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Supreme Commander
- Thread starter madface
- Start date
PPQ_Purple
Purple Cube (retired)
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2008
- Messages
- 5,764
Right now, this whole thing looks dodgy at best since it's a hell of a big project. So, to make things more clear here are some questions for you:
1. Do you have any prior modding/programing experience?
1.b) If so, is any of said experience in modding CIV4?
2. Do you have any source of models for the mod? Are supreme commander/Total Annihilation models portable or would you have to find someone to make them all for you?
3. Do you have any concept worked out already on how this should look like and what base mod you would be using? (I would recommend FFH or one of it's modmods or at least BUG).
Answer those, and than people will have something to look at.
1. Do you have any prior modding/programing experience?
1.b) If so, is any of said experience in modding CIV4?
2. Do you have any source of models for the mod? Are supreme commander/Total Annihilation models portable or would you have to find someone to make them all for you?
3. Do you have any concept worked out already on how this should look like and what base mod you would be using? (I would recommend FFH or one of it's modmods or at least BUG).
Answer those, and than people will have something to look at.
Before I directly answer your questions, please let me state that I intend to make a similar SupCom mod for both Civ 4 and Civ 5.
Now, to answer your specific questions:
1. Yes, I have modding and programming experience.
With regards to what is required to mod Civ 5, I have experience with Lua. With regards to Civ 4, I am only tangentially familiar with Python, but enough to pick up programming in the language in short time.
I am also a member of an extensive mod team for Supreme Commander 2:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/revamp-mod/
With regards to general programming experience, I am proficient in C++, C#, and WinForms. In fact, one of my projects within the above mod team is to create a Mod Creation Toolkit to make it easier for anyone wanting to mod Supreme Commander 2. The entire toolkit is GUI-oriented and much of the code is automatically generated for the modder. I have working prototypes and I intend to publicly release my toolkit later this summer.
For example, have a look at the following screenshots:
The main section in the middle with all the squares are locations for items in a research tree. The modder uses the tabs on the left-hand side to locate any of the game's units, structures, and upgrades and then drag-and-drop them onto the grid. The text boxes on the right are made available for the modder to manually change values in the corresponding Lua files.
1.b) No, I do not have any experience modding Civ4. However, I am willing to learn the necessary in order to mod it.
2. SupCom and SupCom 2 models are all available. Perhaps just some tweaking in order to get them to work correctly in the Civ games, but they are there. You can see at the above website that modelling will not be a problem. As for Total Annihilation, I would like to do that mod for Civ, but not at this point. I am creating my own TA models for use in a TA mod for SupCom 2, so that material would eventually be recycled.
3. The major concepts are worked out, but I do not intend on relying on any existing mods.
Now, to answer your specific questions:
1. Yes, I have modding and programming experience.
With regards to what is required to mod Civ 5, I have experience with Lua. With regards to Civ 4, I am only tangentially familiar with Python, but enough to pick up programming in the language in short time.
I am also a member of an extensive mod team for Supreme Commander 2:
http://www.moddb.com/mods/revamp-mod/
With regards to general programming experience, I am proficient in C++, C#, and WinForms. In fact, one of my projects within the above mod team is to create a Mod Creation Toolkit to make it easier for anyone wanting to mod Supreme Commander 2. The entire toolkit is GUI-oriented and much of the code is automatically generated for the modder. I have working prototypes and I intend to publicly release my toolkit later this summer.
For example, have a look at the following screenshots:
The main section in the middle with all the squares are locations for items in a research tree. The modder uses the tabs on the left-hand side to locate any of the game's units, structures, and upgrades and then drag-and-drop them onto the grid. The text boxes on the right are made available for the modder to manually change values in the corresponding Lua files.
1.b) No, I do not have any experience modding Civ4. However, I am willing to learn the necessary in order to mod it.
2. SupCom and SupCom 2 models are all available. Perhaps just some tweaking in order to get them to work correctly in the Civ games, but they are there. You can see at the above website that modelling will not be a problem. As for Total Annihilation, I would like to do that mod for Civ, but not at this point. I am creating my own TA models for use in a TA mod for SupCom 2, so that material would eventually be recycled.
