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what about a CORE type thingie

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unmerged(80821)

unmerged(80821)

Second Lieutenant
Jul 22, 2007
190
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I am just spit-balling here, so do not take anything said here as a plan for the future, as it probably will not happen.

I was just wondering, would it be possible for the relatively small community we have here right now to get together and form 1 multi-modder project. Some form of a Community Open Resource Exchange if you will ;) . I currently am working very enthusiastically on the SPQR mod, but sometimes I let my brain wander to far :) . The only reason I want to discuss this is because I am afraid of certain modders, and with them great ideas, will be left in the dust by the advances of a different mod. I realize that all of the modders here will be willing to take on other team members if someone wants to join, but I fear that some people will just be left in the dust by one mod triumphing over the rest. I think that maybe some major unification of modders (not necessarily mods) would be a good preemptive strike to stop this from happening.

I also realize the problems with polar ideologies about what should a mod do or not, such as more nations or not. And I also realize the problem with leadership in the mod group as well.

The reason I post this is because of a conversation with battlecry about his mod and his general willingness to do this. One thing I fear is the massive comprises that would have to be made for this to work, which will put people off, but the benefits would outweigh the problems.

Thankyou for reading this, and remember this is just a brainstorm. Now if anyone cares about this please post, and if nobody cares just let this sink to page 10 or however far it can sink. :D

EDIT:

As far as I can tell this is actually looking like people want it. As a "to do list" if you will we can work on a couple things:

-Get all of the historical starting positions set up correctly. As far as I have seen the social wars are not represented at all in this game, which is disappointing.

-Get some sort of "things historically wrong with the game" list going, and then some sort of list of things that will help fix this.

I am still not sure on how well some thing like this would work, but if it falls apart then we would at least have a historical database of sorts for the mod. As for a program coordinator I would love for someone with a little more historical knowledge then myself to help, but I would like to be a temporary co-coordinator for the time being. As for the time being I will put "updates" in this post, and eventually start a new thread if this gets moving along. Now I'm off to modding in the SPQR mod.
 
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Well one of the first things C.O.R.E. set out to do was list all the historical inaccuracies evident in the vanilla game. After this modders worked on ways to correct those discrepancies. Such an effort, and the list of errors it would produce, would be extremely helpful to the entire modding community, lead to the improvement of current mods, and set a precedent for group action that might lead to a community mod.

I should note that if such a group effort were to be organized, there should be strict rules as to verifiable sources - i.e. if you can't provide a verifiable scholarly source for an inaccuracy (and wikipedia is NOT a scholarly source, any professor anywhere will tell you), then don't bother posting it.
 
The biggest problem with fixing historical problems in ancient times is the lack of hard evidence. Most of our knowledge, especially of the Roman era comes from the writers of the time, Polybius, Plutarch, Appian, to name a few. And not all of these sources are 100% accurate as some of them preferred to embellish their tales or add created personal stories to their historical accounts.

This leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and people are quick to form their own opinions of how history happened.

You also open up the big nationalistic can of worms when you do this as some people are going to start fighting over the current ethnicity of their nation and how it relates to the ancient ethnicity of their land just because their present-day country happens to occupy the same land.

Eventually opinions will become so divided that it will be near impossible to reconcile the differences and people will leave to make a mod closer to their own view of history.

All of this already happened with Rome:Total Realism and Europa Barbarorum. They both had great groups of people who love history, but that same love of history and perhaps their favorite factions in that part of history made it nearly impossble for the two to work together on anything for the longest time. They had only just begun to share information and actual portions of their mods at the very end of my stay there before my job took away too much of my time to help.

I'm not trying to be negative, because I'm all for the sharing of information, I'd just consider this a warning from the past as you're going to get all kinds of arguments and a lot of them won't have a clear right or wrong answer.
 
TheLoneGunman said:
The biggest problem with fixing historical problems in ancient times is the lack of hard evidence. Most of our knowledge, especially of the Roman era comes from the writers of the time, Polybius, Plutarch, Appian, to name a few. And not all of these sources are 100% accurate as some of them preferred to embellish their tales or add created personal stories to their historical accounts.

This leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and people are quick to form their own opinions of how history happened.

You also open up the big nationalistic can of worms when you do this as some people are going to start fighting over the current ethnicity of their nation and how it relates to the ancient ethnicity of their land just because their present-day country happens to occupy the same land.

Eventually opinions will become so divided that it will be near impossible to reconcile the differences and people will leave to make a mod closer to their own view of history.

