Ash_Mantle
Veteran
Disclaimer: This may not be useful for veterans. It's posted on the off chance it might be useful to someone; if it's not, we'll just have to lament over the occupied database space.
So my friends have asked me a few times about how moddable M&B is, in detail, and we've had a few chats about it. I've discovered I don't actually know, and have since decided to try to better answer the question. I've seen a few threads on these subjects and started prodding around in the murky depths of the module system. It's all been quite edifying, but I lost track of a few personal projects a month ago and decided to work on other things and when I came back I forgot half the crap I was interested in knowing - like what's possible to alter. Hence, this.
I did a search or two and the results are all pretty damn haphazard - there's a great and disorganized archive of old guides and tutorials, some absolutely archaeological, some up to date, and it's getting hard to make sense of them, so I'm makin' this thread for personal use. It will hold my understanding of up to date information regarding what can and cannot be changed, and be as exhaustive as I care to make it. Help if you like, flame if you must, and for god's sake please correct me.
And before anyone asks, I have, in fact, seen these three threads:
Ruthven's Do YOU want to make your own mod? Look here.
Mostly up to date, great starting point, shines when it comes to telling newbies how not to get flamed to ****, but not terribly exhaustive.
ealabor's Modders Lore thread: An informative guide on tips and limits to modding.
Good thread, albeit six months out of date and deals mostly with what codebase or file format to work with when trying to meet a specific goal. Nice to have, but not what I'm after when some wild idea grabs me by the brain-stem and yanks hard.
And, of course, Thorgrim's Mount & Blade Mod Makers Q&A Thread
This thing is awesome and the FAQ in the first post is goddamn primo, but the thread's 156 pages and growing. Unless you know what you're looking for, searching it can get a bit problematic in my experience - plus, the guy started the thread because he saw a hole and decided to fill it, so I'm gonna try to follow in yon giant's footsteps. Maybe it won't suck >.>
Alright! Let's get started. Organization of categories below will change on the 'if you think it sucks, give me a better idea and I'll implement it' schema. Every entry will ideally be vaguely substantiated with links to threads (preferably specific posts in threads), and credit to pioneering code-monkeys, artists, and whoever else will be given where possible. If you see a mistake, give me a good correction and I'll try and stick it in where appropriate.
-badly detailed first draft entries begin here. When completed, each entry will have examples, links, and credit where due to pioneering/established modders-
Section 1: The obvious and the popular.
General Modding
- Editing game files:
If this is new to you, you're probably too much of a beginner for the scope of this thread; you might find Ruthven's thread helpful.
There is a module system for Mount & Blade; Armagan and team made it available to the playerbase as early as 2005. This is the preferred way to muck about with game content and features for most beginners.
There are sound, music, texture, and graphic files. People have been replacing them since the first few mods.
Then there's the executable and so forth. It is worth noting that while Taleworlds are very welcoming of mods and modders, they are not handing out the source code for Mount & Blade insofar as I know, so playing with the encrypted stuff and that lot is at best quasilegal and infringing on their rights and at worst flagrant disrespect for other's work and an open invitation to being sued until you're coding on an abacus and your bandwidth is the product of vibrations on a string. In other words, if you have to ask, screwing with hardcoded things is a bad idea for you.
Multiplayer
This one's a hot topic. There's two main areas of concern now that Warband's existence has been announced:
- Combat Multiplayer:
This is being introduced in the new expansion. For more information, consider the recent thread here, where Mabons & company have been kind enough to describe upcoming features. Past that, judicious use of your google will tell you up-to-date things.
- Strategic or Campaign Multiplayer:
In any broad sense, this is a no-go. Stop asking. The closest anyone's gotten so far involves turn-based workarounds and a very involved solution. This failed, but the thread on it is very edifying in a certain sense. Have a read here. There were, of course, legality concerns, but on the whole there was some interesting speculation, though I'd be amazed if it ever did come together. Highlights for me included Archonsod's summary of his take on things in reply #230, and the discussions about legality and feasibility around page 23. If your burning lust for campaign multiplayer won't leave you alone, either take a few cold showers and lend your copy of M&B to a friend for a week, or get coding.
