Hi there,

I am starting to get a tiny grasp on this modding biz, and it's fun! Now i want to develop my own mod to suit my own wants and needs.

Although i am not an online player i really like a lot of the changes made in mp evolution. This is why i want to base my mod upon it.

This means that in the course of things i will have to revert some of the changes made, which leads me to the following question:
Is there any way to figure out what's been done to change something so as to convert it back to the original state?
(example: i don't want this: Pioneer gold cost is increased by 50 with every pioneer built by the player)

Another question:
When i start customizing i use the mp evolution editor, so when it's time to release(somewhere around 2041)am i stuck with the mp evo desktop icons? They look cool alright, but i'd rather stick with the original game's icons.

So, that's it for now,
best regards,
feargus

Hi.

Is there any way to figure out what's been done to change something so as to convert it back to the original state?
(example: i don't want this: Pioneer gold cost is increased by 50 with every pioneer built by the player)

The problem is, all the interesting things (including the one you mentioned) are hardcoded in the exe file - yes, we had to repeat the mistakes of original game, because the other way had not been mastered yet. But we're currently working on moving the settings for the new stuff to the editor, so it can be modded in an adequate way.

So if your estimated release date is more or less realistic ( ), it's probably better to wait for the next MPE version. A list of things you want to change but can't will be helpful, just in case you have something we don't have in our todo-list yet.

And if you need this right now, I can talk you through some simple changes - but the list of things you want to change is needed anyway =)

Oh, almost forgot the icons. They are easily changed by any resource editor. I don't even remember which one we used to substitute default ones... The only tricky thing is you must NOT remove any icon sizes or add additional ones, it might screw up the exe file.

[This message has been edited by HellBrick (edited 04-21-2012 @ 03:06 AM).]

Thank you, Hellbrick,

So it seems i'm better off starting in the regular editor and converting it to mpevo later on. Hey, i might be able to make some of my favorite changes myself.

Oh, almost forgot the icons. They are easily changed by any resource editor

what's a resource editor?
is the iled a resource editor?
i haven't figured out its workings quite yet.
cuurently wrestling with the ugpm-gui

anyhow, icons are for later concern...

by the way, i love the hell brick ilb, nice touch!

see ya

I meant exe resource editor. Resources are everywhere, so confusing =)

Btw. Do you and your team have some news to us HellBrick?
You are so quiet lately.
Some new discoveries?

Maybe razeable bridges or some other impossible cool stuff?

News will start coming in about a week, I think. The thing is I've been incredibly busy IRL for the last 2 months, so I've hardly had any time to work on anything. But my free time is much better now, so after I finish wrapping up some more urgent stuff that have been screaming for my attention all this time, I go back to MPE.

[This message has been edited by HellBrick (edited 04-22-2012 @ 01:15 AM).]

This are news. If they are good or bad for the MPE project and its fans is not important. RL is more important.
But this are news nevertheless.
Thanks for this.

Ahhhm...?
I donīt know if this was asked or already made?

Is it possible to toggle off the domain in game?
It would be cool if a player could toggle off the domain so another player canīt see it anymore. I donīt mean to turn if off via keyboard but turn it off/out total.
Or let only see the own and/or allied players see the domain.

Is this maybe possible?

[This message has been edited by The Groll (edited 04-27-2012 @ 05:08 PM).]

@Groll: I think it's there from the beginning of this MPE project. At least in a game I played a while back, I don't see the border of magic domain at all.

Domains displaying was disabled years ago indeed =)

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Meanwhile, we have some news... well, kind of =) The last week was dedicated to research, related and unrelated to MPE in the same time. Being a programmer, I always want to automate things, and for that I slowly research AoW file formats. Now I've finally reached the point where I could generate unit info tables for the actual version of MPE - something that we've been asked for pretty often, mostly by the new players, but I think this is a generally good thing to have easy access to. You can find them here if you're interested (don't get scared by the Russian website, all the game terms (unit names, ability names, parameter names, etc.) are in English).

More research was done on the topic that has been bothering me for a very long time - brining balancing problems and math together. We did a bit of this before in 1.5 - some tweaks were applied to the battle spells and War mage based on calculating their average effective damage. Unfortunately, with units everything's a lot more difficult (or I just suck at math =)), and no big triumphs have been made here. Yet

Anyway, now I'm really back to exe patching. We've estimated the feature set for the next release, and I am finally starting to continue implementing it. So expect news Even though I have no idea if it's being read or not, I still think I'm gonna use my twitter account for most of them, just because it's convenient for both the writer and potential readers. So stay tuned!

