Mod friendly ?

[leonardus]

Hi,

Too bad this excellent game, IMHO, the best/realistic game of the genre. But I still search for tools to enlarge the scenarios with personalized vehicles/units. I think this is not yet an option, which degrade a lot the game. I want to see modders vehicles pack, for example. Or this is yet another cash-cow strategy which make it worse instead make it better ?

[Scipio]

You are aware of http://cmmodsiii.greenasjade.net/ and http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tsd3/ or maybe http://www.thefewgoodmen.com/tpg2/?

[sburke]

What do you mean by personalized?  The link given above is for the modding community items which are free.  Might want to read around the forum for different comments about BF strategy etc before worrying about cash cow plans. If you are expecting pay for play features or items this definitely isn't in that genre.  

[A Canadian Cat]

We in the CM community use the word mod a bit differently than some other communities. We use it to mean skinning. But the other meaning of modding is to add new vehicles, soldiers, weapons etc to the game. So, you could create a full set of Soviet tanks and vehicles and play what if the US tried to push the Soviets back after the fall of Berlin.

Of course it could also be used to make <insert favourite tank here> stronger or <insert hated tanks here> weaker so the uber <insert favourite army here> can crush the sad <insert hated army here> every time

[leonardus]

Seems I was not very concise. I say this : is possible by some talented players to insert theirs own vehicle (say an italian or hungarian ww2 armor) ? Because in this situation we will have a whole new horizon here, not only the vehicles/units provided by the game itself. Cheers.

[Cobetco]

yeah the answer to that is no, CM isn't quite COH or MOW. the units don't have health bars and such that abstract things to the point where that might be feasible. even if you could, then you'd have to squeeze it somewhere in the to&e.

I might be wrong but i don't think you can even model flavor objects for maps and such.

However i will point out the with exception to a couple minor variants (like the stug IV, which hopefully we'll see soon) stuff on the western front is pretty much fully fleshed out.

[Ales Dvorak]

1 hour ago, leonardus said:

Seems I was not very concise. I say this : is possible by some talented players to insert theirs own vehicle (say an italian or hungarian ww2 armor) ? Because in this situation we will have a whole new horizon here, not only the vehicles/units provided by the game itself. Cheers.

No you can insert your own new vehicle in the game. BTW, you mean something like this?

http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage_bfc&product_id=479&category_id=36&manufacturer_id=0&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=26

Edited January 17, 2017 by Ales Dvorak

[IICptMillerII]

2 hours ago, leonardus said:

Seems I was not very concise. I say this : is possible by some talented players to insert theirs own vehicle (say an italian or hungarian ww2 armor) ? Because in this situation we will have a whole new horizon here, not only the vehicles/units provided by the game itself. Cheers.

No this is not possible, and I sincerely hope BFC does not change that. The last thing we need is a bunch of amateurs going nuts tearing into vehicle and other data and tweaking (destroying) the values.

[sburke]

38 minutes ago, IICptMillerII said:

No this is not possible, and I sincerely hope BFC does not change that. The last thing we need is a bunch of amateurs going nuts tearing into vehicle and other data and tweaking (destroying) the values.

This is one of the reasons cited I think is allowing it would disrupt the integrity of the game.  So the answer is no. Players will not be able to insert new vehicles etc.  You can as IanL said re-skin them, but that is it. I do not expect to ever see that stance change so no not a cash cow, just no. 

[Ales Dvorak]

9 hours ago, IICptMillerII said:

The last thing we need is a bunch of amateurs going nuts tearing into vehicle and other data and tweaking (destroying) the values.

PBEM nightmare.

[leonardus]

So, it's a very big disappointment. We are forced to see and play what developers want. And this is only a minor fraction of vehicles/weapons who are really depicted in the game on what was real in western front. So a big MALUS here. And mentioning that players could ruin the game is just a stupid think. Look at Rome Total War 2 and the series which have tons of new players and a continuous immersion just for the fact that it is highly moddable, making it practically a new game every time an overhaul mod is out. For that reason RTW2 will have future IMHO even 10 years by now without developers launching new game. I play RTW 2 a lot and made my personal changes in the databases according my optics, making new units, new weapons, etc.........I'm very very sad this SUPERB game haven't got the same path. Only to wait for the developers to launch another Combat Mission XYZ, to see new units/troops/etc......excuse me, only my fifty cents....