All of this already happened with Rome:Total Realism and Europa Barbarorum. They both had great groups of people who love history, but that same love of history and perhaps their favorite factions in that part of history made it nearly impossble for the two to work together on anything for the longest time. They had only just begun to share information and actual portions of their mods at the very end of my stay there before my job took away too much of my time to help.

I'm not trying to be negative, because I'm all for the sharing of information, I'd just consider this a warning from the past as you're going to get all kinds of arguments and a lot of them won't have a clear right or wrong answer.
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Yes I agree there are going to be disputes as to veracity of evidence, but at least we can weed out those who offer no evidence whatsoever. As for the veracity of Polybius, Plutarch, Appian etc etc, much of the vanilla game must already be based on some of their works (as is much of the history of the period), so assuming an absence of directly contradictory evidence I think these can be termed as proper sources. Virtually every history ever written is embellished in some way (usually ethnocentrically) so we must either move past these embellishments, or have practically no evidence whatsoever.
 
Well like I said, it was just a warning, since I've seen it all happen before.

Just wait till you start discussing whether to keep Macedonia as a seperate but related culture to the Greeks... ;)

In all seriousness though, I'd love to help out with some sort of combined effort. I've been wandering the internet hijacking every map of the ancient world I can find lately and storing them in a nice convenient folder.
 
TheLoneGunman said:
I've been wandering the internet hijacking every map of the ancient world I can find lately and storing them in a nice convenient folder.
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That'd be useful (although I'm not sure if you can post them, copyright stuff & all)
 
This is really more of a brainstorm than an actual project, but thankyou for your replies. I did not think of the culture thing, lets just not go to Greece and talk about how they were the same :D . The only reason I posted this is just to see the general willingness for the modders to help and form 1 amazing mod. Maybe we could do it like, "your in charge of National Ideas, He's in charge of Greek politics etc." and have everybody work on separate things, but this may come out like some weird patchwork that is completely different in all parts. Maybe this is not possible, but It would be great if it worked.
 
As far as nation placement and historical events go, I think the best way to implement them would be to go year by year. So if the mod is set to start at 474AUC, then we'd make sure every major (and hopefully every minor) nation is in its proper place, with the correct leaders, and set up the correct events that will happen in that year.

Once 474 is covered 473 would then be next and so on. Tedious and painstaking, but the best way to handle it IMHO. Reason being, it gives those who wish to play the mod a starting point while the rest of the mod is being finished.

Naturally this doesn't affect the more global settings and non-specific events that can be worked on seperately and easily.
 
This is an extremely interesting idea and one I would love to aid - not with my miniscule modding experience but with my historical knowledge (being a history pro - editor in chief for a military history magazine in Greece and author of more than just several monographs on military history subjects).

For starters.... let's not go into the "maks: greeks or not" area, it's muddy and won't give a nice impression for the start :D Let's get more ...say, pragmatic, shall we? Is there a list of "to do" tasks? Perhaps start with some recruitment, nominate someone (should be someone with time at his/her hands) as coordinator, give tasks to people and take it from there?
 
TheLoneGunman said:
As far as nation placement and historical events go, I think the best way to implement them would be to go year by year. So if the mod is set to start at 474AUC, then we'd make sure every major (and hopefully every minor) nation is in its proper place, with the correct leaders, and set up the correct events that will happen in that year.
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I have noticed that vanilla's province-history files have relatively little history in them and kind-of had this chalked up on a to-do list.

I have also been thinking about introducing new cultures (not culture-groups, which are complex). Indeed, SPQR 0.3 is likely to have a 'Latin' culture distinguished from a Roman one.

It strikes me that enhancing the initial setup in this way would be a very productive job and would enhance a number of mods.

I am not sure that anything like CORE is possible in Rome... and on the occasions I have tried CORE I didn't much like it, finding it a bit dry and restrictive. However, a list of differences between Rome and history would be very useful for everyone.
 
This would be a great thing to add to the Extended Map project.

The Information is already being gathered there for the provinces, and would likely criss-cross with the information collected in this one.
 
just so people realize, I have updated the first post. What I would really like (I think I am far to optimistic) Is for all the major modders around here to come and help with one unified project (It doesn't have to be this one :D ) and for everybody to make compromises for the unified mod. If this does work for a unified mod I would like for most of the decisions to be done in a good Athenian democracy way, everybody enters their decision into a poll and whatever decision the majority says, is the one that goes, (or we can do it the way the soviets did it and have all you guys pm me your vote and I tell you the answer i want to hear :D ).