[This message has been edited by HellBrick (edited 05-11-2012 @ 00:48 AM).]

Some very big stuff is happening at the moment, so I decided to write a big post about it.

AoW offers very diverse opportunities to enjoy it. Games vary tremendously depending on map size, availability of TC combat, creativity of a mod maker and tons of other stuff. And this is awesome for the players, but it is the huge pain in the ass for the people who are trying to support the game with patches, targeted for a wide acceptance.

Until just recently we had been making the same mistake original developers did - hard-coding stuff. Well, we kinda have an excuse - we don't have the source code, so reorganizing stuff is not easy, to say the least. So we did the only thing we could - we just introduced new features and hoped they are not too extreme.

But the problem is it's impossible to fit everyone's needs this way, and the feedback we've received has shown us how futile our attempts to do it were.

Well, now the good news: this problem is no more =) It has been a very long road, but we are now capable of extending modding possibilities. And the first thing we did was moving some of the previously hardcoded settings from the game exe to the modding: skill modifiers for summoner, enchanter, channeler, conqueror and pacifist.



Now these skills can be easily reverted back to their original states. Or tweaked. Or completely changed. For example, a mod maker can turn enchanter into a negative skill by setting research/mana modifiers > 1 and chance modifier < 1 - this way enchantments will be researched longer, cost more and appear less often. Or they can be disabled completely by setting chance mod to 0. Or... I don't know, I ran out of ideas, but you get the point ;)

The next stop is gonna be Secret glade forest radius - probably the most controversial change in the patch (actually, we were kinda surprised to see that a lot of people consider nerfing Pacifist the worst thing we did - but now that it can be changed in a mod, the Secret glade seems to be grabbing the title). And probably research -> mana conversion rate after that. And then we'll just see how far we can go =)

Unfortunately, I still can't say that everything is possible now. Will I ever be able too?.. Even though the limit of our possibilities has been expanded drastically, some things still lie beyond it - adding new abilities, for example. But nevertheless, we've achieved a huge technical breakthrough and now are much closer to finally grab them =)

---

Oh, and just one more thing. I found out that Twitter can translate posts to Facebook, so I've set this thing up, and now you can also read MPE development news here as well.

[This message has been edited by HellBrick (edited 05-26-2012 @ 09:09 AM).]

Great news! Would it be also possible to add new editable properties to the Races tab, like friendly/unfriendly/arable terrains, alignment and turn on/off the ability to create caravan?

[This message has been edited by PawelS (edited 05-26-2012 @ 09:58 AM).]

I think it should be. It's definitely possible to move race+terrain properties to resources, but there might be some problems with displaying them in the editor. As a failsafe plan we can add an additional mod editor for these special features - it's probably not very convenient to have to editors, but I guess it's better to have a possibility to do something that not to have it.

Very good.

Most excellent!

Amazing stuff!
When will it be available?

We're not sure about release date yet - too many cool features and uncool bugs are planned to take care of to talk about the deadline so early in development. Somewhere in 2012 is the most specific thing I can say at the moment =)

I hope it's not as vague as Upatch 1.5 release date

Well, it's at least 75% less vague ^_^ Seriously speaking, though, we can extrapolate from the previous releases. MPE was started in the end of 2009, first version was released in July 2010 and supported until November 2010. After that we started working on 1.5, released it in May 2011 and kept making updates until November 2011. In other words, so far we've been able to make one major release every year, and if we keep that tempo, late 2012 is the time you'll probably see 1.6.

[This message has been edited by HellBrick (edited 05-29-2012 @ 04:50 AM).]

Can http://aow2.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=302 be made to work with the mod? Unsure where it's getting its icons from.

As well, abilities really need to have their complete descriptions again (block not showing +defense, having to look in changelog to see it's +2/+4/+6/+8/+10 when it could just be in-game, etc.). Some things are just flat out unknown, like how powerful max rank siege engine shots are or max breath weapons.

Edit: Forgot one thing, early on in the mod incarnates were given physical immunity as their gold veterancy perk, and it seems to have been taken out without a changelog. Was wondering why that was taken out leaving them with no gold perk (seemingly every other level 4 has one or loads of gold perks), though the assumed reason would be their total immunity to anything not involving holy.

[This message has been edited by Evalora (edited 05-29-2012 @ 08:31 AM).]

