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The Omnibus M2 Modding Thread

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Can you add lairs and guilds to a map using the editor, or do you have to edit .mi files? All I can manage so far is copying and pasting existing ones.

Optimus prime said:
3. I figuered out, how i can spawn units from outside of a map. But for now, i only can spawn units which already exists on the map. For example on the multiplayer map "waterfall", there dont exists any ogres and therefore i cant let them spawn from outside.
Click to expand...

I've managed to spawn marauding hordes of goblins on maps, so it can be done.

You just need a spawn program (specifies what monster to spawn and their action, like attack, patrol, or protect), and a trigger, which controls the conditions and frequency at which they are created.

Optimus prime said:
4. The game has a day/night cycle, but you cant notice it. How can i change the lightness depending on the time of the day?

Thanks for your help!
Click to expand...

I don't think you can. You can add and change the interval of fog, lightning, and rain and do things like change the light color and direction, but that seems to be about it.
 
I have paid a lot of attention to this forum, and have done a few edits myself thanks to you guys, but I think the day and night cycle is specific to the mission. In some of the campaign missions it's day, others night, but I've never seen them switch.
 
Phexx said:
someone in another thread figured out how to build a temple on any ground.. remove the areabuildrestriction.. where do you do that? :)
Click to expand...
Look in resource/entity/buildings there are folders for all the different building types. The temples are guild_beastmaster, guild_blademaster, guild_darkpriest, guild_marksman, guild_paladin, and guild_priest (And guild_ice_mage if you enabled that ;) )

Inside each folder there will be a .def file, like guild_beastmaster.def.

Inside that file you'll find this line:
Code: 
{Flags "need_special_zone"}

Which you can comment out just by changing it to:
Code: 
;{Flags "need_special_zone"}

Or delete it. Either works.
 
Hrmm, I tried getting the trading post to sell healing potions and mana potions like in Majesty 1, but I don't know if it's possible since the game refuses to start when put in, what seems to be, the appropriate code.

Here's the code I used:

{"tradepost"
{entity_id tradepost}
{potions
{"h_potion"
{Bottle healthpotion_0}
{"Production time" 0.4}
{Cost
{money}
{"count money" 20}
}
{Prerequesities
{inevntion "health potion"}
}
{enabled}
}
{"mana_potion"
{Bottle manapotion_1}
{"Production time" 0.3}
{Cost
{money}
{"count money" 20}
}
{Prerequesities
{inevntion "mana potion"}
}
{enabled}

I feel like hardcoding is interfering somewhere, either that or I'm doing it all wrong. If you know how to do this, do tell.
 
Bennett said:
Hrmm, I tried getting the trading post to sell healing potions and mana potions like in Majesty 1, but I don't know if it's possible since the game refuses to start when put in, what seems to be, the appropriate code.

Here's the code I used:

{"tradepost"
{entity_id tradepost}
{potions
{"h_potion"
{Bottle healthpotion_0}
{"Production time" 0.4}
{Cost
{money}
{"count money" 20}
}
{Prerequesities
{inevntion "health potion"}
}
{enabled}
}
{"mana_potion"
{Bottle manapotion_1}
{"Production time" 0.3}
{Cost
{money}
{"count money" 20}
}
{Prerequesities
{inevntion "mana potion"}
}
{enabled}

I feel like hardcoding is interfering somewhere, either that or I'm doing it all wrong. If you know how to do this, do tell.
Click to expand...

I'm no programming genius, but spelling mistakes could destroy your game? :p
 
Actually that was what I tried first, but that doesn't work either. I think it's because the trading post is already creating a caravan and can't do two things at once. I was hoping it would work in the sense that if I researched healing potions at the market, it would also be available at the trading post. However, I'm starting to doubt this will work at all. Oh well, it was worth a try.
 
That doesn't work, because all research is per-building. If you could build a second marketplace, you'd have to research the potions in both.

If you take the prerequisites out altogether it might work. But they'd sell them without having to research them.
 
I would say that it is fairly important that we do get something like this working, for the benefit of future modding. Just looking at the code makes my head swim sometimes, just trying to understand what the hell they were thinking. For example, the guild_marksman. Well.. there is no Marksman Hero in the game, is there? Nope, its actually the Archer of Helia that they are talking about. Its almost like the programmers had no idea what in the world they were writing code for.

