ummm what's the update for?

[Yayattasa]

Wait, so they did not add the Kingdom features to the base game?

[Emperor Hantscher]

I was able to play Broken Crescent today by doing the following:

1. Open Steam, click "Games" on top left toolbar.
2. Select "Add a non-steam game to my library"
3. Browse and find Medieval2.exe
4. You will now see "medieval2" on your games list, right click, open "Properties"
5. You can now rename it to your mod title in my case "Broken Crescent", on the target line add ""C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Medieval II Total War\medieval2.exe" @mods\nameofmodfolder\nameofconfig.cfg"
6. Make sure in the modfoler the .batch file uses medieval2.exe and not kingdoms.exe. Open the .batch with notepad++ and you will see this line "start kingdoms.exe @mods\nameofmodfolder\nameofconfig.cfg" rename kingdoms.exe to medieval2.exe

That should be it now you just select your mod from the games list press play and everything should be smooth. I find this way better than the old launcher anyways.
Please note, if you have changed the name of the mod folder or config then both the .batch and .cfg will need to be change to reflect the new folder name, like in my case.

No need to worry about an update corrupting your mod folder. If you want to play a mod or one of the Kingdoms expansions that was corrupted during the update than yes, a reinstall of both mod and M2TW is nessasary, if you are like me and could care less for anything vanilla then who cares.


EDIT: After trying to set up other mods the same way it alwasy just opens the first mod I setup. However I was able to open all my mods by making sure the .bat file has Medieval2.exe instead of Kingdoms then opening it. it opens the mod no problems. no bug nothing. Worked on all mods.


So basically as long as you have not changed any folder names etc. all you have to do is open the mods executable with notepad++ or w/e and change kingdoms.exe to medieval2.exe and you can run the mod from it's own .exe creat shorcut to desktop whatever you want. I have no idea why everyone is saying you can't play mods and why some people are going of with all this technical nonsense......Simple.

[capablecenturion]

Jeez, this second update...

I had renamed my SS install to americas from crusades, because otherwise vanilla crusades would launch anyway. When called americas it would load but saves wouldn't load, the faction select screen would just be "Crusades 1 AD" and nothing else.

Now Steam seems to have deleted most of my kingdoms expansions... only 4 folders are in there, instead of 5, and I still get CTDs when loading using the method described above. Trying to start a new campaign won't even take me to the faction select screen - I just get "please choose an option".

Would uninstalling and reinstalling everything make a difference?

I confirm this - Playing with GUAM Mod (Retrofit + the mod installed) and it doesn't allow me to get to the faction screen.

(Lost my screenshot )

I've tried this with multiple ways (one posted by irishron, regarding using Med2.exe as shortcut in steam library, as well as using .bat way) -- both have rendered the error. It worked yesterday when changing kingdoms folders was actually WORKING (it didn't screw up my mod, interestingly)

This is just gonna keep going forever in a loop isn't it...just like Rome 2 -_-

[Achilles Lacedaemon]

CA doing more crap, again...

[ikyu828]

i'm using the method to copy then rename the medieval.exe > kingdoms.exe and so far it works
i tested on the following mods :
- rage of dark gods ( call of warhammer)
- deus lo vult
- stainless steel
( i only try for few turns on new games, save then reload )

[RubiconDecision]

I was able to play Broken Crescent today by doing the following:

1. Open Steam, click "Games" on top left toolbar.
2. Select "Add a non-steam game to my library"
3. Browse and find Medieval2.exe
4. You will now see "medieval2" on your games list, right click, open "Properties"
5. You can now rename it to your mod title in my case "Broken Crescent", on the target line add ""C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\Medieval II Total War\medieval2.exe" @mods\nameofmodfolder\nameofconfig.cfg"
6. Make sure in the modfoler the .batch file uses medieval2.exe and not kingdoms.exe. Open the .batch with notepad++ and you will see this line "start kingdoms.exe @mods\nameofmodfolder\nameofconfig.cfg" rename kingdoms.exe to medieval2.exe

That should be it now you just select your mod from the games list press play and everything should be smooth. I find this way better than the old launcher anyways.
Please note, if you have changed the name of the mod folder or config then both the .batch and .cfg will need to be change to reflect the new folder name, like in my case.

No need to worry about an update corrupting your mod folder. If you want to play a mod or one of the Kingdoms expansions that was corrupted during the update than yes, a reinstall of both mod and M2TW is nessasary, if you are like me and could care less for anything vanilla then who cares.


EDIT: After trying to set up other mods the same way it alwasy just opens the first mod I setup. However I was able to open all my mods by making sure the .bat file has Medieval2.exe instead of Kingdoms then opening it. it opens the mod no problems. no bug nothing. Worked on all mods.