Section 2: The list of things that might actually be useful.
Sub-section A) Gameplay elements and features of play; what the player sees.
Interface
This refers to any portion of the screen not devoted to either the campaign map with your tiny character on it among scenery, settlements, and other people, or to your significantly larger character and the battle map you're playing on.
- Altering the interface windows/divs:
There has been at least one reskin that I've seen to date, and there is an entire module (in the M&B Module System, which you can read about here), at least, devoted to the interface.
There was some sort of farming mod, possibly Knights & Merchants, which drastically affected the interface. More to follow if I find links.
- Adjusting portions of interface windows/moving around sub-windows (say, switching the inventory to the left side of the screen and the merchant stock to the right when you go and visit a merchant):
I believe windows can be resized and moved around as well, but this is understandably complex - screw up relocating a button and you've affected a player's ability to use a feature.
- Interactive screens, slots, & icons:
Several mods feature expanded equip slots or otherwise tweaked inventory windows; for example, certain of them have done away with the food slot (aka, 'horse slaughtering button' >.>) or, I believe, reintroduced it. At least some of these were for older M&B versions, so additional clarity here is needed.
- Creation of entirely new interface windows/limitations on number of interfaces available in module:
Currently unknown, even to the extent of creating new categories in the ingame wiki aside from 'people,' 'places,' etc. Must work on this.
- Triggering for, as well as size adjustment and content editing of popup announcement windows inside game (for example, offers of vassalage):
Currently, the limitations on this are unknown to me but presumably the content may be edited and triggers for appearance of popups affected through scripting if one interpolates from mod featurelists.
- On-screen text announcements ('You have gained a level,' for example):
I seem to remember knowing these were customizable through scripting.
- Affecting fonts, font styles, & typography:
There is a guide to altering the font face somewhere, possibly linked on Tholgrim's or Ruthven's threads. Whether this font face alteration applies to all fonts throughout the game or only certain subsets.
- Text labels:
There have been numerous changes to font color of labels on the campaign map simply by virtue of changing faction color, as these two are tied together. I do not currently recall anything about altering available faction color sets; will re-read factions guide and try to formulate a better explanation.
Label font face alterations are a mystery to me and will remain so until either I read the damn guide mentioned above or some kindly stranger swings by and enlightens me below.
- Button alterations:
Button skins can be altered, as can button functions through scripting if I remember correctly. Will provide examples if found.
- Tooltip alterations:
This one's a big mystery to me at the moment.
- Selectable options on event screens(recruit, take a hostile action, leave):
These have been altered to no end. I plan to find out if there are known limitations on number of options added, number of characters in a given option, and so forth.
Dialogue
A dialogue occurs when the player speaks to at least one other NPC.
- Dialogue choices:
One can definitely introduce new dialogues, and thus new dialogue choices. The relevant limitations might include a character limit per dialogue option, both for on-screen display purposes before and after option selection and for file storage purposes. I find it likely that there's no hard limit on how long a line of dialogue is but if it doesn't fit on-screen you've got a problem; however, this may not be the case.
- Scripting:
Scripting and dialogue were made to work with each other much like in other games; precise limitations currently elude my sleep-deprived mind, but some consultation of Jik's excellent module system guide and other documentation will sort that out in a day or two, if the replies below don't set me straight.
- Scene/background for dialogue:
New dialogue scenes (the view over the shoulders of the people in conversation) can be created from any existing scene (as far as I know) with a bit of work. Whether the total number of dialogue scenes a module uses is limited arbitrarily or for the sake of performance is not known to me yet.
Commands & Modes of Input
This refers to everything from keystrokes that affect player character actions to new features one accesses through commands (whistling for your horse; formation commands) and even to any work done in integrating new peripherals.
- New hotkeys?
This should perhaps go into the second sub-section, but! Several mods, including TheMercenary's native expansion, feature repurposed default hotkeys and new commands. More on this later.
- New battle & strategic map commands (formations, bracing spears, etc):
As stated above, several well-known mods incorporate modifications that allow for new commands on the battlefield, most notably formations, spear-bracing, calling in reinforcements, and so forth. Limitations on this will likely be defined case by case due to some of the things in this category being quite complex.