It is impossible for Incarnate to reach a gold medal without Strike, so the upgrade has been removed as well.

Live description updates will be implemented eventually, the only question is when "eventually" comes. But we are definitely aware of the need of this.

Spell icons must be reordered and recolored to match MPE's standard. But fortunately I already have the MPE-compatible version that I use myself and a toolkit that can be used to customize them, I will upload them when I come home.

Right, forgot about removing strike. Kind of figured incarnates could gain experience from killing things while possessing a unit, but I guess not.

I wonder if your color icon pack is better than the existing one, seeing as how it's rather poor in quality. Grainy and such. For an 18.6 megabyte file I'd expect better.

Also, is it reaaaaally necessary for a glutton and two axemen to be guarding a catalyst? I can deal with the earlier level 4/two level 3's/some 1-2's guarding the recruitment site with a dread reaper in it, but christ, there's loads of everything guarding everything now. 2x iron maiden + treeman/glade runner area guards. Whyyy three level 3's for area guards.

I was leaving in a hurry and completely forgot the icons have already been available for quite a while =)

Icons (Screenshot)

Customization toolkit, consists of:

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Also, is it reaaaaally necessary for a glutton and two axemen to be guarding a catalyst?

To be honest, you have a better chance to know the answer from that glutton than from me =) Garrisons are messy and require a lot of work...

2x iron maiden + treeman/glade runner area guards. Whyyy three level 3's for area guards.

That's actually something I'd like to know too

[This message has been edited by HellBrick (edited 05-29-2012 @ 11:28 AM).]

If I recall correctly, there was a medium-level neutral city, the population between outpost and.. city. For some odd reason, it only had one swashbuckler guarding it, despite seeing a neutral of that population is rather rare.

Anyway, there were three area guards in tight proximity around it, I was using various cheats to test some of the intricacies in the mod. The iron maiden/tree man team caught me off guard and killed off my three doom wolves, granted that was atrocious luck on my part.

I can't remember the details of the other two area guards (due to them not being as ludicrous as the elf one), but they were still alarmingly powerful considering this neutral town was only about 15 hexes away from the home city. Elves wiped out 4 doom wolves (only mentioned 3 due to one being at 10%), starter party got rid of one area guard group and then died to the other which immediately ambushed afterward.

Unless area guards can be RMG'd around important things that are otherwise shoddily defended, I can't account for why such a bastard concentration of them would be so close to a home city on the surface.

All settings were on average except cities, which was large. I usually play on all = many, or all except cities = many. The odd thing is in the all-many test I did, independants were far more reasonable than that deathtrap on average.

Edit: Woooow, those spell icons are waaaay better than http://aow2.heavengames.com/aowsm/pics/interviews/spellbook_rs.jpg just as they are.

[This message has been edited by Evalora (edited 05-29-2012 @ 05:04 PM).]

It's MPE Patch that offers options to auto save the game before battles, isn't it? I don't remember Upatch 1.4 or the original game has this.

Yeah, that's in the settings exe for the mod under the gameplay tab.

That option has a deal-break game exploit.

I hope hellbrick at gmail dot com is a real email address as I sent a message about the exploit there. It doesn't need to have a reputation before it gets fixed.

He posts here at a fair rate as well, I don't think it's worth treating as a level 4 biohazard unless it's something that could ruin multiplayer for this version, but whatever.

If it's for single player you could always turn the option off as easy as typing ctrl shift S gold.

It's a real address; I sent you a reply.

I'm not sure if it's a level 4 biohazard - I have a feeling that if this exploit can be performed with a help of the autosave, it can just as well be performed without it - but it will be taken care of. Thanks for the valuable tip

hey hellbrick,

a while ago you helped me out with some troubles and asked for a list of things i would like to see changed.

while going through the mpevo changelogs i noticed little that i would want to change.

the only thing is: i really miss the 'build watchtower' ability & i really love the 'dig an edit' ability.
Now, is there any possible way to have both? (Pretty Please)
I remember reading a thread somewhere that new abilities can only replace existing ones that are of a similar nature. That would be most unfortunate.
Also, i just tested dig an edit for the 1st time and thought it would claim the unit's life(like i recall build watchtower did), it didn't, which is grand.

The only other objection i have is the one with each pioneer being more expensive than the last. i realize the importance of this for multiplay, but i am designing my 'pioneers'to be regular units.

i would greatly appreciate any help concerning these matters,
tia,
feargus