So basically as long as you have not changed any folder names etc. all you have to do is open the mods executable with notepad++ or w/e and change kingdoms.exe to medieval2.exe and you can run the mod from it's own .exe creat shorcut to desktop whatever you want. I have no idea why everyone is saying you can't play mods and why some people are going of with all this technical nonsense......Simple.

This is a well written post and is reflective of another old school way of getting a mod to work. It works EXCEPT there are known issues with sound and multiplayer that are yet to be worked out as a result of the 10Gig "patch" and the devs at Steam are working on it. Which means yet more patches to come while they sort it out.

Honestly, it might be worth it to simply wait to do anything until the chips fall where they will as you might have to do it all over again.

I honestly couldn't detect any sound issues in custom battles or in the vanilla or Britannia campaigns, but I've barely tested it thus far. The only way would be to bug test it exclusively.

A check of the registry after doing a completely new reinstallation after doing a complete forced uninstall of the registry prior, shows the identical registry entries, and so it's possible that mods will still install and that save games MIGHT work if you carefully do as I suggested and migrate data for safe keeping.

The patch is 10gigs, and a completely new installation is 14.6 gigs. Honestly that mammoth a patch is bound to fail.

Example: there are reports that SS 6.4 has sound issues where the Americas' campaign music plays instead of the regular SS mod music.

Note that there is a patch of some sort that was supposed to fix the sound/MP issues on another forum, but the same issues remain. It will take a cadre of lots of players to hunt down these issues by trying different things within mods. I seriously doubt there will be any simple answers.

See: http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...-Update-Hotfix

[capablecenturion]

...

I've tried this with multiple ways (one posted by irishron, regarding using Med2.exe as shortcut in steam library, as well as using .bat way) -- both have rendered the error. It worked yesterday when changing kingdoms folders was actually WORKING (it didn't screw up my mod, interestingly)

...

I was wrong as I had suspected - replaced my mod with a backup and now the error no longer persists. Apologize for double post -- couldn't edit, thank the site for that.

[Emperor Hantscher]

This is a well written post and is reflective of another old school way of getting a mod to work. It works EXCEPT there are known issues with sound and multiplayer that are yet to be worked out as a result of the 10Gig "patch" and the devs at Steam are working on it. Which means yet more patches to come while they sort it out.

Honestly, it might be worth it to simply wait to do anything until the chips fall where they will as you might have to do it all over again.

I honestly couldn't detect any sound issues in custom battles or in the vanilla or Britannia campaigns, but I've barely tested it thus far. The only way would be to bug test it exclusively.

A check of the registry after doing a completely new reinstallation after doing a complete forced uninstall of the registry prior, shows the identical registry entries, and so it's possible that mods will still install and that save games MIGHT work if you carefully do as I suggested and migrate data for safe keeping.

The patch is 10gigs, and a completely new installation is 14.6 gigs. Honestly that mammoth a patch is bound to fail.

Example: there are reports that SS 6.4 has sound issues where the Americas' campaign music plays instead of the regular SS mod music.

Note that there is a patch of some sort that was supposed to fix the sound/MP issues on another forum, but the same issues remain. It will take a cadre of lots of players to hunt down these issues by trying different things within mods. I seriously doubt there will be any simple answers.

See: http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...-Update-Hotfix

The way I did it through steam(creating the mod in the game list) I played 3 custom battle and about an hour in the campaign. I did not notice any sound issues(I had the volume cranked) Running the mods through their proper .exe I played a few custom battles and noticed not sound issues at all. Not thoroughly tested but still good enough for me.

Can you explain these sound issues? because I clearly am not experiencing them. Oddly enough for me, Squids launcher never worked for me. I was on tech help for a very long time trying to find out why it never worked, everything was as it should have been but my mods always crashed on startup. No one could figure out why, not even the "pro's". I wonder if that has something to do with the fact I am not having any problems this go around lol.

[RubiconDecision]

The way I did it through steam(creating the mod in the game list) I played 3 custom battle and about an hour in the campaign. I did not notice any sound issues(I had the volume cranked) Running the mods through their proper .exe I played a few custom battles and noticed not sound issues at all. Not thoroughly tested but still good enough for me.

Can you explain these sound issues? because I clearly am not experiencing them. Oddly enough for me, Squids launcher never worked for me. I was on tech help for a very long time trying to find out why it never worked, everything was as it should have been but my mods always crashed on startup. No one could figure out why, not even the "pro's". I wonder if that has something to do with the fact I am not having any problems this go around lol.

The sound issues are numerous with diverse ranged weapon sound effects being incorrect or totally missing as well as music playing from the wrong campaign even when specified by a mod and unique, or missing music. See the steam forum link in one of my posts, the official one in which the Steam devs related that they're working on it.

