Running multiple mods

[jrawlings]

Hi. I've grown a bit bored with vanilla Mount&Blade and have begun to adventure into the mods a bit. I've downloaded and played Mag7... freakin' awesome! I'd also like to try a few others out there, like the hundred years war and the upcoming LOTR mods. There is also the arena expansion and a few others that look interesting.

Now, I no nothing about the scripting language used to make M&B or the mods, so this may be a stupid question:

Can I load all of these mods on at once? I don't mean to play them, but at least have them installed. I guess, a clearer question may be: if I install all of these mods, will I get the option to select which one I want to play from the pull-down menu (like when chosing which Mag7 to play)?

I don't want to ruin my vanilla install of the game or ruin the almighty Mag7 install either hehe.

 

[mfp]

Any mod installed into your /modules directory automatically appears in the drop down menu of the game launcher, like the three Mag7 mods (vanilla is there too, listed as "Native").

So, to answer your question, yes, you can have any/every mod installed at once, but you can only run one at a time (unless maybe you manually merge them), and they're all conveniently displayed at game start-up. I think this is one of the strengths of M&B, it seems like it really strives to cater to the mod community as much as it can.

 

[-GandalfTheGrey]

One inconvenience, though : if a mod has custom textures, they will be used for all the modules. The better thing to do then is to have another install of M&B for these mods with new textures.

 

[jrawlings]

Thanks for the replies. Good to know about the textures thing. I'm not sure if this is a standard for the Mod community here, but do folks indicate if textures are changed? Maybe make that a requirement before posting a new mod?

Merging mods... I've read in the Mag7 that, at least in previous versions, it incorporated another mod, Hugemod... I suppose this is Ancientwanker merging the two for us? If I want to merge mods, is there a way I can do it that is straightforward? (my programming skills are VERY basic, no pun intended... one class in C++ and that was 5 years ago).

 

[Ancientwanker]

Effidian is looking into doing a program for that I think..dont quote me. As part of the editor I think.

Noo8's Hugemod and Mag-7 were easily merged. They didnt affect the same files. Mag-7 would work with any graphics mod from the old .632 days.

 

[Effidian]

Merging is on my list. It might take awhile though...

 

[Janus]

By the way, heads up, I got a response back from Armagan stating that separation of textures and meshes for different mods is done, and he will be adding in support for music and sounds for each module as well.

Now I'm not sure if he's saying module textures and meshes are already in or just that he's already done them for the next version.
I'm wondering if they're already supported by the load_resource lines in module_info.txt, as some others have suggested. Can anyone else confirm this who has played around with new textures and meshes?

 

[n00854180t]

The load resource stuff was dodgy, at best. I tried it out before merging most of my stuff into the default files. I imagine Armagan was referring ot a future version.

 

[Lemonfield]

I was just in the process of making a new topic about those issues you mentioned Janus, when I came here in another window and saw the great news about seperating mod files.

There was one other thing I wanted to discuss but I don't think it warrants its own thread, and it's related to 'running multiple mods' so this is as good a thread as any.

Savegames: Each mod logically has it's own savegames. But what if we want a mod that doesn't change the game itself, but instead only how it looks or sounds, to be selectable as a mod? (a graphics enhancing mod for example would need to be installed seperately and be selectable since we don't want to replace the original content.) Currently, as I noticed from the music mod with Edgen(Justin Durban)'s music, that means they have to have their own saves. That means we can't use previous saves or go back and forth between graphical or sound mods without manually relocating the saves (if that's even possible) even though they should work just fine as it's only grabbing the different assets as you play and has nothing to do with the save file afaik.

I haven't looked myself (not that it's my forte), but what I'm asking is that if it's not possible already that somebody go figure out a way to share save files between these types of mods and the original game. It's probably not too hard, the clincher is this functionality would preferably be installed along with the mod via the installer. End users don't like to fiddle around with files. I hope I'm not asking too much. I'm not a coder kind of guy, I just make the assets and it would be really helpful if saves could be shared in this way right right off installation.

 

[Effidian]

The saves for each mod are in separate folders. So without some batch process that you run before you load M&B, to subst folders or copy saves, I don't think it is possible.

Of course if you are just updating music or graphics, then why not just add those type of mods to an existing mod (like Native)? You may want to use mods like those in multiple mods so it doesn't really make sense to me to have those as separate directories anyway.