For those of you who aren experienced modders, much of which follows is just preaching to the choir. But for those of you new to modding, you may find this useful..
As some of you know, FE development was led by modders. Derek Paxton and Jon Shafer are best known for their Civ 4 mods (Fall From Heaven in Derek's case). As for myself, I got my modding start with Civ 1, MOM, Total Annihilation, and so on. My love of Civilization 1 ultimately led to writing Galactic Civilizations.
And this brings me to the frustrating part of modding: the limited lifespan of the mod. I eventually got to know Total Annihilation so well that had they made a Total Annihilation 2 with a derivative of their original engine I'd been already set up to do crazy cool stuff. But that didn't happen (and don't talk to me about TA:K).
So our approach has been to approach Elemental from the perspective of it being a platform that mods can be built with for years to come. Many of the mods that worked with War of Magic work, with slight changes, with FE. That's because WOM and FE are built on the same platform which we call Kumquat.
Kumquat is a relatively new engine and we have land-based strategy games scheduled to use it and upgraded versions of it for the next several years -- and not just Elemental universe games. So the skills and understandings of what you get from modding FE will lend itself to more modding.
We also plan to support both Nexus Mods and the Steam workshop as we go forward in ways that make what we have today seem very primitive.
The point being, the age old issues of short-lifespan mods is something we are hoping Kumquat addresses. We looked at Kumquat as a platform that modders can use to create increasingly ambitious mods. I can't promise source code or scripting support yet. Resources are tight, but we will be supporting this underlying platform and the expansion of its capabilities until *at least* 2017.
If you played WOM in 2010, consider what FE is like in 2012. Now, consider what Kumquat will be like in 2014.
It's not just you bitching, it's many of us who want to mod or are modding, bitching as well. We wouldn't be complaining if claims weren't made so vocally about in-depth modding and tools to accomplish all of this. I'm certainly not giving up on Stardock providing them, but it's probably a good idea to do this sooner, rather than later. Before modders naturally turn to other things, such as, well, life. I'd like to believe we'd get something in time for the holidays, but that's just an arbitrary goal post.
this is good news to hear. Though as they say, actions speak louder than words. i'll be waiting to see how things pan out in the longterm before making any commitment to modding.
I'm disappointed in the relatively terrain-independant design of FE though. in civ you build improvements on tiles, and work the land around your city. Yet in FE it seems you only work the tile the city is placed on, and everything between that and the next town is just wasted space.
While we can agree or disagree about this kind of design, I think it can be modded in a similar way into the game, with interactable object every 3- 4 tiles, that can be built as "farm" or "mine" etc. or give pioneers a spell.
Current system can be seen as similar to MoM- but instead of calculating the surrounding spots, the tile the city is built upon has the info inside it.
Yes, which makes Fallen Enchantress a moderately moddable game only. We will never see a mod with the scope of Fall From Heaven or Alpha Centauri for Civ IV, because modding is just data driven and the range of what can be done is actually quite limited, at least when you try to do something really original. So I'm not sad about what's already there, but I think it certainly doesn't add up to "a very moddable game".
An example: I've been trying to have fire staves (the ones for trained units) deal damage over time that scales with the caster group size to whoever was hit by them. It's impossible to do, because of the odd way things were coded. And this is something relatively basic (fire dealing some DoT after the attack is a relatively modest change)
Frogboy does tend to exagerate the moddability of the game a bit. Aside from the particle cauldron (a nice, but somewhat cosmetic mod feature), Fallen Enchantress is less actually moddable than many other 4X, starting with the Civilization series. We can do nice mods with the software as it already is, but we can't do truly amazing things. And until I see that promised python API, I will consider this as a 3-years unfulfilled promise that will most likely never see the light of day.
Fallen Enchantress has, in my opinion, the huge problem that as soon as you change the core files the mod is not compatible with the next patch. That is the reason why i stopped working on my mod.
What's your suggested solution? Because I don't see one besides stopping the patches.
Spend ½ a million to a million or more in dollars developing a smarter patcher....
Had to get it out of my system
Edit: I do hope they extend the capabilities of the mod-folders so more mods would fit in there, that would be grand!Meaby even providing a tag to files you can put in the folder to tell the game to use those instead of a certain other game file.(Say you want to use a custom "Herotraits.txt" and not having to delete stuff in the core game, there should be a command you would have to put as the first line in the file like "Overwrite (Herotraits.Txt): Activate"! and it would use the modded document instead of the target document, target document would be the one in parentheses of course.)
Sincerely~ Kongdej
The long-term solution is to NOT modify the core files put instead replace the core files in the mods directory and have the game use those instead.
this doesn't work correctly for some files though, which is why sean has to overwrite many core files in Master Affliction for example.
To this end is it possible to set another flag called override. So when the program sees two interanal names the same then it checks the flag to overwrite the file without the overide flag. I know this sets up other problems, but it first eliminates the need to overwrite corefiles.
This should be a relatively easy thing to do, both dot over time and damage scaling can be done. Try looking up the spell infection or dirge of ceresa...