This will take a while for the first versions of the mod to come out (if this project even continues), but I think it will be worthwhile in the end. :D
 
As I've said in another thread, I think working together is a good idea. And I like the idea of starting by going for historical accuracy. It's a good base since everyone can more or less agree on what changes should be made.

I'd still rather see one big mod than many smaller mods, though, and maybe it could be done if everyone was willing to compromise a bit. Say, all of the modders interested made a list of what their mod changes, then we see the conflicts and figure out how to fit it together. There's a chance it wouldn't work out, since we all know something's going to have to give for certain cases, but maybe we could come to enough of an agreement to put together a unified mod.

In any case, if that's something we would actually like to attempt, I think we should do it soon, before everything gets too big to consider it. I think it's definitely worth trying. I'd hate to see several awesome mods being built separately while everyone wishes they could get the best of each, when we have the chance now to put the best of each together.

But hey, if there's no interest then we all keep going our separate ways :)
 
Great Idea antimatter, I hope than many of the modders will put out a list of the things their mod changes specifically, and hopefully all the contradictions will be worked out. I really want this to work, because, as you said, having many good mods is not as good as having 1 awesome mod. I ask all the modders who read this thread to pm me a list of things their mod actually changes, and we will hopefully be able to work from there.

I will wait for a day, so what some modders post, and then will pm some of the ones who did not, and yes I will read all of the read-mes of the mods that seem historically based.

This is better done sooner than later, because we don't want anything to get out of control big where combination is just impossible. May all people who have released mods please help, because this mod is a community effort, and no one person will have their name on the mod as the leader.

if anybody has any complaints/ suggestions please post, I thrive on posts :D

EDIT: I have downloaded most of the mods that improve gameplay/ historicity and I am reading their read-mes to help me understand what we currently have to work with, I will not take any parts of any mod for anything unless permission is granted, so dont worry, I am just reading them to see the current potential and conflicts each mod has.
 
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I hope so, because most of these individual mods, even though they are all great (I'm serious I love all of them :D ), they will take forever to finish and still not be as good as if we all put our mods and modding ability together, for one huge joint effort.

Do you guys think that I should make a new thread, and make this official, I would also like a poll to see how many people actually are willing to do this/want this(this has to be done by a moderator, correct?). Or should I pm most of the modders and see what their reactions are to this?
 
Well before you make an "official" Official thread, I'd say you decide exactly what kin dof mod you want to make. What era you're going to cover (if it's going to be different from the current time period we're working with) and any other major goals that need to be set first.
 
It will be the same time period, just an an enhancement of the historical accuracy, something that will boost the historical outcomes (I just made that up, I swear :rolleyes: ) of the game, kinda like a magna mundi product with a CORE approach, have the entire modding community (or at least most of it) help in one unified mod that will be historically accurate, while not doing anything like, "It is 50BC so now ceasar starts a civil war" event. I would like it if all of the starting dates are set correctly, and many rebellions/civil wars that are not represented in the start menu to be represented. This mod should increase the historical accuracy, while not impeding on anything that is slightly ahistorical. But then again, it will be the entire community's mod, so the modders as a group will get to decide not just me. ;)

EDIT: once again I would like to ask all of the people who already have a mod (or like to mod, or just want to help) to consider merging with all of the other modders to create one super-mod.

I also don't want this project to continue if I only have a small portion of the modding community, because then it would just be another mod :p , so this will only work if all of the Rome modding community was to help.

EDIT: thankyou for the maps TheLoneGunman, they are awesome!!!!!
 
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Outright merging of current mods might not be the best idea. I would suggest rather picking parts of those mods to go in (i.e. those that already enhance historical accuracy, ignoring those that don't).
A new project of this scale should be started from the ground up.
People who have tried each of the mods can suggest parts of them to be added to the project, and how those parts might be altered to better fit this project (this can be voted on, if you wish).
Having integrated a number of pre-existing mods for Rome:Enhanced, trust me, it'll work out better if you start from scratch, adding one by one (I've already had to rebuild my mod from the ground up twice).
Once the mod is an operational beta, I (I can't speak for anyone else) would be willing to cease (or at least reduce) development of R:E and redirect my efforts towards the community project.
In the meantime, any questions regarding integration of components can be directed my way, and if you wish I can do some of the integration myself - just say "Hey, here's this and this, please make them work together and then send them back to me". I'd be happy to help.
 
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