Roma Surrectum Remastered?

[TheRomanRuler]

Remaster would be epic. I don't know how rose tinted my glasses are but imo Total War modding was at it's glory days when Roma Surrectum 2 and Third Age Total war were created. To this day RS2 with it's improved graphics still has vastly superior perfomance to vanilla, on top of everything else.

[Sebastos Abdes Pantera]

I would love this to happen, would be the main reason I would buy the remastered version.

[Sebastianus V]

I retired from TW games 4 years ago, seeing that remaster is coming out was awesome!!! I cant wait to see if mods such as RS3 and EB will be avaiable

[tungri_centurio]

well we had a remade rome for so long called roma surrectum. now we get a remastered rome so i really hope a new team will form to remaster this masterpiece.
damn wish i know something about modding,but i can only support the ones that can.
my RS3 still runs smooth so i can keep playing, sadly not the case for everyone.

[The Noble Lord]

That would've been awesome BUT I believe that all the members of the modding team are very busy with their real life, married , children and all.....

[tone]

In the meantime, before any decent mods appear, I've just this week managed to get all of the lovely shader goodness of Reshade working with the Rome total war engine, include proper depth of field, ray tracing, ambient occlusion, etc.
I'll post some screenshots in the next few days, but it really does look rather gorgeous and while still not as good as modern game engines, does give things a further lease of life.
The only issue is that I haven't yet figured how to get the effects to ignore the UI, which for some reason is seen as being distant (therefore blurred) rather than near and in focus.
I'll share what I've done shortly.

[Nelduin]

I am interested in what you said, since I never managed to get Reshade working with RTW, sadly.

[dvk901]

Basically a new team has to be formed from scratch to make RS IV. But porting over RS III into Rome Remastered is likely to be much easier than actually building the entire mod from scratch. For instance, most of the mod design elements are already there. And assuming the scripts for RS III will work for Rome Remastered, that's a lot of time saved.

In addition, most of the skins and texture files are already there. So you don't need to create new skins from scratch unless there's some issues with the newer models.

It's not going to be as easy as simply dumpling all the RSIII files into Rome Remastered, but if the old modders are happy to allow the creation of a successor team in porting over the mod, it is far easier than creating an entire mod from scratch.

I was shocked when all of a sudden one day I saw a video on YouTube explaining the news that Rome Total War had been re-mastered. My first thought was, "Thanks, but we wanted that about 8 or 9 years ago!" Still, my love for this old game got the best of me, and I got sucked into thinking about it again. A few years ago my data drive on which I had EVERYTHING.....all the research, files, historical data, graphics, units etc. gave up the ghost with a loud 'beeeeeep!', and there was nothing I could do to save it. Fortunately, I had various backups of a lot of stuff in other places, but a lot was lost. To be quite blunt, I gave up modding RS3 because of a lot of personal RL issues and in particular, my slowly failing eyesight. I just couldn't work on this as much as I could before, and it seemed that interest in RTW and RS were dying anyway. Sorry I just seemed to disappear. Sometimes things happen, and that's just the way it is.

I am going to get the Remaster and have a look at it. I know the guts and workings of this game so well that a good look at what they did might well tell me what can and cannot be done.

As far as forming another team to port this mod into the new engine, whomever wishes to do that....you have my blessing and support. This mod was a 'labor of love' for us, I guess you'd say, and it would be wonderful to see some new life pumped into it. I was personally most impressed and awed by the units that Tone created...they are works of art that I don't think are surpassed anywhere in the RTW world. I know how much work he put into them, and I was always honored and grateful to have him as my partner in this effort.

So have at it people....let the younger generation show what they can do!

[tone]

I was shocked when all of a sudden one day I saw a video on YouTube explaining the news that Rome Total War had been re-mastered. My first thought was, "Thanks, but we wanted that about 8 or 9 years ago!" Still, my love for this old game got the best of me, and I got sucked into thinking about it again. A few years ago my data drive on which I had EVERYTHING.....all the research, files, historical data, graphics, units etc. gave up the ghost with a loud 'beeeeeep!', and there was nothing I could do to save it. Fortunately, I had various backups of a lot of stuff in other places, but a lot was lost. To be quite blunt, I gave up modding RS3 because of a lot of personal RL issues and in particular, my slowly failing eyesight. I just couldn't work on this as much as I could before, and it seemed that interest in RTW and RS were dying anyway. Sorry I just seemed to disappear. Sometimes things happen, and that's just the way it is.

