Modding! Sort of...The first step

[thesword88]

Firstly I am very excited to play the game the way the devs meant for it to be played.
Secondly it seems like a lot of stuff is exposed to the user for easy editing hopefully enabling some awesome modding. If that appeals to you read on, else probably stop reading.

So I frist noticed all of the strings(text) in the game is exposed through easy to read/edit xml files. Which opens up some fun 'modding' opportunities such as playing as yourself, a licensed character or whoever.

For example to change name of you hero in the prologue go to:
1. %STEAM_DIR%\steamapps\common\kingarthurii\Strings where __ is where you steam games live for example D:\Steam\
2. open Lang_Heroes.xml in notepad go to line 30
3. change the text in that node to whatever you want. For example replace 'Septimus Sulla' with Sun Tzu to play with your hero named after the strategist.

You can perform similar trickery with artifacts, wives, units and so on and so forth(You can even reauthor the text based quests) via the strings folder but this is only the start. In addition to those xml files large portions of the game exist in plain text which is similarly editable.

Next: most(all?) of the game's graphics are stored as dds(DirectDrawSurface) files and follow an excellent naming scheme. While I personally am not the best at the artistic side of software it should quite straightforward to replace many of the in game models.

The sounds and some(much) of the other data uses a nice open source format(ogg which I am only passingly familiar with) and as far as I can tell all of this might be fairly easy to mod. If not

Given I have only spent about an hour on this so far so none of this is final, it looks like we should have an excellent and easily moddable game on our hands with KA2.

Hopefully that will give it the boost it needs to challenge the more and more locked down total war games.


***Two notes:
1. If this is bothersome to the devs let me know and I will remove it/refrain from such things
2. I think it is awesome that so much of the game is available in documented formats instead of compiled way into the dlls and exes.

 

[Neocore_Kate]

We don't mind at all

Although when it comes to official updates/patches, they might overwrite what you have changed.

 

[unmerged(146399)]

May dev tell us about what they allowed for modding ?
I've made my modding class on similar games (TW) and I might "fall in modding" again, depending to what can be done. I actually don't have the game, and won't have it before one month so I can't have a look by myself at the viewable files...

Thanks a lot for allowing modding anyway, this is what make a developper different from another (and also what makes games a lot more interessant to buy -to my opinion)

 

[unmerged(146399)]

Please, don't forgive me

 

[unmerged(146399)]

Someone just asked about modding there : http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2508360

And what Lind replied is quite disturbing, will there be modding or not, I don't really understand ?

 

[Neocore_Kate]

Basically the game was not built in a mod-friendly way. So no, in that sense it doesn't support modding.

But there are a couple of files you can open and change and as I stated above, we don't mind if you do.

 

[unmerged(146399)]

So just "soft" modding... no total conversions...

I don't have my game (waiting for 23th february : french boxes release), I can't look at its files.

 

[Slan]

A list from the top of my head:

• Soldier types, skills/spells, locations (and Buildings), artifacts, artifact sets, AI armies, ladies, traits, quests, diplomatic actions, terrain modifiers and weather modifiers are all in configurable files, but be warned that if you mess something up, it might break the game (the code might reference something in the files and if it can't find it, it might crash). Always keep a backup copy! Also note that some of the lines in the cfg-s might be in Hungarian, so you might need a dictionary
• Artifact modifiers are partially hard-coded, you can change the values to some extent but you can't introduce or change actual modifiers.
• 2D graphics are interchangeable for the most part (unit pictures, artifact pictures, gui elements, etc.), although AFAIK they are encoded beyond the .dds extension, so you probably won't be able to open them with a regular pictuer viewer. But if I'm not mistaken, that's only a way to compress the game, so if you replace our pictures with standard .dds files, it should work as well.
• Similar for the sounds. You can replace pretty much anything in the '\Sounds' folder, it should work. (It should also accept .wav files, not only .ogg.)
• Objectives are hard-coded, you won't be able to change them, so the story will remain the same, whatever you do.

So basically you can tweak and re-balance your game but you won't be able to make a complete overhaul like a Lord of the Rings or a Song of Fire and Ice remake