modding

zachanscom · Post by **zachanscom** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 12:04 am

has anyone began modding yet?

texture-wise, there could be a little added variety.

direwolf · Post by **direwolf** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 4:22 pm

Hi All,

I wanted to take a moment to thank you for 2 things:

1) Great game
2) I don't think folks realize it yet but the modding tools that you have provided will allow the community to easily build custom downloadable campaigns...this seriously increases the life of the game and i for one am looking forward to community developed mods.

I really hope that we get the same kind of community that we had in COM...i was mostly a troll there but there were some great, knowledgeable players in that forum.

cheers,
DW

Post by **IainMcNeil** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 4:37 pm

What people diid for Cult of Mithras was great and without any help from us really. These tools allow massively more modifcation and we think some great things could be done with it.

niptiknah · Post by **niptiknah** » Fri Oct 16, 2009 6:47 pm

Hi, I'm enjoying the game and started to look into modding, the Scenario editor is currently crashing for me. I compiled up the code that was there and found out its giving me this error

Current thread must be set to single thread apartment (STA) mode before OLE
calls can be made. Ensure that your Main function has STAThreadAttribute
marked on it. This exception is only raised if a debugger is attached to the
process.

which is fixed by inserting
[STAThread]
before
public static void Main(string[] args)

Havent got round to creating or loading anything yet as only just fixed this a few minutes ago

I'm running Vista64 in case its just on that operating system

Post by **pipfromslitherine** » Fri Oct 16, 2009 10:54 pm

Very odd. Maybe it is just a 64bit issue - although that kind of internal error is pretty strange to see happening on a vanilla C# app.

I will attempt to replicate it here and I guess I can just make the same fix as you to the runtime anyway.

Thanks

Pip

grumblefish · Post by **grumblefish** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 5:57 am

I call dibs on a Hellenic mod for the Peloponnesian war and its aftermath! I just bought the game now, and am downloading it as I type this. After I get bored of it, I hope to mod in Agesilaus and have him jog around some Thebans.

Surtur · Post by **Surtur** » Wed Oct 28, 2009 8:37 am

I would join that mod!

zachanscom · Post by **zachanscom** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 4:08 am

you'll need to develop tools to convert the models first though.

texturing is easy enough, i'm getting by just with ms paint and gimp. although it's a matter of cut and paste for me. someone more skilled could make some new textures from scratch.

grumblefish · Post by **grumblefish** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 6:07 pm

Wait, you mean new models can't be added in to the game yet? As in, we can't make new units? Only being able to change textures is a pretty crippling problem; we can make new shields and stuff, but they will all be the wrong shape, and the units will make the wrong motions when they use them.

Anyway, if we're going to do a mod of the Peloponnesian war and its aftermath, I suggest starting with the section of Xenophon's Hellenica that deals with Phlius. It is a short series of battles where the player can be the underdog, and at the end we could maybe have a fictional battle or two. We would need:

1. Map of the Peloponnesos
Easy enough to get. I don't know how to make a map on the computer, but I can provide an actual map to use as a reference.

2. Models and textures for Hoplite, Peltast, and Cavalry
There are plenty of illustrations available. I am terrible at art, but would be happy to find illustrations for actual artists, and also come up with ideas for equipment, skill sets, and the balacing of units.

3. Battles
I have the primary sources here, and they're freely available on the internet, so laying out the battle shouldn't be too hard. I don't know if the AI likes to march forward in phalanx formation, though.

Post by **pipfromslitherine** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:59 pm

Just to be clear - you won't be able to add any new units to the game. If we get a lot of demand from the modding community, then we could I guess create them in house - or even just convert them to the correct format, but we would probably need to determine that on a case-by-case basis as it is a lot of work. The issue is that the toolchain we use is not something we are allowed to give out to modders, we have not got suitable licenses to do so. We use Granny as our exporter and we then need to run the files through some custom tools to get them set up as we need. It's very very unfriendly, and only a tiny number of people would want to jump through all the hoops.

If we get a large demand to let people do this kind of thing, then perhaps we could work out some kind of tool to allow for modding of the existing models using some kind of post-process on the vertex data, effectively just moving the mesh around, but this would involve a lot of work for me, so it would again be dependent upon demand.

I appreciate this isn't ideal - and we have gone with entirely moddable assets in our BBC game - but GBM has a very different and more detailed asset set which we just didn't think a lot of people would have the time or desire to build or work on themselves. If this proves to be the case and there are legions of people wanting to create their own 3D units then we can, as always, listen to those requests and be as responsive as we can.

Feel free to ask for any other details, although it might make more sense to use the modding forum.

Cheers

Pip

zachanscom · Post by **zachanscom** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 4:38 am

made dagged aventail for knights

also able to get close shot of charles vi's jupon:

very hard to see though. i had to use a downward looking vector.

edit: i also wonder if you guys have any unused assets we could use that would very much be appreciated.