3. The major concepts are worked out, but I do not intend on relying on any existing mods.
PPQ_Purple
Purple Cube (retired)
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2008
- Messages
- 5,764
Keep in mind that CIV4 and 5 are vastly different games and that as such you will have to keep the projects separate for the most part.
Thank god, a fellow brother programer.
Well, than this has a chance of sucseding. Most people post here without any notion of anything.
Personally, I would suggest you check out the CIV4 mods that are out there already. In particular Fall From Heaven.
You see, most mods now a days don't start from scratch. This is becouse a lot of the things you need done have already been done by others before. FFH in particular is used as a base for most fantasy/SF mods out there becouse of the sheer amount of features the .dll provides over the regular mods.
Modding civ can in essence be divided into 3 segments. The XML (where you add units and promotions and stuff), python (where you code events and effects like spell effects) and the .dll where all the stuff is actually defined. The .dll is the most complex and difficult part of it all so that is why I assumed that you would use an existing one as a base.
For example Warhammer Fantasy Battles, Dune Wars and Planetfall all use the FFH .dll as a base.
What format are they in and can you convert them to .nif files. Also, you will need someone skilled in modeling to do the conversion of animations.
Care to share them here? Becouse I am an old Total Annihilation fan from the old, old days and this topic has gotten me fired up like none in months.
I've been perusing the forums and I see that the approach to modding the two games is different. In terms of the end result, I'd like to have the two mods similar in flavour, but if one of the games permits more robust modding implementations, then by all means I will take advantage of that. I never meant the mods between the two games to be carbon copies of each other - just have a similar approach to gameplay. Sorry if I was unclear on this.
I've been thinking about doing this mod for a while, but I've been held up with other projects and the like. Things are slowing down so I'll be able to devote some time to this. I'll take a look at the other mods you suggested and see what ground has already been covered. If the existing dll from FFH (FFH2?) can be used, then so much the better.
As for nif files, I don't have experience with them, but doing a quick Google search, I see that they have plugins for 3ds Max and Blender. We have max and blender scripts to read and write to the SupCom 1 + FA formats, so I don't think there would be a problem on that front. SupCom 2 is a bit more tricky. We have some workarounds to work with this implementation of the SupCom file format, but I am working on creating a proper plugin that would allow direct importing/exporting of SupCom 2 in max. I prefer max over blender, but either one will work.
As for animations, I think we'll be ok with that
In terms of concepts, for the time being I want to keep this info restricted to only people who are part of a mod team. As the mod progresses, and input from anyone else taking part in creating the mod, some of the concepts might change, so I don't want to put out misinformation or false expectations. Nonetheless, I will say that I will try to port over as much as possible the gameplay of the SupCom games (or the closest idea possible) and integrate things into the Civ framework, i.e., advancing through the ages would be equivalent to reaching higher tier levels.
I've been thinking about doing this mod for a while, but I've been held up with other projects and the like. Things are slowing down so I'll be able to devote some time to this. I'll take a look at the other mods you suggested and see what ground has already been covered. If the existing dll from FFH (FFH2?) can be used, then so much the better.
As for nif files, I don't have experience with them, but doing a quick Google search, I see that they have plugins for 3ds Max and Blender. We have max and blender scripts to read and write to the SupCom 1 + FA formats, so I don't think there would be a problem on that front. SupCom 2 is a bit more tricky. We have some workarounds to work with this implementation of the SupCom file format, but I am working on creating a proper plugin that would allow direct importing/exporting of SupCom 2 in max. I prefer max over blender, but either one will work.
As for animations, I think we'll be ok with that
In terms of concepts, for the time being I want to keep this info restricted to only people who are part of a mod team. As the mod progresses, and input from anyone else taking part in creating the mod, some of the concepts might change, so I don't want to put out misinformation or false expectations. Nonetheless, I will say that I will try to port over as much as possible the gameplay of the SupCom games (or the closest idea possible) and integrate things into the Civ framework, i.e., advancing through the ages would be equivalent to reaching higher tier levels.
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