandViz, GED, Miraj, King Kong, are there modders who were like the Forerunners in Halo that dragged the community into the light? I would like to know about these people, especially if they are from TWC.

Well alpaca, Knight Errant, and GrumpyOldMan are all tool-makers who have done great stuff for us modders

[Halie Satanus]

In a time far ago a long way from the world of men in a swamp beset by by black hearted soulless creatures lived a young whittler. He spent his days whittling and whistling. His life, while fought with danger, was in it's way idyllic until one day he received his very own copy of 'Rome Total War'. His name was 'Nobby.'

But enough of Nobby.

There is no mention of CA releasing tools for Empire right now. Does this follow the concise history or is this something different?

Ca didn't release any tools for RTW, not that I know of anyway. A couple of devs used to hang out at the Org and from what I've read they were pretty decent in helping the early modders unlock various elements of RTW.

Also TWC Hall of Famers. I know of a few such as Halie Satanus, MCM, Lusted, GrandViz, GED, Miraj, King Kong, are there modders who were like the Forerunners in Halo that dragged the community into the light? I would like to know about these people, especially if they are from TWC.

I didn't start modding until '05', RTW modding had long been established. There weren't many released major mods I think RTR was at version six, SPQR had been around a long time by then, EB was an open beta and 'Forth Age' was well on it's way, but there were a lot of mini mods around, most of which are buried in the mod threads forum.

TWC used to have a modding collective known as the Trivium, some of their projects still exist; LT's SPQR was one, 'Pinares' realistic horses (seen in RTR, TE, and many other mods), the Time map converter. But the Trivium was controversial and to this day can raise the hackles of the real old 'heads,' (especially at the Org) best to leave that one well alone, people who dig around in that tend to 'disappear.'

The real fore runners were guys who moved from MTW 1 to RTW, putting together a history would take a better memory than mine, though I recall Duke John, Adherbal, Count Zimmoah of Flanders, I think they were all in 'The Lords,' my personal favorite would have to be hoggy (Blue Lotus), all of them were staunch Org members. .

RTW modding really kicked off when Vercingetorix released the 3D Max import/export tool. If anyone should be recognized as a 'hall of famer' then I'd start with him.

[Aradan]

Finally, if i may ask (please delete if not cool), what input has CA/Activision/SEGA had in the development of the mods here on TWC? Did they help positively or was it like blood out of a stone? This question may be related to my above questions (such as "modding kits/tools").

0, more or less.

Ca didn't release any tools for RTW, not that I know of anyway. A couple of devs used to hang out at the Org and from what I've read they were pretty decent in helping the early modders unlock various elements of RTW.

CA did release the sprite generator and the docudemons for RTW, and M2TW 1.2 included an unpacker. Not much by any means of course, but at least they didn't promise "tools and moddabilty" and then delivered the exact opposite as was the case with ETW (to be expected, community mods that add tons of content for free don't really go well with paid-for DLC).

I didn't start modding until '05', RTW modding had long been established. There weren't many released major mods I think RTR was at version six, SPQR had been around a long time by then, EB was an open beta and 'Forth Age' was well on it's way, but there were a lot of mini mods around, most of which are buried in the mod threads forum.

The real fore runners were guys who moved from MTW 1 to RTW, putting together a history would take a better memory than mine, though I recall Duke John, Adherbal, Count Zimmoah of Flanders, I think they were all in 'The Lords,' my personal favorite would have to be hoggy (Blue Lotus), all of them were staunch Org members.

There were pioneers for RTW in a number of ways: pioneers in modding discoveries (Epistolary Richard, MasterOfNone, etc etc), pioneers in tool creation (Vercingetorix, alpaca), pioneers in expanding mods' scope (EB, RTR, SPQR, FATW, etc). But yes, serious RTW modding was possible because of Verc's xpak/xidx tools.

[Halie Satanus]

CA did release the sprite generator and the docudemons for RTW, and M2TW 1.2 included an unpacker.

The sprite generator was always there, just no one knew about it.

There were pioneers for RTW in a number of ways: pioneers in modding discoveries (Epistolary Richard, MasterOfNone, etc etc), pioneers in tool creation (Vercingetorix, alpaca), pioneers in expanding mods' scope (EB, RTR, SPQR, FATW, etc). But yes, serious RTW modding was possible because of Verc's xpak/xidx tools.

Ah yeh, ER was definitely an early pioneer, I was reluctant to write a list, bound to forget people. MasterofNone, yeh I remember him, wonder what happened to him!..

