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Modability info for patch 1.0.97

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unmerged(169409)

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Sep 27, 2009
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  • Majesty 2
I've got the patched Steam version now and looked into some of the issues we're having with modding.

At first I was excited, because now there are more than one resource.pak file in the resource directory! I also noticed that there are files with the same name in both pak files! But..

The good news is that it won't crash if you have a .pak with files that you have in another pak. There is also still a method for loading custom missions, but it's not as convenient. The bad news is that everything else is bad news. :(

Here's what I've discovered:

  • It no longer loads any extra pak files in the directory, only the two they've hard coded it to load (resource*.pak and resource*_1_01.pak), so we can't release mods/missions as additional .pak files.
  • It will no longer load loose files. If you extract the .pak and move it, it says it can't find files. I hoped it was only looking for certain files in the pak, so as it complained about a file I added it to a dummy resource.pak file, but it eventually threw an error I did't understand so I had to give up.
  • Localization is inaccessible in a new pak file, texts_1_01.pak. It's not a regular zip file, and it seems to be encrypted in some way, or it may even just be a zip file without a zip header. I didn't look at it too closely. Presumably they did this so we can't add our own strings by comparing their two files.
  • You can still load custom missions by adding them to a pak file, they just need a specific mission file name. As long as the .mi file is named "single_NN.mi", where NN is great than 06, it will display in the mission list. The directory can be whatever, so in order to make my Wizard's Woe mission work, the .mi file just needs to be renamed to single_07.mi.
  • The patch's std resource file (resource.std_1_01.pak) can be easily replaced because the two std.pak files are identical. I replaced resource.std_1_01.pak with wizards_woe.pak, and it works! This means we can safely use this file for our missions, with a little trickery, like a zip combiner.
Overall, the changes seem intentionally oriented towards removing modability. I'm pretty disappointed by this, to say the least, since I've been excitedly building another mission (with snow!). There does not appear to be any way to access the editor short of patching the game. There's also a lot of references now to a pay shop, so it looks like the microtransaction thing is coming. The exe also has a new Goblinish name you can see when it crashes, which sounds like an expansion pack.

We'll probably just have to wait until they give us the campaign editor, if it ever happens. I'm really hoping they follow up with the rumor of an editor tool expansion, because the worst part of Majesty 1 was the lack of modability. This game DOES have it, but it's largely inaccessible now, and pretty useless without the editor.
 
my pessimistic opinion as following:

I think there aren't many reasons for doing something like this. if they'd disabled all that stuff from the beginning, they could've said, its not ready for public use yet, because its too unpolished. while not a entirely valid reason, its at least a cheap excuse. because, why is it included then anyway? either because it was meant to be in the release but got stripped away (ok, did the price then also get lowered? probably not) or because they want to sell it later on but they explicitly said they won't try to sell anything they've already made before release (search for fredriks post if you want proof, I'm currently to lazy *g*)

disabling the editor on a later stage can be excused by the generic 'we don't have the license for redistribution' (which, in my personal opinion, is a heap of crap - they'd have to buy the distribution license anyway since they said they'd add an editor sooner or later. if they didn't check for that from the beginning, then something seriously went wrong and I cant beleave they're that naïve).. another reason might be the same 'its unfinished' excuse of course. but its alreade out there, its been used. those who can't use it wait for a better version, those who can happily map away, stopping it now won't do any good, it just annoys people.

which leads me to believe: they want more money. simple as that. they will do what they said they won't and charge us for every single feature which should've been included from start (which most other games in that pricerange would've included from start). that means. Ice mages cost, goblins cost, the editor costs and so on. all of which were already in the game by release.

obviously, I'd be glad to be proven wrong. I'd like nothing more than that. majesty is my number 2 franchise (just after dungeon keeper). Its just a gut-feeling that thats exactly the way its gonna be for this game. I can't even say they don't deserve the money, but I can say that loads of people will feel ripped off and won't pay anything because of that. and this might lead to the downfall of this game.
 
Oranisagu said:
majesty is my number 2 franchise (just after dungeon keeper).
Click to expand...
Oh DK was an awesome game. I was looking forward to DK3 after finishing DK2 and seeing the ad for it. To bad it and the rest of bullfrog got bought out and dismantled by EA.

I know it's a little off topic but that's one of the reasons I don't like EA. They bought up and then dismantled so many good small development houses. A lot of which made really good games that I really liked. And they ended up doing NOTHING with their franchise lines. That never made much business sense to me. Other then the old business tactic of simply buy out the competition and shut them down so you have a monopoly rather then competing in an open market.

So the end result seems to be an even more limited choice in gaming these days. Most main stream stuff is junk and nothing more then carbon copies of other games. So we end up having to rely on small time developers on low budgets to make "good" games. And because of their low budgets they often can't do as good a job on gfx or marketing so it's hard for them to break out.

Other then Spore which was a huge let down I can't even recall the last game I bought from EA it's probably been over a year or two. I've bought more Paradox products in the last year then EA products. Which is why I was kinda surprised and disappointed by the lack of refinement M2 seems to have.

In fact EA is only working on one franchise that I have any interest in these days. And that's only cause once again they bought out another successful development house which for the time they seem to be allowing to do their own thing. I know EA has a ton of franchises most of which are stuck away in their vault because they killed them.

It's funny though for all their effort, money, marketing and etc EA isn't selling what interests me. Many of the games I buy these days come from small developers like Paradox. So it's sad to see when they drop the ball on something you had high hopes for.
 
well, you can say that about a lot of companies out there.. a lot of the big players can't stand competition and try to gain unfair advantage over others..
like microsoft.. for wich I don't even have to name examples..
or apple, with its patent-frenzy.. they abuse the lacking knowledge of patent office clerks to press small stuff through which hurts the world-wide market by crippling progress (ie: multitouch. oh yeah, SURE they've invented it. btw, I invented breathing)
or ea like you mentioned. as far as I know they don't only buy all kinds of IP's, they don't sell it even if they don't need it. so if some newcomer would want to take over dungeon keeper.. no chance.. otherwise, I'm quite sure, somebody would have tried to pick that up (maybe failing, but at least a try would've been made)

and to go back to the topic:
I think there's a rudimentary problem with the moddability. currently, the whole game is moddable, but as soon as you change anything, you'll get mp-desyncs. makes sense to a degree. what would've been nicer:
- you make mods by adding additional .pak files containing the changes. these are standalone files
- ingame you can chose which mods to activate or disable
- if, in multiplayer, 2 players have different mods, the host of the game offers the mod (as well as the map, if the other player doesn't have it) for download. after the appropriate warning for potentially dangerous code, the 2nd player could accept and save the mod. or (if a proper name / hoempage is displayed) he could go and look for the mod manually, making sure nothing has been tempered with (if you don't trust the host)

that I would call a nice and cool feature.

ora
 
Oranisagu said:
- ingame you can chose which mods to activate or disable
Click to expand...

There isn't much we can do about multiplayer except to hope they add those features in the (hopefully) upcoming user-editable expansion.

When I was researching the changes to the modability in the patch I thought of a decent way to make a mod manager. I was going to get around to making a quick prototype but got distracted by the awesome recent games.

Since I discovered that we can safely replace resource.std_1_01.pak with whatever we want, I was going to make a tool that would read pak (zip) files that had some kind of definition file in it, and then a config file that says which mods you have installed. After you choose "install these mods" it'd combine all of your mod paks into a resource.std_1_01.pak, which the game would then load.

It's not perfect, and it doesn't solve the problem that most mods would be editing the same files. Hopefully though having a decent tool would inspire more people to make missions and whatnot.
 
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