Steam will allow you to run any game within their package, and so when you do that, then it is in effect doing the Regedit editing just as Squid's tool does.

Now the weird thing is they literally renamed the kingdoms.exe to the medieval2.exe after making modifications to the Assembly code, but they didn't have to make the regedit changes to reflect this exe change. Which is odd. Literally the americas or britania campaigns are calling for the same old kingdoms.exe, so it shouldn't work...but it does. No idea why.

I'm glad that you got it to work. Realize that lots of people have been helping in the tech part of the forum, and that regardless of your luck, making a snarky comment does nothing to help the vast majority of users who only got mods to work because of folks like Squid or irishron. That's not helpful.

[Tellos Athenaios]

I was able to play Broken Crescent today by doing the following

It should be a lot easier than that: simply let Steam create you a desktop shortcut for M2TW. Rename M2TW shortcut to $mod_name.exe, edit Target line appropriately (to referenced the correct config using the @config option, as per your post).

It works EXCEPT there are known issues with sound and multiplayer that are yet to be worked out as a result of the 10Gig "patch" and the devs at Steam are working on it. Which means yet more patches to come while they sort it out.

Honestly, it might be worth it to simply wait to do anything until the chips fall where they will as you might have to do it all over again.

Example: there are reports that SS 6.4 has sound issues where the Americas' campaign music plays instead of the regular SS mod music.

Note that there is a patch of some sort that was supposed to fix the sound/MP issues on another forum, but the same issues remain. It will take a cadre of lots of players to hunt down these issues by trying different things within mods. I seriously doubt there will be any simple answers.

See: http://forums.totalwar.com/showthrea...-Update-Hotfix

That would be because your friendly mod developers have not yet built proper IDX/DAT packages. Therefore you are relying on what M2TW cooked up when you first ran the mod. Which reflects the old location/paths of the mod, which had a different directory name. Here's another fun fact: simply copying a mod from one place to another and then removing the first location will break sound, even if the mod directory name itself remains the same. You see, when IDX/DAT files are built by M2TW it uses absolute path names, so 'copies' are not always quite what they might seem at first.

The way I did it through steam(creating the mod in the game list) I played 3 custom battle and about an hour in the campaign. I did not notice any sound issues(I had the volume cranked) Running the mods through their proper .exe I played a few custom battles and noticed not sound issues at all. Not thoroughly tested but still good enough for me.

Can you explain these sound issues? because I clearly am not experiencing them. Oddly enough for me, Squids launcher never worked for me. I was on tech help for a very long time trying to find out why it never worked, everything was as it should have been but my mods always crashed on startup. No one could figure out why, not even the "pro's". I wonder if that has something to do with the fact I am not having any problems this go around lol.

No, you are simply using the very same mechanism (albeit in a somewhat more convoluted way than strictly necessary) that CA relied on with their launcher, namely the command line syntax supported by M2TW/Kingdoms. All the CA launcher did was read out a few registry keys, assemble a (broken, in case there were spaces in the mod path) command line and execute that. You could get the CA launcher to execute pretty much anything by writing the name of the program to execute in the GameExe field.

This could lead to undesired results, for example, say GameExe = "rmdir.exe" and Path = "C:\Windows\system32 /S /Q" then you will find out who has UAC disabled and runs everything as admin by default.

[irishron]

Now the weird thing is they literally renamed the kingdoms.exe to the medieval2.exe after making modifications to the Assembly code, but they didn't have to make the regedit changes to reflect this exe change. Which is odd. Literally the americas or britania campaigns are calling for the same old kingdoms.exe, so it shouldn't work...but it does. No idea why.

Sorry for pulling this out of context but could you post a pic of the registry entries for Americas and Britannia? I'd like to compare them to the old dvd version.

[RubiconDecision]

Sorry for pulling this out of context but could you post a pic of the registry entries for Americas and Britannia? I'd like to compare them to the old dvd version.

Sure my friend. Here's two screen caps from the registry.

I can confirm that the old way of running a non-Steam game (Emperor Hantscher's method) does work for De Bello Mundi. Note that doesn't do anything to the registry upon rechecking it after running the mod by this means.

Given what Tellos Athenaios wrote, then this could certainly explain the sound issues, and rethinking that in the future with this issue.

[irishron]

If I got the pic I wanted you can see the differences.
Steam vs retail is expected.
Versions, yours 1.05, mine, 1.03, both kingdoms.exe.
Draw what conclusions you may.

[RubiconDecision]

That would be because your friendly mod developers have not yet built proper IDX/DAT packages. Therefore you are relying on what M2TW cooked up when you first ran the mod. Which reflects the old location/paths of the mod, which had a different directory name. Here's another fun fact: simply copying a mod from one place to another and then removing the first location will break sound, even if the mod directory name itself remains the same. You see, when IDX/DAT files are built by M2TW it uses absolute path names, so 'copies' are not always quite what they might seem at first.