Finally, if i may ask (please delete if not cool), what input has CA/Activision/SEGA had in the development of the mods here on TWC? Did they help positively or was it like blood out of a stone? This question may be related to my above questions (such as "modding kits/tools").

I missed this bit before. It's a long long story but I'll give you the gist. CA's relationship with 'TWC' has always been strained, long before I was a member here there was an issue with 'TWC' hosting the 'Time Commander' series, CA took umbrage and for a long time 'TWC' received the cold shoulder.

IMO it was a bit childish on CA's part as the admins at the time did everything CA asked in removing the videos and, it wasn't like they put the episodes up with any insidious intent.

So while the Org enjoyed a good relationship with CA and CA devs frequented the Org, TWC was given ziltch. I guess because of this the Org attracted the cream of the modding world while TWC became more of a fan site.

Where it gets complex is with 'The Trivium Organization,' from what I've read/heard/bribed from shadowy figures. The early 'TTO' was started by two members of TWC with the intent of making TWC at least on a par with the Org, but they were considered to aggressive in their recruitment and tried (successfully) to lure people from other sites to TWC. This caused a rift in the modding community. You' may have noticed how some Org modders rarely appear at TWC and visa versa, as I said some people still get out of shape over the whole affair which is probably why the history of TW modding isn't well documented.

There's much much more to it, and tbh it's more interesting than the histories of TWC's political battles, mostly because people put real time and effort into modding and having work stolen or team members defect can have devastating real life consequences.

Anyway the short answer is, there was no stone.

The road back has been long and hard fought, people often forget that while TWC's pseudo politics have on occasion threatened to tear the site apart successive admins have always worked hard to keep the TW (modding) side of things separate. TWC is now, by a country mile, the biggest TW site on the net, despite some modders still preferring other sites there's no doubt the majority of fans come here to see previews and discuss the mods on show.

[Augustus Lucifer]

Another interesting point concerning the Trivium was their surprisingly backwards inclusion policies. At the time I was mainly on the RTR forums, since my involvement there predates my registrations to both TWC and The Org(found it through a thread on the Rome GameFAQs forum). While they did do all the things Halie has mentioned, they also were fairly closed ship for an organization that tried to rally modders. A good organization releases tools to the greater community at the very least when it is disbanded, but to this day there are a number of tools some mods in the past utilized that are dead and gone, the only remnants of which are TTO tagging in files.

As with Halie I'm not well versed on the history of modding prior to Rome, and it does strike me as the most interesting timeframe. Consider that those of us who came here with the release of Rome never really paid any mind to Shogun/Medieval despite having played them, and then contrast that with the still active Rome community probably well into the release of CA's next headliner game(or until they get it right again). It's interesting the way that the established community moved forward, something which has not been done on any large scale since.

Most modders find a platform and compose all of their work for it, and most mods don't attempt to port. There's a few exceptions like EB 2, but they also have an unusually massive team, or Darth Mod, which can be attributed to a common goal across games that doesn't seek to change the face of it. There's others like DaVinci who have worked on all three platforms, and Caius maybe though I'm not sure if he's done ETW work. Overall though the community has largely been reborn with each new installment. The key folks in Rome(Verc, SigOne), M2(GOM, KnightErrant), and Empire(LtChambers, just) tools releases had nothing to do with the preceding game.

This has been a point of contemplation for a lot of modders. We all realize that to some extent the entire success of the modding community has been contingent on the chance involvement of a few select people. In planning for ETW, back when lots of us still had high hopes for it, this was one of the points of concern as to whether the community could take off with only the prospect of a stray programmer hobbling along to save the day. As a decentralized community there's only so much we can do to remedy that, and thankfully this time around we got another save in the form of the Pack Manager. Next time around though we may not be so lucky, and the fact of the matter is our community doesn't run on people who can hex edit. I could probably count the number of people who are main players on a mod team and can hex edit with efficiency on both of my hands.

I was wondering if you guys could link me to a concise history of how the modding scene developed for each game since Rome TW? After CA released Rome, how long was it before a deveoped mod was released? how did things change after CA released "modding tools" (k i dont know what this means) and patches?

You can actually sort of see the history at least from Rome by following the history of EB. There's still a topic on the Org where the first seeds of EB were planted, check the EB forums for a link in there somewhere. You can view the history as cataloged by Teleklos Archelau here. You can probably stop reading around the end of '05, unless you're interested in the specific history of EB, since that's around their first release.