Strategic Map
The strategic or campaign map would be the one with city, castle, and village names on it, as well as multiple enemy or allied parties and the player's warband. This differs from the tactical or battle map, on which combat takes place, accessible from field battle or siege scenes by pressing backspace.
- Terrain, modifications and types:
There are several old guides to modifying the map; one of them has a useful-but-crashy tool attached. One need only have a careful look at released mod threads to find out that the campaign map is customizeable; the interesting question is whether one can add new terrain types, and if so, what they'd do for one's mod.
- Character & object tokens/animations:
These refer to the small animated icon of a horseman that a player controls on the strategic map. They are readily alterable; Jik's documentation regarding the module system features a handy guide. I will have to check if there's mention of a limitation on how many icons the game can cache per module.
- Total conversions with respect to terrain and terrain type quality changes (pirates mod, sailing ships on the sea, etc):
These have been pulled off before to varying degrees of success. Whether they are still possible in the current version is an extremely interesting question to some and utterly banal to others, so I guess it has a place here.
-badly detailed entries end here, entries without details at all begin here-
Battles
Animations?
AI?
Factions?
Troop Trees?
Items & Equipment?
Specific NPCs/companions/etc?
Sub-Section B) Mechanics and guts of the game; what the modder can fiddle with.
Edit Mode?
Modules
Scenes
'Scene,' to the extent of my understanding, refers to any part of gameplay wherein the player can walk his character around in third or first person, as opposed to parts of the interface or strategic map. A town or tavern is a scene, just as a field battle or siege is.
Scenes have objects (doors, wagons, chests, houses, furniture, horses you cannot interact with, and so forth), NPCs (hostile or non-hostile people animated by the game), portals (objects you interact with that take you to other places, like doors), and scripting.
-Adding scenes:
There is a guide to this somewhere. Need to find a link.
-Editing portals in scenes:
There are conflicting comments about this dating from older versions of M&B; need to find them if possible and get updates.
-Importing objects, scripts, and so forth, and the limits therein:
Big point to tackle, must ask many questions.
More to come if anyone finds this remotely useful.
So my friends have asked me a few times about how moddable M&B is, in detail, and we've had a few chats about it. I've discovered I don't actually know, and have since decided to try to better answer the question. I've seen a few threads on these subjects and started prodding around in the murky depths of the module system. It's all been quite edifying, but I lost track of a few personal projects a month ago and decided to work on other things and when I came back I forgot half the crap I was interested in knowing - like what's possible to alter. Hence, this.
I did a search or two and the results are all pretty damn haphazard - there's a great and disorganized archive of old guides and tutorials, some absolutely archaeological, some up to date, and it's getting hard to make sense of them, so I'm makin' this thread for personal use. It will hold my understanding of up to date information regarding what can and cannot be changed, and be as exhaustive as I care to make it. Help if you like, flame if you must, and for god's sake please correct me.
And before anyone asks, I have, in fact, seen these three threads:
Ruthven's Do YOU want to make your own mod? Look here.
Mostly up to date, great starting point, shines when it comes to telling newbies how not to get flamed to ****, but not terribly exhaustive.
ealabor's Modders Lore thread: An informative guide on tips and limits to modding.
Good thread, albeit six months out of date and deals mostly with what codebase or file format to work with when trying to meet a specific goal. Nice to have, but not what I'm after when some wild idea grabs me by the brain-stem and yanks hard.
And, of course, Thorgrim's Mount & Blade Mod Makers Q&A Thread
This thing is awesome and the FAQ in the first post is goddamn primo, but the thread's 156 pages and growing. Unless you know what you're looking for, searching it can get a bit problematic in my experience - plus, the guy started the thread because he saw a hole and decided to fill it, so I'm gonna try to follow in yon giant's footsteps. Maybe it won't suck >.>
Alright! Let's get started. Organization of categories below will change on the 'if you think it sucks, give me a better idea and I'll implement it' schema. Every entry will ideally be vaguely substantiated with links to threads (preferably specific posts in threads), and credit to pioneering code-monkeys, artists, and whoever else will be given where possible. If you see a mistake, give me a good correction and I'll try and stick it in where appropriate.