Edited January 18, 2017 by leonardus

[Ales Dvorak]

3 hours ago, leonardus said:

 We are forced to see and play what developers want.

Not exactly true for Battlefront.

[Erwin]

BF is a tiny company that started by making games that they are passionate about.  They still do.  Up to a point they have to be commercial.  But so long as they make enuff $ to continue with their passion, it's admirable that they don't feel the need to pander to lowest common denominator mass market demands (like just about every other game company).  There has to be a massive groundswell of demand to get BF's attention, not individual gripes.  They are about the longest lasting wargame company surviving, so they know what they are doing.

[nik mond]

On 1/17/2017 at 10:52 AM, leonardus said:

Hi,

Too bad this excellent game, IMHO, the best/realistic game of the genre. But I still search for tools to enlarge the scenarios with personalized vehicles/units. I think this is not yet an option, which degrade a lot the game. I want to see modders vehicles pack, for example. Or this is yet another cash-cow strategy which make it worse instead make it better ?

CM2 is very mod friendly. But the issue for you is perhaps it does not go far enough. To me, an example of a game that is not mod friendly would be the TOW series in my experience. You had to use a third party program to extract the database files. And any unit or formation created had to be added to the Dbase sequentially. Graphics had to be converted to another format using plugins, and then renamed. Scenario creation maps had to be hand painted in photoshop. The scenario creator had its own compiler for the AI, which required scripting using C++ syntax. It was all doable and there was a small group of us that had fun making the mods, But to me that is an example of a game that is not Mod Friendly. Combat Mission series in contrast, very mod friendly.

[IICptMillerII]

7 hours ago, leonardus said:

So, it's a very big disappointment. We are forced to see and play what developers want. And this is only a minor fraction of vehicles/weapons who are really depicted in the game on what was real in western front. So a big MALUS here. And mentioning that players could ruin the game is just a stupid think. Look at Rome Total War 2 and the series which have tons of new players and a continuous immersion just for the fact that it is highly moddable, making it practically a new game every time an overhaul mod is out. For that reason RTW2 will have future IMHO even 10 years by now without developers launching new game. I play RTW 2 a lot and made my personal changes in the databases according my optics, making new units, new weapons, etc.........I'm very very sad this SUPERB game haven't got the same path. Only to wait for the developers to launch another Combat Mission XYZ, to see new units/troops/etc......excuse me, only my fifty cents....

No. You aren't "forced" to play anything. Don't want to play as the Americans or British or Germans during Normandy/Bulge/Italy/wherever? Then don't buy the game. 

Without typing up a 50 page rant on RTW2, all I will say is that that game is about as realistic as me saying I'm going to build a rocket in my garage and fly to Mars in 11 minutes, and no none of the mods make it any better. 

Think of CM like a tabletop game. You can paint your army however you want to (creating skins with photoshop) you can tweak how the UI looks, chage the sound effects, music and even create your own maps. But when its time to play, you play by the rules of the game.

We all want more content. I really want (some might say desperately) a cold war gone hot 1980's CM game. Others want the Pacific theatre in WWII, or wars like Korea and Vietnam. Not to mention the entire Eastern Front of WWII and early war WWII (North Africa, Poland, France, etc) With time a lot of this will come to be, and until then there is plenty of content to wade through now. 

[Rinaldi]

8 hours ago, leonardus said:

So, it's a very big disappointment. We are forced to see and play what developers want. And this is only a minor fraction of vehicles/weapons who are really depicted in the game on what was real in western front. So a big MALUS here. And mentioning that players could ruin the game is just a stupid think. Look at Rome Total War 2 and the series which have tons of new players and a continuous immersion just for the fact that it is highly moddable, making it practically a new game every time an overhaul mod is out. For that reason RTW2 will have future IMHO even 10 years by now without developers launching new game. I play RTW 2 a lot and made my personal changes in the databases according my optics, making new units, new weapons, etc.........I'm very very sad this SUPERB game haven't got the same path. Only to wait for the developers to launch another Combat Mission XYZ, to see new units/troops/etc......excuse me, only my fifty cents....