Enough ranting. I do have some small observation. Even with my limited programming knowledge, it seems to me like we have been had. If they plan on releasing additional content, they really dont have to do anything. There is already new content in the game, all they have to do is unlock it. The Ice Mage is the obvious example, but it also looks like there are about four extra missions included with the game, and goblin heroes. If I was not at school right now, I would quote the code, but alas.

Venture a guess, I think there is at least one mission where you play as goblins. There is an alternate palace, a goblin guild, and several goblin heroes. Sounds like a foundation at least.

But maybe I am crazy. Probably.
 
Was taking a quick gander at some random files (Still working on that HoL thing.) and I found a refrence to a possible Xbox 360 port.

Code: 
<?xml encoding="Windows-1251"?>
<Folders>
    <!--çäåñü çàäàþòñÿ ïàðàìåòðû äëÿ êàæäîé ïëàòôîðìû-->
    <Platform_PC>
        <GUI>
            <s_rootPath>/interface/enguine/</s_rootPath>
            <s_locPath>/enguine/</s_locPath>
            <s_editorRootPath>resource/interface/enguine/</s_editorRootPath>
            <s_editorLocPath>localization/texts/enguine/</s_editorLocPath>
            <s_texturesPath>/interface/enguine/textures/</s_texturesPath>
            <s_fontsPath>/interface/enguine/fonts/</s_fontsPath>
            <s_commonPath>/interface/enguine/common/</s_commonPath>
        </GUI>
    </Platform_PC>
    [COLOR="Lime"]<Platform_XBOX360>
        <GUI>
            <s_rootPath>/interface_xbox/enguine/</s_rootPath>
            <s_locPath>/enguine/</s_locPath>
            <s_editorRootPath>resource/interface_xbox/enguine/</s_editorRootPath>
            <s_editorLocPath>localization_xbox/texts/enguine/</s_editorLocPath>
            <s_texturesPath>/interface_xbox/enguine/textures/</s_texturesPath>
            <s_fontsPath>/interface_xbox/enguine/fonts/</s_fontsPath>
            <s_commonPath>/interface_xbox/enguine/common/</s_commonPath>
        </GUI>
    </Platform_XBOX360>[/COLOR]
</Folders>
 
TheDrgnRbrn said:
I would say that it is fairly important that we do get something like this working, for the benefit of future modding. Just looking at the code makes my head swim sometimes, just trying to understand what the hell they were thinking. For example, the guild_marksman. Well.. there is no Marksman Hero in the game, is there? Nope, its actually the Archer of Helia that they are talking about. Its almost like the programmers had no idea what in the world they were writing code for.
Click to expand...
This is pretty common in games. The coders start work and the design is changed while they're working, something gets it's name changed, but there's no reason to change the name in the code, it would be a lot of unneccessary work. So they leave it. If you mod games you end up seeing this sort of thing a lot.

Lunysgwen said:
Was taking a quick gander at some random files (Still working on that HoL thing.) and I found a refrence to a possible Xbox 360 port.

Code: 
<?xml encoding="Windows-1251"?>
<Folders>
    <!--çäåñü çàäàþòñÿ ïàðàìåòðû äëÿ êàæäîé ïëàòôîðìû-->
    <Platform_PC>
        <GUI>
            <s_rootPath>/interface/enguine/</s_rootPath>
            <s_locPath>/enguine/</s_locPath>
            <s_editorRootPath>resource/interface/enguine/</s_editorRootPath>
            <s_editorLocPath>localization/texts/enguine/</s_editorLocPath>
            <s_texturesPath>/interface/enguine/textures/</s_texturesPath>
            <s_fontsPath>/interface/enguine/fonts/</s_fontsPath>
            <s_commonPath>/interface/enguine/common/</s_commonPath>
        </GUI>
    </Platform_PC>
    [COLOR="Lime"]<Platform_XBOX360>
        <GUI>
            <s_rootPath>/interface_xbox/enguine/</s_rootPath>
            <s_locPath>/enguine/</s_locPath>
            <s_editorRootPath>resource/interface_xbox/enguine/</s_editorRootPath>
            <s_editorLocPath>localization_xbox/texts/enguine/</s_editorLocPath>
            <s_texturesPath>/interface_xbox/enguine/textures/</s_texturesPath>
            <s_fontsPath>/interface_xbox/enguine/fonts/</s_fontsPath>
            <s_commonPath>/interface_xbox/enguine/common/</s_commonPath>
        </GUI>
    </Platform_XBOX360>[/COLOR]
</Folders>
Click to expand...
Well the game uses the GEM3 engine, which was developed for the game Men of War, which is on PC and Xbox. So that's probably why that's there.
 