-badly detailed first draft entries begin here. When completed, each entry will have examples, links, and credit where due to pioneering/established modders-
Section 1: The obvious and the popular.
General Modding
- Editing game files:
If this is new to you, you're probably too much of a beginner for the scope of this thread; you might find Ruthven's thread helpful.
There is a module system for Mount & Blade; Armagan and team made it available to the playerbase as early as 2005. This is the preferred way to muck about with game content and features for most beginners.
There are sound, music, texture, and graphic files. People have been replacing them since the first few mods.
Then there's the executable and so forth. It is worth noting that while Taleworlds are very welcoming of mods and modders, they are not handing out the source code for Mount & Blade insofar as I know, so playing with the encrypted stuff and that lot is at best quasilegal and infringing on their rights and at worst flagrant disrespect for other's work and an open invitation to being sued until you're coding on an abacus and your bandwidth is the product of vibrations on a string. In other words, if you have to ask, screwing with hardcoded things is a bad idea for you.
Multiplayer
This one's a hot topic. There's two main areas of concern now that Warband's existence has been announced:
- Combat Multiplayer:
This is being introduced in the new expansion. For more information, consider the recent thread here, where Mabons & company have been kind enough to describe upcoming features. Past that, judicious use of your google will tell you up-to-date things.
- Strategic or Campaign Multiplayer:
In any broad sense, this is a no-go. Stop asking. The closest anyone's gotten so far involves turn-based workarounds and a very involved solution. This failed, but the thread on it is very edifying in a certain sense. Have a read here. There were, of course, legality concerns, but on the whole there was some interesting speculation, though I'd be amazed if it ever did come together. Highlights for me included Archonsod's summary of his take on things in reply #230, and the discussions about legality and feasibility around page 23. If your burning lust for campaign multiplayer won't leave you alone, either take a few cold showers and lend your copy of M&B to a friend for a week, or get coding.
Section 2: The list of things that might actually be useful.
Sub-section A) Gameplay elements and features of play; what the player sees.
Interface
This refers to any portion of the screen not devoted to either the campaign map with your tiny character on it among scenery, settlements, and other people, or to your significantly larger character and the battle map you're playing on.
- Altering the interface windows/divs:
There has been at least one reskin that I've seen to date, and there is an entire module (in the M&B Module System, which you can read about here), at least, devoted to the interface.
There was some sort of farming mod, possibly Knights & Merchants, which drastically affected the interface. More to follow if I find links.
- Adjusting portions of interface windows/moving around sub-windows (say, switching the inventory to the left side of the screen and the merchant stock to the right when you go and visit a merchant):
I believe windows can be resized and moved around as well, but this is understandably complex - screw up relocating a button and you've affected a player's ability to use a feature.
- Interactive screens, slots, & icons:
Several mods feature expanded equip slots or otherwise tweaked inventory windows; for example, certain of them have done away with the food slot (aka, 'horse slaughtering button' >.>) or, I believe, reintroduced it. At least some of these were for older M&B versions, so additional clarity here is needed.
- Creation of entirely new interface windows/limitations on number of interfaces available in module:
Currently unknown, even to the extent of creating new categories in the ingame wiki aside from 'people,' 'places,' etc. Must work on this.
- Triggering for, as well as size adjustment and content editing of popup announcement windows inside game (for example, offers of vassalage):
Currently, the limitations on this are unknown to me but presumably the content may be edited and triggers for appearance of popups affected through scripting if one interpolates from mod featurelists.
- On-screen text announcements ('You have gained a level,' for example):
I seem to remember knowing these were customizable through scripting.
- Affecting fonts, font styles, & typography:
There is a guide to altering the font face somewhere, possibly linked on Tholgrim's or Ruthven's threads. Whether this font face alteration applies to all fonts throughout the game or only certain subsets.
- Text labels:
There have been numerous changes to font color of labels on the campaign map simply by virtue of changing faction color, as these two are tied together. I do not currently recall anything about altering available faction color sets; will re-read factions guide and try to formulate a better explanation.