I am going to get the Remaster and have a look at it. I know the guts and workings of this game so well that a good look at what they did might well tell me what can and cannot be done.

As far as forming another team to port this mod into the new engine, whomever wishes to do that....you have my blessing and support. This mod was a 'labor of love' for us, I guess you'd say, and it would be wonderful to see some new life pumped into it. I was personally most impressed and awed by the units that Tone created...they are works of art that I don't think are surpassed anywhere in the RTW world. I know how much work he put into them, and I was always honored and grateful to have him as my partner in this effort.

So have at it people....let the younger generation show what they can do!

Kind words, but of course you created the original vision, the amazing framework, stirred us on to keep going.

You'll be pleased to hear that I still have all the original GIMP layered files for units etc. One sensible thing to think about would be to somehow collaborate with other modding trans to have a pool of shared resources with some unique flavours.

As I said, I can't really consider getting heavily involved in any mod development, but could do some minor tinkering in the background, mainly graphics related.

[tone]

Worth looking at the Remastered Answers channel on Discord here: #answers-collection (discord.com)

Specifically some answers of interest:

As with Campaign AI, we have made some alterations to battle AI (also toggle-able when entering a game mode). It was a conscious decision to keep the original engine, we wanted the remaster to remain true to Rome 1 and the engine is integral to how the game feels. We have made substantial efforts where possible to fix known issues or add complementary optional systems. We spent considerable time understanding the original codebase to ensure the changes made were compatible and complementary to the original and it’s design intentions.

With respect to battle AI we have improved specific self contained behaviour & made smaller incremental improvements to the overall experience while avoiding side effects. We know there is a long list of AI behaviours that many of you might want addressed so this will be something that we’ll be monitoring and taking into consideration.


Some examples of areas we have investigated are:


* Phalanx formation realignment.
* Tower and walls pathing
* Settlement breach point pathing.
Replied to
Has the single soldier, and unit pathfinding been fixed. By single soldier pathfinding, i mean will the whole units soldiers shuffle places when formation is slightly altered? And will the unit pathfinding be overall fixed, meaning the units will go straight where they're commanded instead of taking some wierd round trip through the enemy phalanx?

Yes, Blender will be supported with the modding tools.Replied to
Will Blender be supported directly by any of the new tools or will it rely on modders developing new tools as per current RTW.

Yes we have investigated and worked on campaign map AI and in particular diplomacy. All these changes can be enabled or disabled when starting a new campaign.

These are a selection one features with the AI system which we have looked into and attempted to address:


* Negotiations now have a concept of long term relationships so factions can build up or lose trust with each other over multiple turns.
* The AI can be more decisive when needed and is less likely to oscillate between two different objectives.
* You’re more likely to be able to convince a small faction to become a protectorate but they also have the ability to analyse the situation and may turn on you if they can see a better alliance could be made.
* AI will now attack across seas.
* Diplomacy updates with a concept of settling debts both financial and territorial.
* Armies strategise better to form up into larger armies and co-ordinate attacks or formulate longer term macro strategies.


All changes have been focused on making sure the AI is more consistent and logical with it's approach and that their actions are usually in keeping with their reputation.
Replied to
What changes we will see in diplomacy? In general AI was very untrustworthy in old Rome. Will it be more likely to honor treaties with player in the remaster?

Yes, in some aspects the new campaign map should be more moddable or at least flexible to artistic and design edits. To give a brief overview of how the original map system worked. The map was divided into 1000s of tiles, each tile with its own metadata, which included biome information, topology etc. The game would take a base texture as input to a basic shader and in combination with the metadata computed a tile texture and 3D mesh which would be interpolated with surrounding tiles (this topography metadata was also used for the battle map generation, this system is retained for the Remaster). This was extremely computationally inefficient and inflexible.

The remaster has maintained the underlying tile system and it’s metadata, so modders should be able to redefine the contents of each tile or add new ones as needed. There are now 104 4K textures which were procedurally generated offline and are assets within game data. This should allow for more artistic control, as viewing the assets outside of the app should be representative of how they look in game as there are no further computation steps. For any dynamic content such as farm development levels, devastation etc we have added an overlay system, which also is possible to be leveraged by mods. We also have a 104 static meshes for the whole map so modders can swap them out for their own as needed. Finally we have a simple flag which modders can set to regenerate a height-map file so that items are correctly placed and move around on new map topology.