Rome 2 doesn't use particularly complex values for its armor, and the things worth tweaking (re: Tac Ai) have been hardcoded, CA's not so subtle way of making a certain rude hand gesture at their mod community. Not to mention, of course, that for every satisfactory mod for games like Rome 2, HOI, etc. that there's 101 absolutely trash ones that are either openly nationalistic, "realistic" or so dank that you need to roll it in a paper before playing it.

The very thought of people being able to get into the armor coding of this game, or God forbid add new vehicles, makes me faint. I'm just imagining a Panzer IV Ausf. H bouncing 76 rounds off its turret, Commander roaring with laughter out of his cupola as he crushes the ubermensch :/

There's a certian type of game that benefits from being able to add units, factions, total convert, etc. CM isn't one of them. CM scenarios focus on relatively narrow fronts and time-frames and adding in new units that 'were maybe somewhere on the Front at some point in time' will upset both the intricate armor coding the devs use and the rarity system they've established for QB. Other than that, nothing coding wise is so fundamentally flawed that it requires us to meddle in it - which is more than I can say for games like Silent Hunter which need a cocktail of mods to be the simulator it claims to be.

Edited January 18, 2017 by Rinaldi

[sbobovyc]

2 hours ago, nik mond said:

CM2 is very mod friendly. But the issue for you is perhaps it does not go far enough. To me, an example of a game that is not mod friendly would be the TOW series in my experience. You had to use a third party program to extract the database files. And any unit or formation created had to be added to the Dbase sequentially. Graphics had to be converted to another format using plugins, and then renamed. Scenario creation maps had to be hand painted in photoshop. The scenario creator had its own compiler for the AI, which required scripting using C++ syntax. It was all doable and there was a small group of us that had fun making the mods, But to me that is an example of a game that is not Mod Friendly. Combat Mission series in contrast, very mod friendly.

You are conflating ease of modding with modding capability. Look at OP definition of mod friendliness. It is very easy to modify textures and copy/rename files in CM2, but that is the extent of officially supported modding. Content creation for TOW (and other games) is complex but allows for extensive modification of the game.

Leonardus, I suggest you do a search of these forums to understand Battlefront's stand on modding and business strategy. 

 

Edited January 18, 2017 by sbobovyc

[Warts 'n' all]

"We are forced"... I don't remember Steve flying across the Atlantic and putting a gun to my head yelling "Buy my game you Limey SOB".

[leonardus]

17 hours ago, nik mond said:

CM2 is very mod friendly. But the issue for you is perhaps it does not go far enough. To me, an example of a game that is not mod friendly would be the TOW series in my experience. You had to use a third party program to extract the database files. And any unit or formation created had to be added to the Dbase sequentially. Graphics had to be converted to another format using plugins, and then renamed. Scenario creation maps had to be hand painted in photoshop. The scenario creator had its own compiler for the AI, which required scripting using C++ syntax. It was all doable and there was a small group of us that had fun making the mods, But to me that is an example of a game that is not Mod Friendly. Combat Mission series in contrast, very mod friendly.

Ok, let me introduce, say my Turan ww2 hungarian tank, for which I already done the graphics and can be easily converted on what I like to, and thus you convinced me that the game is very moddable friendly...

[leonardus]

15 hours ago, IICptMillerII said:

No. You aren't "forced" to play anything. Don't want to play as the Americans or British or Germans during Normandy/Bulge/Italy/wherever? Then don't buy the game. 

Without typing up a 50 page rant on RTW2, all I will say is that that game is about as realistic as me saying I'm going to build a rocket in my garage and fly to Mars in 11 minutes, and no none of the mods make it any better. 

Think of CM like a tabletop game. You can paint your army however you want to (creating skins with photoshop) you can tweak how the UI looks, chage the sound effects, music and even create your own maps. But when its time to play, you play by the rules of the game.

We all want more content. I really want (some might say desperately) a cold war gone hot 1980's CM game. Others want the Pacific theatre in WWII, or wars like Korea and Vietnam. Not to mention the entire Eastern Front of WWII and early war WWII (North Africa, Poland, France, etc) With time a lot of this will come to be, and until then there is plenty of content to wade through now. 

Do you understand that the game is very ''limited'' in options ? How many weapons/vehicles is there compared of what was in reality ? Making it easily moddable, players can use their own units/scenarios/etc, using the same game engine. They introduce only new graphics and values. That's all. Penetration, mobility, armor values, etc. And the game engine start to use them like in vanilla. What's so hard to understand ? RTW have a superb approach here, only using the PFM to change the values in databases.

