Suggestion: Official MOD tools / Documentation to Media/Code

[teike]

The battle mechanics of this game, the horse mounted fight, the usage of bow/xbow, all this is amazingly excelent! (ECHO.. )

IMHO this game as it already is, is much more cool then half-life (think on it w/o the mods, I am trying to create a context here).

But afaik half-life was just another good game out there.
When a group of 'users?' created the mod Counter-Strike, the hole half-life game became a market commercial BOOM, everyone knows about it (despite I dont like much CS gameplay, that boom is a fact, period).
From day to night there showed up more then 30,000 multiplayer servers running it!

My suggestion to the devel team is to make available to users, just enough info so extra code/media/storylines/quests could be easly created and added, while still requiring the main game engine to be used.

I am sure M&B has potential to go beyond CS but I think effort must be put on it now that it seems to be spreading fastly worldwide .

 

[Kestenvarn]

Isn't this idea basically what the next patch is about?

 

[compfreak]

troll!!1!!!1one!

 

[n00854180t]

Isn't this idea basically what the next patch is about?

Not really, no. The next patch will give us some tools for modding, such as a model exporter, but mostly tools for module making. Teike was referring to a system by which we can modify we can modify the engine, rather than just the content.

I asked Armagan earlier about a plugin/mod solution (i.e., you have the function dostuff() which outputs "Stuff." to the screen, and modders can make a file called whateverDoStuff() in the folder "whatever" which will instead output "Whatever." to the screen. This would allow modification of the engine without having the actual source code to the game), but he said it'd pretty much be too much work.

I doubt anything like this will happen unless someone wants to make a program that uses detours (not very easy stuff).

 

[compfreak]

My suggestion to the devel team is to make available to users, just enough info so extra code/media/storylines/quests could be easly created and added, while still requiring the main game engine to be used.

Sorry to prove you wrong, but look at the bolded text. And what is a detour?

 

[teike]

I think you mean 'what I mean' right?

It is like what n00854180t said:

This would allow modification of the engine without having the actual source code to the game

I mean they implement a way that several calculations from the game engine could be performed outside of the main executable.

The executable would allow a .dll created by users from a source code typed and compiled by them, to perform predefined tasks in a different way than what the engine does.
The Engine would request for 'answears' to certain input data it would send to the the .dll so it would calculate and return a user customized answear.

For example: Function to calculate gravity force to a falling unit().
If a user is creating a magic based module, he could add an algorithm like this:

if 'unit' is a 'mage' and has 'AI' then
'unit' do 'cast levitation spell'
else
'unit' do 'cries scared'
end

Btw I dont believe it would be too hard to allow such .dll modules to be loaded.
I mean that in the beggining, only a few functions would be allowed to have a different way to be performed.