The added complexity of this new system will come from ensuring that the tile locations and scale are in agreement with the mesh and texture assets. However we believe that you should be able to export out a texture of their new tile layout and use this as the basis from which to make the map geometry.
Replied to
Will it be possible to modify the campaign map as we used to in RTW?

We have worked to multi-thread as much as possible. Rendering setup for Units, particles as well as audio and some other some other smaller subsystems, have been multi-threaded.

With regards to the update logic (animations, AI), features such as multiplayer expect deterministic results, the engine made assumptions about serialised computed states. There is also an overhead in tracking multi-threaded state which negates the gains for the most part at normal battle sizes. As such there will still be some bottlenecks in specific battle setups or scenarios although they should be improved somewhat from the original.


We have also spent time on other optimisations, I've provided some examples below:


Unit rendering optimisations whilst increasing complexity (e.g. unit ethnicity variation):
*Batching of draw calls
*Instancing


Buildings
*Instanced and reworked the assets
*Fully implemented LOD system


We also spent significant time on campaign rendering
*New mesh and texture setup (as previously discussed in modding response).
*Texture streaming system


Although we are using the original game engine (with significant edits) we have written an entirely new renderer which is plugged into the original engine, the renderer now supports:


*A modern post processing stack
*SSAO
*Realtime reflections
*Volumetric clouds, improved sky and atmospheric effects leveraging trueSKY.
*High quality shadows.
*DoF, Heat Haze, Bloom
*Colour grading


We have plan at release or shortly after to expose many of the renderer parameters so that modders can modify the look of these effects and ship them as part of their mod.
Replied to
Will the game run on multiple threads? The original runs slow in large battles even on modern multi-core CPUs

Yes, you will be able to edit textures with ease. We will have more information on modding specifics soonReplied to
You talked about 3D models requiring tools to edit but what about the unit textures? the original game allowed those to simply be edited with programs such as photoshop rather easily without the need of tools. Will this also require tools that us modders will have to wait for or can we mess around with them instantly on launch day with no tools required to change them? thank you Feral also on the android ports, good time killers when i'm bored on my phone :heart:

The map editor won’t be available in the remaster for release however we’re looking into bringing back in the future. Until then I can confirm if you use the original game’s map editor you can create maps, save them then copy them over to the Remaster and they should work perfectly just with new models, textures and updated lighting. :slight_smile:Replied to
Has there been any improvements for the battle editor for the remaster?

The Remaster still uses the same skeleton and animation systems as the original release and this does impose limitations as to what can be done. It is important to note that game state and animations are linked, we wanted the Remaster to feel like the original and significant edits to this system would risk changing the gameplay or the combat timing drastically. With that said we have spent time polishing and updating animations as well as adding new animations where it would not impact gameplay. For example mounted units now react to the motion of their mount and units will now reflect their their fatigue status.Replied to
Does remaster have brand new animations or are they still the old ones?

Yes, we’re raising the limits from the original game to allow for more factions and settlements to be added to maps (more information in due course). We’ll also be monitoring and keeping in contact with the modding community post release (with the help of CA’s community team) to see what features modders need to bring all their amazing mods to life and trying to support where we can.Replied to
Will the limit on factions, units, and regions be removed or greatly expanded?

[Darth Bane1]

Man, what I time to be alive. I just hope porting models isn't a hassle. As I've spent a great amount of time switching out units of the Greek/Hellenic roster for units done by Neo and some of
Leoni's stuff. Doing that was such a fresh breeze of air, after yeeears of playing this mod. A larger map for RSIII would be cool, as we know now that they've raised the most hindering hardcoded limits like more factions. We could have all the swap factions as real playable factions and more.

[Love Mountain]

Worth looking at the Remastered Answers channel on Discord here: #answers-collection (discord.com)

Specifically some answers of interest:

To a total modding noob, could you tell us some of the implications of these comments by CA?

[tone]

It was a conscious decision to keep the original engine

Means that modding should be not that different from the original engine, so it'll make porting easier. Onwards from M2TW, modding became a lot more complex.

Yes, Blender will be supported with the modding tools.

Blender is a free 3D modelling tool. This means that 3D models can imported and exported, allowing easier changing of units, buildings and siege engines. With the original release, the requirement was to own the expensive 3dsmax in order to change models.