With M2 and Empire it's harder to find a single derivative point, since the transition to M2 was smoother due to engine similarities and a variety of projects started up around the same time. Lusted could be seen as the progenitor of the most common form of M2 mod, the realism/gameplay europe projects, with Lands to Conquer which would win the first modding awards held after M2's release. This type of mod was of course in itself derivative of the Rome realism projects. For Empire it's a bit hard to follow, even though it happened recently. A number of older folk and newer folk started cracking from the release of the Demo, and the currently 'Hosted Mods' all began with similar premises around the same time.

Really I guess the history of all modding can be traced to the classic 'enable all factions' mods, which can be as simplistic as editing a few lines in one file, and was the first thing people did after the release. Then came things like skin packs and BigMap before what we traditionally consider a 'mod' nowadays.

I remember reading somewhere there was a demand from the community for CA to patch it up. Did CA release these "tools" after a community demand or was it scheduled? How did things develop after the release of M2TW? How long was it after release that "tools" were released? Again was this in answer to community demands or scheduled?

There is no mention of CA releasing tools for Empire right now. Does this follow the concise history or is this something different?

As Halie said, CA have never really released 'tools'. They've released a few utilities such as the DocuDemons, the animations, their own CAS script, lists of building effects, etc. They also documented some files at the top, to various extents, though it's unclear who did that and when during the development process, and most seem geared to internal developers.

With Empire they kind of shot themselves in the proverbial foot. You can read the Empire Mod Architecture Primer which Jerome, their lead programmer, released soon after the game to lay the foundations for a more interactive relationship. In it you'll read: "One more thing to keep in mind is that we've not yet finished testing the mod support fully - that's part of what's happening here before the mod dev package gets released." This and many other indications pointed to stronger CA support, but thus far the response has been categorically worse post-release. There has never been an Empire dev package, nor is there likely to be, and this may be attributed to the fact that the devs had to busy themselves fixing up a game that was initially botched over a series of 5 patches.

In general modders and CA have a love-hate relationship. We love them for making the niche series that has enabled us to create our works. But we detest the overall policy towards making the game fundamentally modder unfriendly in key areas, and the overall disappointment of the games themselves. 'We' here is used liberally, I don't presume to speak for anyone besides myself.

Also TWC Hall of Famers. I know of a few such as Halie Satanus, MCM, Lusted, GrandViz, GED, Miraj, King Kong, are there modders who were like the Forerunners in Halo that dragged the community into the light? I would like to know about these people, especially if they are from TWC.

I'm not sure most of those you listed would consider themselves 'forerunners'. Important people in the history of modding in terms of the works that have been produced and the impact those works have had on the overall modding spectrum, certainly. In terms of forerunners, I'd more peg people like Epistolary Richard, khelvan, alpaca, Lusted, so on and so forth. Those four and others helped establish the modding ethos and foundations, combined with the tools creators mentioned above. Most of the Opifex today weren't necessarily 'forerunners', but that isn't to take away from their contributions to the shaping of the community through their work.

For example, Miraj can be partially credited with the abundance of non-europe mods for Medieval II, though he obviously had plentiful help from AlphaDelta, Strelac, Ahiga, GrandViZ, etc. This is more indirect since BC was the first real contender to the 'European Realism' mods. MCM can be credited with really establishing the 'team leader' position on a major mod, since he was the perennial everything man of the premier mod of the time. King Kong might be able to make a case for being the father of the modern sub-mod community, since while there existed sub-mods back on Rome, the abundance and scopes of them were never as diverse as on SS and now Third Age. GED was instrumental in the advancement of modding inquiry and solution, and quickly catapulted himself from relative unknown to one of the key figures in the M2 scripting scene next to alpaca. Halie I'm sure you could attribute a lot of things to, be it modding creativity, the positions he held on Hex and the CB, the induction of intentionally small scope projects, etc.

I've only responded to the people you mentioned. If I was to go down the list of Opifex, Artifex, Org modders, and others like florin80 or makanyane who've declined such honorary titles, it could probably fill a small book of rambling. Lots and lots and lots of people have played a part, large or small, directly or indirectly. It's such a jumbled mess that it would be impossible to pinpoint key pioneers, I mean even I've introduced new discoveries or methodologies and I don't consider myself particularly noteworthy in the scheme of things. And then there's the various tutorials which all modders use, many of which were originally written by relative unknowns today. It goes on and on, so here's as good a place as any to stop my rambling.

[Heinz Guderian]

Thanks for the answers guys. I didint mean to ignore this thread, work beating the hell outta me recently.