I'll bet a lot of mod developers plus legacy mods will need this done. I hope you write a tutorial on it because otherwise I doubt the sound gets fully repaired in our old favorite mods.

EDIT: Irishron, what do you think it means? How can they be using a GameExe attribute for kingdoms.exe when there isn't a kingdoms.exe anymore with the Steam patch?

[Nico CA]

Morning all,

Some of you may have already read this on the official forum but I'd like to repost this in case you missed it.
Another update has been released yesterday in order to fix the following issues:

Med 2 - Steam Build ID 334162:

• Fixes laggy menus & multiplayer under certain NAT situations
  
• Fixes broken chat user state colours
• Slight tweak to DLC licence fallback
  

Please let me know if you still experience the above difficulties with the latest build. Thanks

- Nico

[RubiconDecision]

Morning all,

Some of you may have already read this on the official forum but I'd like to repost this in case you missed it.
Another update has been released yesterday in order to fix the following issues:

Med 2 - Steam Build ID 334162:

• Fixes laggy menus & multiplayer under certain NAT situations
  
• Fixes broken chat user state colours
• Slight tweak to DLC licence fallback
  

Please let me know if you still experience the above difficulties with the latest build. Thanks

- Nico

...and the way to tell if you have this latest Steam build of MTW2 is to:
1. Right click on MTW2 in your Steam Library
2. Click on Local Files

and the Steam build number will be displayed.
...............
There are now even stranger reports of odd things like wardogs and peasants appearing in MTW2 mods like SS 6.4, so there's that little nugget of bizarro world postSteam update nonsense.

[irishron]

Tellos Athenaios has nice IDX/DAT tools but I have yet to wrap my old head around them so I am not going to comment on their use other than if he wishes to update my mod's sound and animation packs for me he is welcome to.

This reminds too much of when CA tried to cobble together a Kingdoms patch in a hurry. The fallout from .Com then really never made it back here.

[Gigantus]

Please note, if you have changed the name of the mod folder or config then both the .batch and .cfg will need to be change to reflect the new folder name, like in my case.

1. Does this mean that the BAT file and the CFG file have to have the same name as the mod folder? Right now all three of these have different names in my mod - and I don't have steam to test this.

My present set up would be like this in the steam set up: @mods\Three_Kingdoms\Configuration.cfg with the edited BAT file named Steam Start.bat (start medieval2.exe @mods\Three_Kingdoms\Configuration.cfg)

2. If I create a desktop shortcut to the edited BAT file (med2.exe) will I be able to start the steam game with it?

[RubiconDecision]

1. Does this mean that the BAT file and the CFG file have to have the same name as the mod folder? Right now all three of these have different names in my mod - and I don't have steam to test this.

My present set up would be like this in the steam set up: @mods\Three_Kingdoms\Configuration.cfg with the edited BAT file named Steam Start.bat (start medieval2.exe @mods\Three_Kingdoms\Configuration.cfg)

2. If I create a desktop shortcut to the edited BAT file (med2.exe) will I be able to start the steam game with it?

Gig, using his old school method, I did this to make De Bello Mundi operate. There's no difference in the installer which is the good news.

1. This was the target change in the new non-Steam game added to the Steam menu:
"D:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Medieval II Total War\medieval2.exe" @mods\DBM\DBM.cfg"
(The user has to know where Steam is located and then point to the cfg file). There's no kingdoms.exe any more so that medieval2.exe is important. There's no longer a launcher anymore so this is really the only way to do it outside of desktop icon file commands.

2. Now right click on the new non-Steam game in the Steam menu, and send it to the desktop.
It will send it there, but naturally it won't have a graphic icon attached, but look really generic. Then clicking upon it launches everything so it operates, but expect sound issues.

3. Have users report their:
a) OS
b) Steam Client ID
c) mod

etc so we can track down sound and graphics issues.

To locate their Steam Client ID:
1. Right click on mtw2 in their Steam Library
2. Select properties
3. Click on Local Files
4. It should display the Steam Client ID. The current one that has some quickfixes is 334162 , but that's strictly fixes for multiplayer not sound.

EDIT: Note that I can't get Bare Geomod to work now. It crashes.

EDIT2 : Official answers to adding mods

[Gigantus]

Bare Geomod is using the EXE from the Steam compatible modStarter, you will have make your own BAT file. I have to update that upload once this issue is sorted out.

So I take it is the regular (pre-steam) BAT\CFG combo (not the RTW age command line way) but using medieval2.exe all the way plus steps one to five of the emperor's post?