No, it's impossible to do. Werewindle's brain exploded twice trying to accomplish it and I am the one that has to reassemble him. Please don't tempt him to try again. I am running out of sprockets.
Yeah you have to start trying to create assets before you can comprehend the magnitude of what I was saying. First of all lets all be honest. There is no scripting system in the game, there is no programming to be done here all were doing is balancing and cosmetics so however you choose to mod elemental none of us need any other 3rd party editor other than notepad++ to edit xml. The best way to create new assets is through the editor, and I have already looked into outside ways like using a database storing the info in tables writing some sql and popping out a xml file and there are problems. Mostly testing problems like the height values in the map files for a tile are a float between 50-52 appx for flat land so I can rand a value but didn't know what the impact would be, the visual editor takes care of all of that kind of stuff so you go back to it, you will use those editors.
And having beaten my head against cartographer I am about ready to give up, I have a list of bugs and desperatly needed features, namely sorted list for assets, but the save asset problem is truly getting me to the quitting point. Just so you understand when you save an asset in any of the tools it creates an xml file for that asset (asset - map/stamp/particle/tile object/etc) and the only time the engine will load that asset (xml file in the mod directory) is on startup of the game client. So go try and create a map, make a save, make some changes and of course a few oops, realise there is no undo and you have to go back to an old version, then exit and restart the client and after the 50th time doing that you'll realise what I am trying to point out here. Honestly if these were the tools they used to create the game I don't know how they handled this problem and still have an ounce of sanity left.
The same can ( and sometimes is ) said about C++ and notepad.exe, the biggest reason we need for creating some automated tools is to save time. Currently a handful of dedicated modders that mostly have years of experience create really nice content, however most give up after having suffered through their first few hours of copy pasta. This creates a learning curve comparable to eve-online and dwarf fortress.
I agree that some editors wont give us the much needed freedom for creating not just new content but new features, and I don't think some simple script language that runs at the beginning of every turn would be too much to ask. However considering the quality of that parser my hope is that in time we get some reliable code injections.
On a related note keep discovering and documenting those bugs, so that when we as a community create a standalone map editor in time we can account for them, and you will never have to reload again
C++ = emacs
ok I have to relativize my statement, people like me who like their Visual studio, Eclipse and Matlab also want a Fallen Enchantress IDE
Wait, which part are we talking about here? If you mean you can't get it to apply on normal hit, then yeah, the only one that seems to do that is MeleeAppliesSpell, and that only works in melee (haven't tested extensively for range/spell), but you don't necessarily need it to do it like that either, you could just use UnlockCombatAbility for an ability that does what you want, I was able to easily toss a spell together that does damage over time (I use something very similar on my Academy War Golem). It shouldn't be too difficult to use calc, or maybe just OverpowerMultiplier to scale the damage?
Unfortunately, this isn't really doable due to the vast amount of issues that arise when modding from the /mods/ folder instead of the core files. https://forums.elementalgame.com/434780
Heck, even NEW content (not modified content) has to go into the core files sometimes just to make it work at all.
Personaly I don't see the Corefile problematic as something huge. ev4debug is already working on a mod-manager, from there it's but a small step to building a launcher, where you simply select the mods you want to use and then press start. while somewhere in the background the launcher shifts the necessary files around.
Its not huge for people used to this kind of modding, but is in no way idiot-friendly (Idiot is me, and whoever else wants to be in this group ), and what you achieve by idiot-friendly systems is a wider interest in mods, due to a bigger fanbase, I HATE using corefile modding and currently just delay installing stuff concerning FE due to the unfriendly nature of the game (so many other games provide an easier modding life, from the user side of things).
I agree that it is unfriendly as hell, and it is more then a shame that Stardock actually shipped it that way. However that is a problem we can resolve with some additional software, as opposed to some serious in game flaws and inherent modding flaws.
So don't worry too much about the corefiles, help is on the way
im having serious issues with the map editor - it just feels alien to me. I try to place a starting location or a river and it just all goes wrong. Hopefully i can figure this out so i can make my world map. Once i get the map constructed i can start looking at triggers and quest placement.
I've been a professional developer for over 25+ years, and work fairly extensively with XML. Editing XML is easy enough, anyone can do it. But editing the value of an XML tag is completely different than knowing and understanding what that value affects, or how it's used. Having descriptive XML tag names is helpful, but just knowing the name doesn't really tell you how that value is used, or what the acceptable entries for a given tag are, or what the possible ramifications of having an invalid value are. There's more to modding than just editing an XML file, no matter how easy it might sound.
I know, I've run into the same thing. That's why I said the long-term solution is that we have to make sure that mods can be placed in the mods folder that overwrite the objects in the game folder. Right now, it's hit and miss.
For activated abilities/spells, the casting unit has a group size of 1 during casting, regardless of its actual group size. This was probably done with some specific idea in mind, but that makes a whole lot of ideas (spellsword units, less basic staves...) impossible to implement correctly.
I'm not saying that the modding capabilities oh Fallen Enchantress are limited out of 'being a hater', I'm saying because I've spent hours trying to circumvent those limitations that I would have rather spent on something else - and most of the times, I've failed.
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