These are a selection one features with the AI system which we have looked into and attempted to address:


* Negotiations now have a concept of long term relationships so factions can build up or lose trust with each other over multiple turns.
* The AI can be more decisive when needed and is less likely to oscillate between two different objectives.
* You’re more likely to be able to convince a small faction to become a protectorate but they also have the ability to analyse the situation and may turn on you if they can see a better alliance could be made.
* AI will now attack across seas.
* Diplomacy updates with a concept of settling debts both financial and territorial.
* Armies strategise better to form up into larger armies and co-ordinate attacks or formulate longer term macro strategies.

This is just generally good news for AI behaviour.

Yes, in some aspects the new campaign map should be more moddable or at least flexible to artistic and design edits. To give a brief overview of how the original map system worked. The map was divided into 1000s of tiles, each tile with its own metadata, which included biome information, topology etc. The game would take a base texture as input to a basic shader and in combination with the metadata computed a tile texture and 3D mesh which would be interpolated with surrounding tiles (this topography metadata was also used for the battle map generation, this system is retained for the Remaster). This was extremely computationally inefficient and inflexible.

The remaster has maintained the underlying tile system and it’s metadata, so modders should be able to redefine the contents of each tile or add new ones as needed. There are now 104 4K textures which were procedurally generated offline and are assets within game data. This should allow for more artistic control, as viewing the assets outside of the app should be representative of how they look in game as there are no further computation steps. For any dynamic content such as farm development levels, devastation etc we have added an overlay system, which also is possible to be leveraged by mods. We also have a 104 static meshes for the whole map so modders can swap them out for their own as needed. Finally we have a simple flag which modders can set to regenerate a height-map file so that items are correctly placed and move around on new map topology.


The added complexity of this new system will come from ensuring that the tile locations and scale are in agreement with the mesh and texture assets. However we believe that you should be able to export out a texture of their new tile layout and use this as the basis from which to make the map geometry.

It sounds like modding the campaign map will be relatively similar to the original RTW, possibly easier. Most of the main RTW mods have made significant changes to the map...expanding it, adding more cities, resources, fixing inaccurate geography, changing climates, trying to make more historically accurate. This is good news if in fact it's made easier and not that different from RTW. The key question really will be whether they will allow more regions than previously. So overall, good news I think.

Unit rendering optimisations whilst increasing complexity (e.g. unit ethnicity variation):
*Batching of draw calls
*Instancing


Buildings
*Instanced and reworked the assets
*Fully implemented LOD system


We also spent significant time on campaign rendering
*New mesh and texture setup (as previously discussed in modding response).
*Texture streaming system


Although we are using the original game engine (with significant edits) we have written an entirely new renderer which is plugged into the original engine, the renderer now supports:


*A modern post processing stack
*SSAO
*Realtime reflections
*Volumetric clouds, improved sky and atmospheric effects leveraging trueSKY.
*High quality shadows.
*DoF, Heat Haze, Bloom
*Colour grading


We have plan at release or shortly after to expose many of the renderer parameters so that modders can modify the look of these effects and ship them as part of their mod.

This means that the overall visual quality will look way better, but also that it should be easier to make further improvements to lighting, colour, shadows and overall graphics without needing to use external products such as Reshade to achieve this.

Yes, you will be able to edit textures with ease. We will have more information on modding specifics soon

Great news. It means that unit and building reskins should be relatively straightforward and is likely to be a first step for some modders. It would mean that without making any other changes, it would be possible to port over at least some of the unit textures from RS or other mods as just a reskin pack.

The Remaster still uses the same skeleton and animation systems as the original release and this does impose limitations as to what can be done. It is important to note that game state and animations are linked, we wanted the Remaster to feel like the original and significant edits to this system would risk changing the gameplay or the combat timing drastically. With that said we have spent time polishing and updating animations as well as adding new animations where it would not impact gameplay. For example mounted units now react to the motion of their mount and units will now reflect their their fatigue status.

This helps in that it'll therefore be easier to port across existing models, because the animation skeletons are unchanged.

Yes, we’re raising the limits from the original game to allow for more factions and settlements to be added to maps (more information in due course). We’ll also be monitoring and keeping in contact with the modding community post release (with the help of CA’s community team) to see what features modders need to bring all their amazing mods to life and trying to support where we can.