[leonardus]

15 hours ago, Rinaldi said:

Rome 2 doesn't use particularly complex values for its armor, and the things worth tweaking (re: Tac Ai) have been hardcoded, CA's not so subtle way of making a certain rude hand gesture at their mod community. Not to mention, of course, that for every satisfactory mod for games like Rome 2, HOI, etc. that there's 101 absolutely trash ones that are either openly nationalistic, "realistic" or so dank that you need to roll it in a paper before playing it.

The very thought of people being able to get into the armor coding of this game, or God forbid add new vehicles, makes me faint. I'm just imagining a Panzer IV Ausf. H bouncing 76 rounds off its turret, Commander roaring with laughter out of his cupola as he crushes the ubermensch :/

There's a certian type of game that benefits from being able to add units, factions, total convert, etc. CM isn't one of them. CM scenarios focus on relatively narrow fronts and time-frames and adding in new units that 'were maybe somewhere on the Front at some point in time' will upset both the intricate armor coding the devs use and the rarity system they've established for QB. Other than that, nothing coding wise is so fundamentally flawed that it requires us to meddle in it - which is more than I can say for games like Silent Hunter which need a cocktail of mods to be the simulator it claims to be.

Very bad. A magnificent game without any potential. All reside on developers will. They don't understand the game development concept which can make this game a land mark in history of strategy games all times ever.

[leonardus]

14 hours ago, sbobovyc said:

 

You are conflating ease of modding with modding capability. Look at OP definition of mod friendliness. It is very easy to modify textures and copy/rename files in CM2, but that is the extent of officially supported modding. Content creation for TOW (and other games) is complex but allows for extensive modification of the game.

Leonardus, I suggest you do a search of these forums to understand Battlefront's stand on modding and business strategy. 

Man, don't cast a compass here, it's obvious a business  strategy; and a very unhappy one, aiming to coagulate a tiny group of hard-core enthusiasts which always will buy the new game-clones, but  lack the horizon on what the game could be when hordes of modders will spread the playability in mass.

 

 

[IICptMillerII]

12 minutes ago, leonardus said:

Do you understand that the game is very ''limited'' in options ? How many weapons/vehicles is there compared of what was in reality ? Making it easily moddable, players can use their own units/scenarios/etc, using the same game engine. They introduce only new graphics and values. That's all. Penetration, mobility, armor values, etc. And the game engine start to use them like in vanilla. What's so hard to understand ? RTW have a superb approach here, only using the PFM to change the values in databases.

Limited? Good grief. There are thousands of hours of scenarios and campaigns between all the CM games. Not to mention thousands more if you throw in the editor and all the potential there. There are HUNDREDS of vehicles in each game, tons of TO&E and OoB represented as well. 

To say that you want to see more of an underdeveloped front, such as early war Eastern Front or something like that is one thing, but to claim that the games are limited as they are now is literal insanity. Seriously, get a grip. Just because other games allow modding in content does not mean every game ever made has to allow modded in user content. 

12 minutes ago, leonardus said:

Very bad. A magnificent game without any potential. All reside on developers will. They don't understand the game development concept which can make this game a land mark in history of strategy games all times ever.

Yes, the company that has been around for 20 years has no idea what they're doing. Thankfully you have showed up just in time to save them from finally succumbing to the madness! 

 

[Warts 'n' all]

Let me think, who do I want running BFC, Steve and the boys in the band, who treat us as fellow gamers, or the self opinionated "leonardus", who tells us what we want? No contest really. 

[leonardus]

4 hours ago, IICptMillerII said:

Limited? Good grief. There are thousands of hours of scenarios and campaigns between all the CM games. Not to mention thousands more if you throw in the editor and all the potential there. There are HUNDREDS of vehicles in each game, tons of TO&E and OoB represented as well. 

To say that you want to see more of an underdeveloped front, such as early war Eastern Front or something like that is one thing, but to claim that the games are limited as they are now is literal insanity. Seriously, get a grip. Just because other games allow modding in content does not mean every game ever made has to allow modded in user content. 

Yes, the company that has been around for 20 years has no idea what they're doing. Thankfully you have showed up just in time to save them from finally succumbing to the madness! 

 

So, please list the hundreds of vehicles present in Final Blitzkrieg.