The Gaming Den

Shamus Young (DM of the Rings) has quite a lot to say on the subject and I agree with pretty much everything. Start with STEAMing pile of filth and go from there

Oh, I have interesting updates too.

Remember when I said that Empire Total War had other problems. Well it has.

One that annoys me is that the game has like 30-40 factions on the world map and when you start only about 12 are playable. And a lot of fun obscure little factions that are all there aren't. Even though some of the playable factions aren't exactly well set up for success either so it can't be play balance (start with between 12 and 1 territories spread accross 1 to 3 maps yay!)

Anyway in the past you conquered a faction and (maybe) it unlocked for future games, you finished the game once and it unlocked all the un-lockable factions. Now not so much as there are NO in game unlockable factions, indeed it angry paranoids look on it suspiciously like they were considering selling the damn fuckers on STEAM or something.

But anyway! Total War games have strong modding communities and the first and simplest mods have always been A) The mod that unlocks the unlockable factions and B) The Mod that unlocks the rest.

Only STEAM compresses the game and apparently regularly checks it and overwrites user changes. There may (or may not) be ways around this but it is proving difficult, unpredictable, unstable, and harder to achieve they've got some sort of wobbly hack worked out but its hard to duplicate and buggy as a month of International Vermin Weeks. In the old days I seriously could just find the right human readable config file and move some names from the unplayable list to the playable list.

My Knights of Malta taking over the world agenda is thoroughly on hold. Once again, FUCK STEAM. (And also god damn screw those sell outs at Creative Assembly)

PL wrote:Only STEAM compresses the game and apparently regularly checks it and overwrites user changes. There may (or may not) be ways around this but it is proving difficult, unpredictable, unstable, and harder to achieve they've got some sort of wobbly hack worked out but its hard to duplicate and buggy as a month of International Vermin Weeks. In the old days I seriously could just find the right human readable config file and move some names from the unplayable list to the playable list.

Man, that's pretty lame.

I'm glad it doesn't do that shit to Unreal Tournament.

That is because UT has a proper mod management method, while the total war method has always been 'well if you overwrite these core data files' which doesn't work with the steam system.

They've said they are going to release their own modding tools so it probably won't be usable until then. If you've using a tool that checks your data files against masters and then updates them if they've changed, making your modding method 'change data files' is obviously enroute to failure.

cthulhu wrote:making your modding method 'change data files' is obviously enroute to failure.

We aren't even talking about data files you dumb ass, a simple config file was all it took in the past.

Not only that your general direction of criticism suggests an ignorance of the nature of the Total War series and its support for modding, the particular modding community, and modding in general.

Steam having a modding tool in it (which is apparently not currently usable to perform a basic mod the community WOULD have produced in less than 24 hours under the old regime) is not impressive mod manager tools are so simple and common place that communities write them themselves, and the last total war actually had support for mods built into it to a sufficient degree that the entire 3 campaigns from the Kingdoms expansion were in fact mods presented in a simple modular manner that users could and did mimic with their own expansions of the game.

If it makes any difference, I will not be using steam just from the info in this thread.

Then again, I was disinclined to try it before, so perhaps that's a zero-sum result.

I love how Fallout 3 has SecureROM... and if you buy it from Steam, it STILL HAS SECUREROM BUILT INTO IT! And that's the only reason why I'd buy something from Steam - because it's less screwed up then SecureROM.

That one isn't Steam's fault, though. It's the dumbass publishers. Bioshock originally had the same problem, but I THINK they removed it.

The Securom in Fallout 3 apparently doesn't install, though, just runs from the disk. As the Steam version doesn't have a disk, it would be a logical assumption that it's never actually turned on. Of course, that might not be true. But it's a logical assumption to make.

Heck, WoW checks if you're missing important files, and if you are, fixes it. That's all Steam is doing, but instead of each author realizing that Steam is distributing their stuff, they make their hanky-panky method and then try to tack on the distribution afterward.

Which is a shitty way to make games. But there are devs who know, and devs who push ahead, not caring. And publishers who really don't care.

-Crissa

PhoneLobster wrote:

cthulhu wrote:making your modding method 'change data files' is obviously enroute to failure.

We aren't even talking about data files you dumb ass, a simple config file was all it took in the past.

Not only that your general direction of criticism suggests an ignorance of the nature of the Total War series and its support for modding, the particular modding community, and modding in general.

Steam having a modding tool in it (which is apparently not currently usable to perform a basic mod the community WOULD have produced in less than 24 hours under the old regime) is not impressive mod manager tools are so simple and common place that communities write them themselves, and the last total war actually had support for mods built into it to a sufficient degree that the entire 3 campaigns from the Kingdoms expansion were in fact mods presented in a simple modular manner that users could and did mimic with their own expansions of the game.

We mean different things by the term 'configuration file'

Also, total war mods have historically altered data files - consider the Napoleonic war one for example.

cthulhu wrote:We mean different things by the term 'configuration file'

A configuration file is data and is a file but it is not a "data file" in the more common usage as it does not contain static data such as 3d models, textures, etc... that the software loads but does not alter. It is instead a custom generated file that is potentially regularly loaded but also altered by user actions within (or outside of) the software.

Also, total war mods have historically altered data files

As of the last game in the series and therefore the last several years mods are not required to 0overwrite data files and support has been provided at the design level, by the developer to allow that.

If some individual group doesn't use it fine, clearly they are either incompetent or doing something really special. And both of those cases are screwed by Steam, one of them to the greater loss of the community.

And yet I don't care because none of the mods I used did that and the most basic unlock "mods" I'm discussing sure as hell didn't as they were nothing more than a mother fucking change to a simple human readable configuration setting.

Get that through your god damn head steam fanboi. This series used to provide explicit support to simple changes to human readable configuration settings to the benefit of all users, and Steam took that away No amount of attempts at arguing semantics can change that.

Acceptioning your definition of config files, it's not steam that took that away that fuctionality. This is easily demonstrated as several other steam games (TF2, CS:S, CoD4, UT3 when purchased by Steam) support that functionality, as they have user adjustable config files.

Clearly it is actually the development's team configuration of steam's functionality for their game. Blaming Steam for a problem that is self evidently not solely the fault of steam (as it demonstrably doesn't happen in other games, and thus is not purely an attribute of the steam platform) is insane.

Realistically, the developers fucked it up. If they wanted you to be able to edit that, obviously they can do it, because you can create and edit any number of eecutable config files for, say, TF2

cthulhu wrote:Clearly it is actually the development's team configuration of steam's functionality for their game.

Except that all the press statements on the matter indicate that it is Steam and not the original developer that is responsible for adapting the game to a Steam distribution. The game developers don't do that bit, they, apparently, handed a vanilla install to Steam and Steam does the compression, packaging and distribution.

But I'm sure as heck not leaving the developers blameless, I mean THEY have certainly fallen down on a number of issues with this game beyond the disaster that was Steam distribution and invasive copy protection.

Even on the issue of faction unlocking alone some, indeed much, of the blame falls with the original developers who chose to change from their prior games and not to make ANY of the factions unlockable by regular game play in the first place. Steam just fucked up things for the user base attempting to fix the developers unfortunate error of judgement with methods that were previously effective and easy.

If the devs didn't label the files correctly, how is Steam supposed to guess future uses of the files?

Steam does not handle any sort of development that I know of, they don't actually have any devs - aside from network engineers - on staff. I've talked to them, tho I may be wrong.

-Crissa