Great news. Something modding teams constantly came up against were the map and faction limitation issues. What they've not yet said explicitly is whether they are raising the limits on numbers of different units and buildings. Again, we came up against these constantly with RS and had to work various ways to get around these limits.


So overall, I think it means that they've used most of the same engine, that it should be relatively easy to mod, and that quite a lot of the existing mods could be ported over way more easily than into R2TW or other newer engines. I say relatively, whilst recognising that literally thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of hours went into development of any of the bigger mods like RS, EB or RTR.

Given what we achieved with the original RTW game engine in terms of graphics improvements, I'm pretty confident that any new Remastered mods could be a significant improvement on originals.

However, the key challenge is having sufficient people in any modding teams.

[Ye Olde Fahrt]

Saw the announcement for Remastered and my first thought was to come here and to check on the RS forum

Haven't played RS for years, but this easily has the most hours clocked in for any of my TW titles. Roma surrecta!

[Love Mountain]

So overall, I think it means that they've used most of the same engine, that it should be relatively easy to mod, and that quite a lot of the existing mods could be ported over way more easily than into R2TW or other newer engines. I say relatively, whilst recognising that literally thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands of hours went into development of any of the bigger mods like RS, EB or RTR.

Thanks for the breakdown, it does clarify things a lot.

Given what we achieved with the original RTW game engine in terms of graphics improvements, I'm pretty confident that any new Remastered mods could be a significant improvement on originals.

However, the key challenge is having sufficient people in any modding teams.

Every generation has its heroes.

[LavaCreeper]

I was shocked when all of a sudden one day I saw a video on YouTube explaining the news that Rome Total War had been re-mastered. My first thought was, "Thanks, but we wanted that about 8 or 9 years ago!" Still, my love for this old game got the best of me, and I got sucked into thinking about it again. A few years ago my data drive on which I had EVERYTHING.....all the research, files, historical data, graphics, units etc. gave up the ghost with a loud 'beeeeeep!', and there was nothing I could do to save it. Fortunately, I had various backups of a lot of stuff in other places, but a lot was lost. To be quite blunt, I gave up modding RS3 because of a lot of personal RL issues and in particular, my slowly failing eyesight. I just couldn't work on this as much as I could before, and it seemed that interest in RTW and RS were dying anyway. Sorry I just seemed to disappear. Sometimes things happen, and that's just the way it is.

I am going to get the Remaster and have a look at it. I know the guts and workings of this game so well that a good look at what they did might well tell me what can and cannot be done.

As far as forming another team to port this mod into the new engine, whomever wishes to do that....you have my blessing and support. This mod was a 'labor of love' for us, I guess you'd say, and it would be wonderful to see some new life pumped into it. I was personally most impressed and awed by the units that Tone created...they are works of art that I don't think are surpassed anywhere in the RTW world. I know how much work he put into them, and I was always honored and grateful to have him as my partner in this effort.

So have at it people....let the younger generation show what they can do!

It's great to see you here again! I certainly hope you'll be able to look into how doable the port is and give us pointers, hopefully from there we should be able to manage to release something as great as RS3.

[tungri_centurio]

well i was asking around on the rome total war discord. there are alot of active modders, but non is willing to help and form a new team to port/remake RS to the remaster. was talking with lanjane,from what i understand they rather work on their own on smaller mods. i can respect that.

[ahowl11]

well i was asking around on the rome total war discord. there are alot of active modders, but non is willing to help and form a new team to port/remake RS to the remaster. was talking with lanjane,from what i understand they rather work on their own on smaller mods. i can respect that.

RTR is probably going to collaborate with tone at least to see what we can make, possibly using RS2 materials. You can join that discord if you want to, just message me. Nothing is for certain about RS or it’s future but we have had a great relationship with dvk and tone over the years. We just differ in what we want to see out of a mod.

[tungri_centurio]

RTR is probably going to collaborate with tone at least to see what we can make, possibly using RS2 materials. You can join that discord if you want to, just message me. Nothing is for certain about RS or it’s future but we have had a great relationship with dvk and tone over the years. We just differ in what we want to see out of a mod.

can't see how i can help with the modding part. i can do testing and some research but thats about it.

i went from vanilla rome1 to rs2. so i was spoiled when i started playing mods, didn't even bother to play others for years since this is so good.

[tone]

Just to confirm that a number of the RS team are actively collaborating with the RTR team to look at modding the new engine