Also Known As: banshee_revora (Steam) Joined: 15 Aug 2002 Location: Brazil
Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 5:52 pm Post subject:
Koen's words on Command & Conquer 3 modding scene!
Subject description: And I agree with him. Manifest files are a pain in the ass!
Yesterday, Koen van de Sande, the creator of TibEd and other several modding tools, has posted at TibEd site an article about C&C 3 Mod Support. He is clearly unhappy with the creation of more bureaucracy for the modders (with the dread .manifest files) and the lack of dedication to EA's Modding SDK Tools and he compared C&C3 Mod Support with Supreme Commander's mod support as well. Here's a snippet:
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"Before the first C&C3 community summit back in December, news on mod support on C&C3 was still scarce. Life was good. We only heard a faint quote that the game was switching to XML files instead of the (ancient) INI files: finally! Then, in the C&C3 demo, we have observed that there are still several INI files left... and we are cannot find where the unit settings are. Actually, we do know they are probably in some manifest file, but it is some weird file format. It will take weeks to decipher it all. The alternative is waiting for a Mod SDK to be released by EA. The Generals Mod SDK was released just 3 years after the initial game release. The First Decade edition of Generals still has broken mod support 13 months after release. So if I read that EALA is moving towards a system of patching where C&C3 would receive LOTS of SMALL patches, fairly frequently... then I have to take that with a grain of salt."
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I must say however, that he is very optimistic saying that the .manifest files will only take weeks to be decyphered.
Likewise him, I'm also totally unhappy with these .manifest files that hides important files, including xml files that are crucial to edit the units from the factions and honestly, EA's Modding SDK tools might really not support that.
Take a full read at TibEd site and post your opinions here. QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 25 Aug 2004 Location: DAS BOOT IM DER OSTSEE
Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2007 6:17 pm Post subject:
Everybody complains about these .manifest files and fears that EA will not support them. come on, they support modding MUCH MORE then Westwood ever did. EA will release a tool for opening them, or the fans themselves can. MIXes for a new generation. _________________ PPM's Reichstrollfuherer, 236th Trollenparties brigade. QUICK_EDIT
EA probably just wanted to prevent people from modding the C&C3 demo, so chances are it'll be much easier when C&C3 is really released. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
I may not have been 'on the scene' for a while but I had high hopes for C&C3 - without the community veterans maintaining a longer term interest in the game, I fear for the future of community support for it.
@Desu - whilst there was no official modding support from Westwood, the games they made supported simple addition and modification of game content pretty much out of the box. What's happening here is the placement of serious barriers to doing so. EA are not providing good mod support, they are hindering it in this franchise - if they were as serious as you say about mods, this would all be a lot simpler - probably as simple as the Sims QUICK_EDIT
The simple thing is would you want people to mod a good game that took alot of effort before the game even comes out? I think that EA wouldn't take the chance to lose the modding community by making the final release extremely difficult to mod. QUICK_EDIT
^ remains to be seen in the final release, I accept that.
However, in the same way that they provide players a chance to see what the game will be like, demos have always provided the opportunity for modders to do the same - they don't really want to mod a demo as that's pointless once the game is out, but they do want to figure out how to mod it in readiness for the games launch.
Significant delays in being able to supplement a popular game with user generated content lead to a rapidly diminished interest in doing so, and the barriers here represent those delays. The moral lesson in the history of PC games is that when such interest becomes diminished, so does a lot of other community support at which point the game goes on the shelf for most players until the inevitable x-pack comes along.
Who knows, perhaps it is a shrewd business move on behalf of EA who have in the past asserted that they can't make money from mods but they can from x-packs. QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 25 Aug 2004 Location: DAS BOOT IM DER OSTSEE
Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2007 9:02 pm Post subject:
@DeeZire...
Not really. Modding C&C95 requires knowledge of an EXE editor to do even the ridiculously simple stuff we can in TS, RA2, and YR. All you need for RA2 to make a 'hidden' unit buildable is Notepad and basic literacy. In TD you have to go through a whole bloody ordeal just to play with a unit as simple as the SSM launcher. C&C modders havent even found the armour values afaik.
And why does everybody seem to paint Electornic Arts as an evil corporation that only cares for the bottom dollar? Westwood Studios was not full of happy people making games for all without a care for profit. Westwood made games for money, plain and simple. If Westwood was so 'caring' toward the community as everybody seems to think, we wouldnt have waited till RA2 for mappacks to be released AFTER the original game. Westwood didnt care about modders, or making gameplay more interesting for TS, RA, or TD. I think we all owe EA a great deal of respect. They cared a LOT more about the Longevity of RA2 then Westwood ever would have cared. _________________ PPM's Reichstrollfuherer, 236th Trollenparties brigade. QUICK_EDIT
I must agree with you, Desu, on many levels there. I've also noticed that alot of community vets have not been happy with EA as well, especially with that taken into consideration. Not all the vets are dissatisfied, mind you. _________________ QUICK_EDIT
Of course we are all entitled to our opinons, and I fully respect your points. Although I still assert that, when compared even to EA's recent RTS releases, out-of-the-box support for additional user-generated content for C&C3 is unofficial and is a backwards step from Generals, ZH, BFME and BFMEII.
For the record, RA2's modding support, whether from Westwood or EA, was never official - without wanting to boast, I'd say my own efforts (rather than the publishers) for those games did much to catalyse a wider interest in modding when it became apparent just what could be done with them.
