A Request of The Dev Team

[SergeantEpson]

Didn't know if there was a section where this should go, it's not a suggestion or request of the game so...

I understand that teaching somebody how to mod would take too long. But would there be any chance of sharing your story? That is a quick bit of writing on how you got into modding, where you started and how you progressed. Is it college courses? A particular book or just fiddling about with game files yourself? Just I'd like to learn but have no clue where to start. I thought about a pm, but modding is about sharing, so I'll keep it in the spirit of things .  Thanks.

 

[Duh]

I started as a beta tester for Floris, then began reading tutorials in the Forge (starting with the "Module System Documentation") and finally i applied to become part of the team. As Floris was still rather new (v.2.1) and there was a lot of room to experiment and we didnt have to be all proffessional (), i used some of the tutorials in the Forge and some of the shared codes to reproduce the described and explained features within the Floris module. This was an insanely annoying time, because i picked up every error possible, though luckily i had the support of several coders (as i asked questions in the forge and via pm [after having tested things myself for at least 1-2 days]) and slowly but surely understanding came upon me. After that its really up to you what to do. The game has very little restrictions - except for the time you can invest.

This is a codey story, so dont forget that there are other areas of modding as well (modelling, texturing, rigging, animations, etc). The best path to take, regardless of the job you pick, is, in my opinion, to join a small team (mod or submod), work with them, create a few things, which you (can) share with the community and most importantly - never stop learning.

 

[monnikje]

I never intended to become a modder, it just happened that way: I rolled into the scene.

Computer roleplaying games never were able to hold my attention for a long time (in contrary to the Dungeons & Dragons I play weekly with friends). Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age, and more of such games never sucked me in, and I never gotten myself to try Morrowind for longer than an hour. Other games, like Europa Universalis 3 and Sword of the Stars, were more to my liking. When I was invited to the Paradox Interactive Convention 2010 (you can read my report on that convention here), where all the new and upcoming Paradox titles for 2010 were presented, I saw Warband for the first time. I even spoke to Armagan himself. And to be honest, I didn't pay that much attention Warband: I was more interested in other games.

When I was home again, a member form the Paradox staff contacted me: impressed by the report on the convention I wrote, she offered me to be one of the admins during the final Warband beta period. I accepted, and was assigned to do some things on a distant forum where really nothing happened. But as a result I gotted Warband for free, and so I finally decided to check it out. Against all expectations I was sucked in. After one failed attempt where I got my ass kicked, I decided to write an AAR (After Action Report) of my second attempt: I did this on the Paradox forum, where I hung out. After a couple of months, someone suggested that I would also post this AAR on the TaleWorlds forum. I couldn't find a special AAR section, so I asked permission, gotten it, and went ahead. To my surprise it was immensely popular.

Another few months passed by. I had started my AAR out in Native, but especially over here I discovered that there were quite a lot of mods for the game. I decided to try a few, and saw that some were not mutually exclusive. There was nothing against trying to use a sound mod and a texture mod at the same time. And so I did. Slowly I tried one mod, and added another, and another, all while I wrote the next few chapters to my AAR. After a while someone asked me if I could share my mod experiment. Till that moment things were working very buggy, because it was for personal use and at that time I didn't care much for a few glitches more or less. Most of the things I had done so far were pretty simple: just reading the readme's and following the instructions there, and applying it to my small collection of mods. When I thus was asked to share it, I hesitated for a moment. Would I release this experiment to the public? My first thought was 'no, it's too buggy', but after thinking it over for a few hours I changed my thoughts, and worked for two days to tidy things up. And thus the Floris Mod Pack version 1.0 was born.

Up till that moment I had just fiddled with some text files, but immediately after the release of 1.0 I decided that I should do things properly in the module system. I hadn't worked with that before, so I read up in the forge, and went ahead and tried it. In the meantime I asked more and more mod authors for permission to use their mods into my pack, incorporating them into one source with trial and lots of error. For approximately two months I worked by myself on version 2.0, approximately twelve hours a day seven days a week. During this time I had some beta testers to help me out, one being Duh, who would become part of the Dev team, and another being Knight0815, who would later create an alternative troop tree, and would return as betatester for 2.5. One of the mod authors I asked permission from did more than just allow me to use his code: he offered to incorporate his code into Floris himself. Thus Caba`Drin joined the Dev team.

