Mod Summit 2015 Report
Mod Summit 2015 - 3rd Annual
30/01/2015
Attendees
- .Mitch
- Kinjo
- Dresden
- Noif
- Sebidee
- spartan.warrior
- Champloo
- Mackles
Synopsis
- Overview of the Assembly Kit for Total War: Attila
- More in-depth coverage of TEd and Terry
- Q&A's in-between each talk, with various (scarily senior) developers taking the time to talk to us and explain features
- .Mitch gave an extremely impressive presentation on the possibilities for utilizing lua scripting
- Hands-on with TEd
Off the Starting Blocks
To begin with, in order to cut straight to what is probably the biggest point of concern for many of you who were waiting for news from the summit, we had a talk about how completely reworking the Campaign Map is not a possibility at this stage. The reasoning for this is pretty simple: the in-house tools used to actually create all the logic behind the Campaign Map are very much tied up with the entire codebase of the game. Quite obviously, CA are not going to make their code available generally, and the work required in order to create solid tools separate from this would, by CA's own estimate, roughly take 18 months of work for a team of their key developers. That would be 18 months in which those members would not be able to work on new games, create new features, improve existing functionality or stomp on bugs.
Overview of the Attila Assembly Kit
We were given a presentation by the Development Manager responsible for both CA's internal tools and the official modding tools that have been making their way into our hands. You can already read a description of the full Assembly Kit package here, but the big stand outs were:
- TEd / A battle tile editor
- Terry / A campaign map editor
- The actual date we will be able to access // The full database; Raw terrain Data; And examples to work from for the startpos, animations, etc.
I'll give a brief, but not exhaustive, summation of the capabilities and improvements for the tools.
TEd:
- Battle map creation, for land, sea, and siege (both land and port, fortified and unwalled)
- AI graph authoring (More on this later!)
- Outfield tile creation // The non-playable areas of the map
- Campaign tile creation
- With all maps created being open for use in every game mode // Multiplayer, Historical, Custom and Campaign
Terry:
- It's a Campaign Map Edtior, rather than Creator // Aesthetics, not logic
- Things you can play with include the global heightmap, prop placement, textures, lighting and much more
- What do you mean, not logic? As mentioned before, this facet of the design is too intertwined with the internal codebase. Therefore, you cannot move settlements or borders, create new landmasses or oceans, etc.
DaVE:
- The database editor, that was available for Rome II, with access to the raw xml files
- There have been some UI and usability improvements over Rome II
VEd:
- The Variant Editor for unit creation and editing, that was also available for Rome II
- Again, some UI and usability improvement over Rome II
Raw Data:
- The full database
- Terrain data // This will allow you to edit existing maps; Edit battle tile map (the location of battle tiles on the Campaign Map); Edit campaign tile map (the location of campaign tiles on the Campaign Map)
Exporters:
- As with Rome II, for 3DS Max, Maya and Motion Builder
BOB:
- For processing all the data into pack files
Launcher:
- Maps are to be handled just like any other mods
- Some updates to the UI to help with sorting and filtering mods
The estimated release date for the tools to drop is sometime late March/April.
Break for a small Q&A
- On the launcher, it was pointed out that a disable all function would be useful for people wanting to switch between Single-Player with mods and Multi-Player without.
- The attentive among you may have noticed the lack of any music tools at this stage. Bear in mind that the tool used is actually a very expensive program licensed from a 3rd party, and the situation for getting that for free as a modding tool for Rome II was a separate process from the main Assembly Kit. As such, this is not envisioned as being part of the initial release, but is under consideration for a later point.
- In addition to music modding, it was also pointed out that such a tool would be improved with access to sound and voice files, particularly for full translations into languages unsupported in the native release.
- The load order feature of the community mod manager, created by .Mitch, was also discussed as something to consider with the official launcher.
- With Terry, with things such as editing the lighting, such changes and effects can be viewed in real time.
- Creating entirely new props, textures and buildings, for the Battle or Campaign maps, is entirely possible.
- And yes, we did check - no changes can be made for regions, provinces, roads, cities, landmasses, oceans. It's worth noting that CA do not think that it is possible, but that should not discourage major tinkering to explore any workarounds.
- It's worth noting, though, that with the new tools there is the potential to create unique battle maps for every settlement in the game. Just sayin'...
Introducing TEd
We then had a live demo of the TEd Battle Map Editor. Here we got to see some of the power this tool has got under it. So, my impressions of TEd in action:
- Quick and easy to insert, delete, move and manipulate objects
- Terrain editing seemed nice and smooth
- Pre-fabricating is a thing. Put simply, you can take several objects, such as different building or wall models, and group them together in your own custom made group. Once you've got it setup as you like, you can then save the group and use it like any other object, dropping them down as you see fit, in cookie cutter fashion.
- There are a few bugs and nuances to get around still, so some preliminary exploration should show what kind of things you might want to avoid. Saving often is highly recommended.
- No, seriously. Save often.
We then had a look at the AI graph authoring feature, which, quite frankly, looks insanely cool. In essence, a map creator will be able to define AI behaviours in the different zones of their settlement, to a ridiculous degree. This is only for within settlements, not the general battlefield. On a settlement map, outside of the settlement itself the AI will go with it's normal routines. What this feature will let you do is define the areas for the AI to defend, ignore, focus on, travel down, etc. It really opens up some extremely cool possibilities for map design. The key thing to remember is to cover your settlement in these, otherwise the AI may find areas that it then will have no reference as to where it is or what it should be doing.