Label font face alterations are a mystery to me and will remain so until either I read the damn guide mentioned above or some kindly stranger swings by and enlightens me below.
- Button alterations:
Button skins can be altered, as can button functions through scripting if I remember correctly. Will provide examples if found.
- Tooltip alterations:
This one's a big mystery to me at the moment.
- Selectable options on event screens(recruit, take a hostile action, leave):
These have been altered to no end. I plan to find out if there are known limitations on number of options added, number of characters in a given option, and so forth.
Dialogue
A dialogue occurs when the player speaks to at least one other NPC.
- Dialogue choices:
One can definitely introduce new dialogues, and thus new dialogue choices. The relevant limitations might include a character limit per dialogue option, both for on-screen display purposes before and after option selection and for file storage purposes. I find it likely that there's no hard limit on how long a line of dialogue is but if it doesn't fit on-screen you've got a problem; however, this may not be the case.
- Scripting:
Scripting and dialogue were made to work with each other much like in other games; precise limitations currently elude my sleep-deprived mind, but some consultation of Jik's excellent module system guide and other documentation will sort that out in a day or two, if the replies below don't set me straight.
- Scene/background for dialogue:
New dialogue scenes (the view over the shoulders of the people in conversation) can be created from any existing scene (as far as I know) with a bit of work. Whether the total number of dialogue scenes a module uses is limited arbitrarily or for the sake of performance is not known to me yet.
Commands & Modes of Input
This refers to everything from keystrokes that affect player character actions to new features one accesses through commands (whistling for your horse; formation commands) and even to any work done in integrating new peripherals.
- New hotkeys?
This should perhaps go into the second sub-section, but! Several mods, including TheMercenary's native expansion, feature repurposed default hotkeys and new commands. More on this later.
- New battle & strategic map commands (formations, bracing spears, etc):
As stated above, several well-known mods incorporate modifications that allow for new commands on the battlefield, most notably formations, spear-bracing, calling in reinforcements, and so forth. Limitations on this will likely be defined case by case due to some of the things in this category being quite complex.
Strategic Map
The strategic or campaign map would be the one with city, castle, and village names on it, as well as multiple enemy or allied parties and the player's warband. This differs from the tactical or battle map, on which combat takes place, accessible from field battle or siege scenes by pressing backspace.
- Terrain, modifications and types:
There are several old guides to modifying the map; one of them has a useful-but-crashy tool attached. One need only have a careful look at released mod threads to find out that the campaign map is customizeable; the interesting question is whether one can add new terrain types, and if so, what they'd do for one's mod.
- Character & object tokens/animations:
These refer to the small animated icon of a horseman that a player controls on the strategic map. They are readily alterable; Jik's documentation regarding the module system features a handy guide. I will have to check if there's mention of a limitation on how many icons the game can cache per module.
- Total conversions with respect to terrain and terrain type quality changes (pirates mod, sailing ships on the sea, etc):
These have been pulled off before to varying degrees of success. Whether they are still possible in the current version is an extremely interesting question to some and utterly banal to others, so I guess it has a place here.
-badly detailed entries end here, entries without details at all begin here-
Battles
Animations?
AI?
Factions?
Troop Trees?
Items & Equipment?
Specific NPCs/companions/etc?
Sub-Section B) Mechanics and guts of the game; what the modder can fiddle with.
Edit Mode?
Modules
Scenes
'Scene,' to the extent of my understanding, refers to any part of gameplay wherein the player can walk his character around in third or first person, as opposed to parts of the interface or strategic map. A town or tavern is a scene, just as a field battle or siege is.
Scenes have objects (doors, wagons, chests, houses, furniture, horses you cannot interact with, and so forth), NPCs (hostile or non-hostile people animated by the game), portals (objects you interact with that take you to other places, like doors), and scripting.
-Adding scenes:
There is a guide to this somewhere. Need to find a link.
-Editing portals in scenes:
There are conflicting comments about this dating from older versions of M&B; need to find them if possible and get updates.
-Importing objects, scripts, and so forth, and the limits therein:
Big point to tackle, must ask many questions.
More to come if anyone finds this remotely useful.