The release of Floris 2.0 was a major step forward. Someone had suggested to apply for a subforum, which I did: within a few hours after my application it was a reality. Duh, Caba and I immediately worked on new releases, which followed each other pretty quick: approximately every two weeks a new version came out, till 2.3. Since I had just started to learn the basics of modding in the module system during the development of 2.0, it was inevitable that there were a lot of mistakes in that version. To be honest, we've been busy polishing up and fixing things till 2.31. Then we three took another big leap forward and worked for two months on 2.4. On 18 March 2011 we released that version. Before that release we had asked here in a poll if people really wanted to have savegame compatibility: it turned out not to be. This opened possibilities, because by breaking savegame compatibility we could make the mod much cleaner and more stable. And thus we started working on 2.5. I had originally thought we could wrap it up before the summer, but it was a much larger job than expected: today, after ten months including two months of closed beta and one and a half month of open beta, we finally released 2.5.

During the entire Floris ride I've been a Jack of all Trades. I did not only do some coding, but also fiddled with music, sounds, textures, meshes, scenes... actually with everything. It wasn't the first time I did all these things, but it is unique to combine them all. When I studied astrophysics I did some programming in C and worked with Mathematica, and did some image reduction in IRAF. I was never really good in any of them, just decent enough to get away with it. But for the Floris Mod Pack I had to deliver some good results, so I dived into a lot of tutorials and installed quite some programs. Here's what I use:

Gimp for editing textures, and creating normal and specular maps.
OpenBRF for editing the BRF-files. These are not just the meshes (3d-models) used in the game, but also the materials used by these meshes.
Wings3D for editing the 3d-models.
Obj2SMD to rig armors and such.
Meshlab to create lods. I know OpenBRF can do this too, but Meshlab often does a better job.
MP3Gain to normalize the sound level of the music to the desired level.
Beyond Compare and WinMerge to compare the code form different mods, and then implement it into Floris.
Notepad++ to just edit the source.

I'm by no means an expert in all of these, but I now know enough to work with them, and for the rest there are plenty of online tutorials. I learned to mod every aspect of the game by just trying, and if I didn't know how to do something, I googled for a tutorial on it.

 

[Windyplains]

I played the original Mount & Blade quite a bit using mostly the Prophesy of Pelendor mod in its earlier stages before leaving the game for quite some time.  It wasn't until I noticed steam had a notice for the relatively new Warband version that I came back.  Like most folks, I tried a number of different mods just following the sub-mod links and eventually found myself here at Floris (2.3 at the time).  Of course I was hooked, but being the tinkerer at heart that I am, I wanted to alter certain features to be more in line with what I wanted.  At first I tried TweakMB, but that simply wasn't tailored enough to suit my needs so I looked at the intimidating prospect of learning the module system.  I've had experience with a few different programming languages, but I had not studied them in many years so to say I might be rusty would be a compliment.  Better yet, I had the misconception that I needed to learn python in order to edit the module system for the game.  Thus armed with a newly acquired "learn to use python" book I dived right in and for any who have worked in the module system you can imagine how successful that was. 

Still, the module system is considerably easier to read than many languages so I acquired the source for both Floris 2.4 and Blood & Steel mods.  Using what I knew of how each of those mods worked I began to understand what each of the commands were doing and how the syntax needed to be done.  The biggest help was coming across Jik's Module System Guide, which translated a lot of what the module system syntax was doing into a format that made more sense.  From there it was mostly trying small changes and seeing what I could get away with.

The best advice I can give is this:
[*] Read Jik's guide.  It really is the best place to start.
[*] Read Caba'drin's syntax guide.  That would have saved a lot of fumbling about initially had I known of it.
[*] Spend time reading the Forge forum and seeing what people suggest as solutions to simple issues.
[*] Use the module system code of a mod that you are very familiar with.  You'll much more easily figure out what it is doing.
[*] Even if you don't understand what the code is doing at a line by line basis, pay attention to the (#) comments in it to help guide you on what it is trying to accomplish.
[*] Find a few fellow modders that are willing to answer questions to help iron out misconceptions and listen to what they tell you.
[*] Tinker away.  Modding is much easier to learn by doing vs. being taught.  It is well worth learning and not nearly as daunting a task as it may initially seem.