- The graph authoring itself involves no writing code. It's just drag, draw and drop various functions for different areas, such as streets to travel, squares to defend, etc.
- The different tasks are all colour coordinated to make everything easy to keep track of.
- For example, you can tell the AI to use certain streets and stop for nothing, or use certain streets but fight when it needs to. You can also tell it whether to use the full road width or to try and stick to the middle of the street.
- You can add wall defend nodes so that it will assign units to defend sections of walls.
- As said before, make sure to cover the map in boundaries so the AI always knows what to do.
- You can add in civilians! Specifically their deployment zones and shelters.
- Deployment zones define where civilians may spawn when the battle map loads, and are where they will try and stick to.
- Civilians can move in and out of buildings my placing shelter points inside buildings. These are also the places they may flee to when under attack. If they have no shelters at all then they will just run off wherever seems safest.
- On a side note, you can create entirely new types of civilians, with their own variants and behaviours. You can, for example, define how likely your civilian type is to fight or flee!
Discussion on TEd
So, some other observations on TEd:
- Fire is completely dynamic, so there is no need to do any work on this during map design. If it can burn, it'll burn with enough fire flying around.
- Creating new or editing existing buildings and models is provided for, so go crazy with that!
- There is hard collision on buildings and terrain, so provided you don't go to wild with settlement design you shouldn't need to worry about this. Units won't be able to ghost through your buildings.
- There is some soft collision around columns, however. Certain buildings, the circus model for example, can now be directly fought in. You could make a last stand under the columns and let the enemy try and bash through.
- Barricades should really only be placed on streets. They might cause some problems if placed in a square.
- Escalation is really easy to manage. You can add in separate models for the different levels of escalation, including items like enemy siegeworks outside the walls. A simple click will hide the models for different levels of escalation, making managing this a walk in the park.
- As mentioned, there's no need to do any AI graphs outside the walls as this is managed already.
- There are limits, obviously, but mostly these will be based on your own machines specs. Be warned, if you own a monster and make a monster of a map other people may not be able to play it.
- It's not thought that putting gates on forts as they are would work, as they are a type of land battle. However, a workaround could be to create unique siege maps for forts, and then hook these up using Terry so play when a fort battle is triggered.
- Routing is a separate system, so there's nothing you can do to stop your unit that was holding a gate way from running through the same gate and being slaughtered by the enemy they were just fighting when they shatter.
Meeting Terry
I'll start by apologizing for the relative lack of notes on this. I was rather busy at this point trying to get my head around all the possibilities that Terry does provide. Trust me, it's a lot.
- Talked about the real time editing of lighting on the Campaign Map. Attila has 5(?) different zones to distinguish between areas, and these can be tweaked or changed as you see fit.
- The terrain systems are ridiculously in-depth. The amount of factors you can apply as to where certain plants or trees should pop up, as one example, is jaw-dropping. There is lots of functionality to do with props and placement.
- There are also, as you might expect, plenty of rules to follow to make sure everything works correctly, but that goes with the territory.
- You can use Photoshop or GIMP to view some of the files which control the aesthetics. These work off coloured tiles and pixel groupings. You could, if you were very keen, have a different terrain type for each colour that exists.
- Obviously, this still works within the constraints of the existing logic. You can make water look like land, but it will still behave like water in-game. Your armies will just sail across those mountains!
It's worth noting that, on top of some bugs and nuances you need to familiarize yourselves with, these tools are very powerful and high performance. It is most definitely recommended not to be running them at the same time as each other, or the game itself.
Save often.
As I said before, these tools look to provide an awful lot of access and functionality, and it will certainly take a good long while to plumb the depths of their secrets.
Mitch's Presentation
Our very own .Mitch gave both the attendees and members of the development team an extremely interesting talk on what he has been able to achieve through the use of existing lua scripting functions. I shall leave it to the man himself to do most of the revealing, but he very obviously highlighted what a powerful (and clearly underused) tool this is in the modding armoury. Additional sub-systems and features, access to parts of the UI, and exploration of a section of modding that largely gets ignored.
I need to learn how to use scripting for TW!
Hands on with TEd
After this we were able to get our own hands on TEd, basically just playing around and experimenting with some of the developers on hand to provide tips and guidance. There isn't too much more to say here beyond the earlier impressions on it, other than it is very easy to get to grips with, even if there are some nuances and tricks to get used to. .Mitch and I, who, I will add, have never claimed to be artists, managed to fail in our attempts to build certain fortresses, Kinjo and spartan.warrior were able to quickly make a Hadrian's Wall map. We did find a wickerman model though, so there's potential to put a civilian shelter inside of that...
Final Thoughts
Overall, the tools for Attila look to add an amazing range of possibilities. Personally, I think battle map creation in particular is going to take off in a big way. With all the things we can access and change now mods for Attila are only going to get bigger and better. I'll add in a thank you here to the entire CA crew. They were very hospitable, and the senior developers coming to talk face to face with us is a huge thing, especially with Attila only weeks away. We could talk directly to them about our experiences with modding, with the current tools, with what we want out of those and any new tools. There was plenty of note-taking on both sides and, just like last year, I feel that the community can expect to see some real progress being made on the modding front in the future.
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Originally Posted by stevehoos
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