Extra missions? Right on. Where'd you find them, Drgn?

The ice mage and golbins both aren't fully implemented - they're missing artwork, sound, and flavor text for the most part. Wouldn't really say they're trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
 
Ferdydurke said:
The ice mage and golbins both aren't fully implemented - they're missing artwork, sound, and flavor text for the most part. Wouldn't really say they're trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
Click to expand...

Ice mages are also hella overpowered, so I don't think they were intended as final :)

The first thing I did with modding was to fix the (seemingly typo'd) overpriced amulet of regeneration, changing it from costing 300 to costing 30. It helps pretty well in the early game but isn't overpowered, it heals 2 hp every 2 seconds.

Death Knights have an entity definition, but not much else. When you buy them they're just rogues and the missing texture checkerboard shows up in place of the picture.

I dug into goblins and they at least have one guild defined, the goblin spear. There's no menu for it, so I had to create it and add the button to the castle menu to make it work. The goblins are missing a lot of the button and character images that would make it fully functional.

The goblin units are all incomplete. The goblin spear is a basic guard-like unit. The goblin shaman hillariously roots themselves, each other, and your other units, but will attack enemies while rooted! It's supposed to be a buff according to the action definition. The goblin champion is a pretty tough archer type. None of the goblins seem to have any behaviors defined though, so they don't shop at markets, respond to flags, etc. They do however wander around the maps a lot, which gives me hope for modding rangers to behave more like they used to, exploring on their own.
 
Last edited:
Ferdydurke said:
Extra missions? Right on. Where'd you find them, Drgn?
Click to expand...

In the same place as where you find bits and pieces of stuff like the icemage, there is about four entries that dont really refer to any obvious kinds of content. That was the first place I noticed it, but it could be nothing. Ive seen them pop up again in other places, but nothing solid. So dont get your hopes up.

As far as pulling the wool over us, it would not be hard for them to release a ten meg patch and call it new content.

@gamma, I have seen it in a few other games I tweaked for personal pleasure, but never this bad before.
 
Well I've seen it like this all the time. Also keep in mind the developers are Russian. For all we know the Russian game calls them Marksmen.

As for the extra maps, they're not in the game yet.

When they are they'd go in resource/map/Pay_Pack_01

Make of that what you will.
 
I've modded in other games that have similar setups with compressed files like the pak. And in them you can often extract the files into that directory and remove the compressed file. This allows for a much easier time of editing and modding. I was wondering if there was a way to setup something similar with M2?

I tried extracting the files and leaving the pak but the game locks up on startup. I also tried removing the pak file with the extracted files in the directory. But again they game simply freezes on startup. I was wondering if there was some way to set this up for easier modding?

The main reason I'm interested in this is because it seems to take a couple mins to recompress the pak file every time I made an edit. Then when you include load times of restarting M2 it becomes very frustrating to try and experiment with how the changes effect things.
 
Spyre2000 said:
I've modded in other games that have similar setups with compressed files like the pak. And in them you can often extract the files into that directory and remove the compressed file. This allows for a much easier time of editing and modding. I was wondering if there was a way to setup something similar with M2?

I tried extracting the files and leaving the pak but the game locks up on startup. I also tried removing the pak file with the extracted files in the directory. But again they game simply freezes on startup. I was wondering if there was some way to set this up for easier modding?

The main reason I'm interested in this is because it seems to take a couple mins to recompress the pak file every time I made an edit. Then when you include load times of restarting M2 it becomes very frustrating to try and experiment with how the changes effect things.
Click to expand...

You can extract all of the files to the resource directory and then move the .pak file and it will work fine. The game breaks if there are any duplicate files. I've tried a bunch of different ways of overriding this, based on my experience with similar engines.

I've tried different pak files based on date, based on the date of the files inside, created a dummy empty resource.pak and moved the resource.pak to another file, moved resource.std.pak to the main directory and replaced that, many other things. It really comes down to the problem that it seems the game crashes if it finds any duplicate files, rather than using the first one it finds (such as loading files in reverse date order).

I think they're going to have to patch this to change the behavior if we ever have hope of real mods with drag-drop pak files. If there's a trick to it (such as invalidation in Oblivion) I haven't found it. Maybe they'll tell us :)

Script files need to be extensible too, not just overwritten, otherwise everyone that modifies shops.set (a really important file for most things) will overwrite each other.
 
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