I'm not painting EA as an evil corporation - I worked for them once - however people must accept they exist to make a profit first. I was merely posing an open question - if you follow current business models in the industry to their ultimate conclusion (things like subscription based games, extra downloadable content for extra payments such as maps/levels/units, in-game realtime advertising and so on) you must realise that eventually user-generated content (read: mods etc) will become a threat to profitability as mods will inevitably seek to erode, remove or replace those things. After all, why pay for extra levels/missions/units/maps or other content in a game when the community offers it for free? Remove the open ability for the community to do that and you protect your business model and future profitability thus secure future development. Thus the open question I posed was - 'is this the first step in that process?'.
Publishers know the editing/modding community, i.e. the ability to supplement a game with additional content, is a good thing and it's been long proven to enhance lifetime, appeal, reputation and thus sales through customer loyalty. It is inevitable that they would try to 'own' that, or at least integrate into their own strategy, given the spiralling costs (and we're talking millions of dollars) of developing a game these days. QUICK_EDIT
Basically my point is this: we need such complex tools to be able to edit files, that the time spent on creating the tools no longer goes into mods. Like Deezire said: every week mod tools are released later, the modding community size shrinks. May I remind you that TibEd for RA2 was released 3 days after the game's release? This was only possible because there were no new, complex file formats to decipher; the INI and MIX files were mostly the same as in Tiberian Sun.
-- originally the above paragraph was placed at the end of my text, but probably no-one will read that far, so I moved it --
Well, to make my story a bit stronger: this is the first time I am speaking out loud about mod support in this way. Let me put it like this: the original C&C'95 is easier to mod than C&C3. Period. Sure, we had to hack the EXE file, but the values in there were all in a specific range and they had a fixed format. Given that this was the first real RTS, we could mod it surprisingly well. This is partly because these settings were isolated in the original source (otherwise they will not be laid out like this in the EXE). Anyway, this is not a real argument, because I only built a C&C'95 editor 4 years after everybody else had already done the work, so lets move on to a real one.
In RA1 up to and including RA2 - YR, the designers had to edit text files, and had no specific tools to edit them, i.e. modders and designers were on equal footing (for INI changes, lets not go into art changes, because these have become better supported over the years due to the availability of the W3D tools for Renegade). For Generals, the designers are probably still editing text files, but these text files have become very, very large. The complexity is very high and has further increased in BfME 1 & 2. It has increased up to a point where it is no longer possible to fix all bugs. While attemping to build a solid parser for these files, I found that there are many typo's and missing = characters in these files. The game will still work, but it makes things harder. On a negative side, BfME 1 (and 2? don't own that one) have added AssetCache.dat, which needs to be recreated when you add new units to the game. I spent Christmas 2004 reverse-engineering the format - 2 full weeks for that. And then, suddenly in February 2005, a tool for it was released. Great... but my time felt lost. The reason there is no TibEd for BfME1 is this file format. Had I not spent time reverse-engineering it, I would have had 2 full weeks to build an editor. Unfortunately the weeks after that I had no time left and I haven't felt the need to make an editor for it since. I guess I don't like LOTR that much.
For C&C3, there has been a redesign of INI files (to 'XML' files). Art and unit settings are together in some .manifest/.relo/etc file. Unfortunately, this is not a text file which we can easily edit. From the looks of it, this file is generated from some original source file. If this is indeed the case, then we'll need a Mod SDK from EA before we can do anything. Or maybe someone will reverse engineer it, and the SDK will be released 2 weeks later. QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 25 Aug 2004 Location: DAS BOOT IM DER OSTSEE
Posted: Sun Mar 18, 2007 11:44 pm Post subject:
This is ridiculous to panic over a new file format. The community is not going to explode into a big pile of fail because a new file has to be cracked(OH MY GOD!) XCC mixer and TibEd had to be developed to handle MIX files, the SHP and Voxel builders did, too. There were no editors before to deal with these files, How hard can it be to tackle an XML file? _________________ PPM's Reichstrollfuherer, 236th Trollenparties brigade. QUICK_EDIT
This is ridiculous to panic over a new file format. The community is not going to explode into a big pile of fail because a new file has to be cracked(OH MY GOD!) XCC mixer and TibEd had to be developed to handle MIX files, the SHP and Voxel builders did, too. There were no editors before to deal with these files, How hard can it be to tackle an XML file?
Im sorry desu but you are talking out of complete ignorance
the bottom line is, EA are potentially releasing a game with much less modding potential than what has become expected of games these days (and games companies).
When you compare to how bad TD was to mod, you have to put things in perspective.. it was 1995, WW's second RPG and it had no worse modding capabilities than most games out at around same time _________________ QUICK_EDIT
Joined: 26 Nov 2002 Location: Algae Colony On Mars
Posted: Mon Mar 19, 2007 12:35 am Post subject:
Quote:
How hard can it be to tackle an XML file?
From my understanding, they're compressed. People need to attempt to decompress the files without knowing what the original contents are. Imagine receiving a blurred image and being told that you have to revert it back to its original form PERFECTLY. That's what it's equivalent to. _________________
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Koen's words on Command & Conquer 3 modding scene!
come on, they support modding MUCH MORE then Westwood ever did. EA will release a tool for opening them, or the fans themselves can. MIXes for a new generation.
