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morness 20 Sep, 2016 @ 11:56am
Dat Mod Support
We've got this working internally (long time coming!), but there are some finer details I wanted to share for feedback/design purposes.

Basically how it works is when someone is about to host a game, they get choices about dataset -- currently Expansions or Original. But if you have published/subscribed dat mods, then they would show up in the list too, organized by each expansion.

Information about dat mods would be published to the lobby and lobby browser. Anyone that joins that game automatically subcribes to the mod (which is much faster). Once everyone is ready to go (file transfer progress bars complete), players can ready up and the game can start.

So here are the proposed rules for how dat mods interact with the game:
  1. Dat mods can never be explicitly enabled or disabled. The only way you can use one is to select it when creating a game. Only one dat mod can be active in a game.
  2. In multiplayer, only dat mods that live in the Steam Workshop can be selected. This is a limitation, because peer-to-peer file transfer is too slow for large data files, and downloading from Steam is much faster.
  3. In singleplayer, dat mod authors are able to test their own unpublished mods.
  4. Dat mod priority generally matters. If you have a tree mod at highest priority, followed by a dat mod, the tree mod would win. This allows people to pick which mods are more important than dat mods. But if you join a game, and subscribe to a new dat mod, then the mod would take the top spot -- in order for the player to gain the intended experience. Later on that player can sort the priority as desired, or unsubscribe to it.
  5. Scenario editor will also allow dat mods, but there could be some details that need to be figured out. I would imagine they would need to live in the same mod as the dat mod itself in order to work. For example, if you play a custom campaign that is part of a dat mod, then it'll know to use the dat file.
  6. Some restrictions need to be in place in order to protect reserved dlc content from being accessible to non-owners. Basically we just need to make sure someone doesn't take the latest dlc and rerelease it as a mod that anyone could play.
  7. Longer term, time permitting, we'd like to tackle breaking up the dat file and moving towards a system more like Age of Mythology, where everything is broken up into many text files. That'll make dat mods more resilient to surviving patches, as well as being easier to work with.

Happy to answer questions and for some of you experts to poke holes or suggest better ideas. Thanks!



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Showing 1-15 of 103 comments
gagman 6 20 Sep, 2016 @ 2:11pm 
good news, i think i've waiting for this since years, thanks. What about the ID's ?
I remember long time ago when i tried my dat mod i wasnt able to train ID's over 1500 iirc.
Last edited by gagman; 20 Sep, 2016 @ 2:12pm
#1
morness 20 Sep, 2016 @ 2:30pm 
We currently have a range of 1201-1500 which are reserved for modders. Anything above that could potentially be reserved for later expansions.
#2
Terminator 11 22 Sep, 2016 @ 2:47am 
Though I am nót a dat modder myself, I would like to state that all this sounds very promising to me. I will like to play the Pirates expansion again.

Please do not put too much effort into DRM. I can understand that people should pay for their content and that low effort makes people not to do that. But honestly you could already play (kind of) African Kingdoms without owning it.

Anyways I think that more dat modders should reply here and this topic here is far to less popular. Maybe you could post the link under the more popular topics or at least pin this topic here to the top.
Last edited by Terminator; 22 Sep, 2016 @ 3:37am
#3
gagman 6 22 Sep, 2016 @ 3:09am 
Originally posted by Terminator:
Anyways I think that more dat modders should replay here and this topic here is far to less popular.

lets hope the good dat modders will appear again, some people moved back to modding the CD version because its modding friendly (especially with userpatch) no limits ect. (me included).

Once i see intresting news for me in the patch notes i will install HD again and upload with my previous (popular) dat mods.

About the Unit IDs that are not locked, why not enable ID 5000 - 32767 or even 10.000 - 32767 for modders ? Rest could be for the new DLC and for potentially later expansions.
#4
Catbarf 7 22 Sep, 2016 @ 3:53am 
I ask this from a position of relative ignorance on the data side of editing, but looking at step 7. this sounds like a fair bit of work would be required to acheive. Taking this as some indication that resources are being allowed (at least to some extent) to improving modability, is there any possibility in the longer term that graphics sets could be unlinked from their current meta groupings in the data to allow modders to introduce more individual sets by civ?

In understand that once dat. modding is enabled individual mods will be able to do this, but I think many players would value greater variety in graphics mods, without necessarily wanting to deal with ensuring dat. mod compatability and intracacies for MP purposes.

Apologies if this is slightly off topic.
#5
Infected Mushroom 22 Sep, 2016 @ 7:37am 
Originally posted by morness:
-Snip-
This is off topic from this discussion I just had a quick question.

What ever happened to the development of Rise of nations? It seems all work on it literally just fell off the face of the earth about two years ago?

I bring this up cause we have a pretty serious bug in the game for some time now, and nothing has been done to fix it since the last patch 2 years ago.

The music in the game is quite broken to the point where the game doesn't even recognize the volume set in game, and overrides it to maximum volume for fun.
#6
TriRem 6 22 Sep, 2016 @ 12:48pm 
That's some great news, I really started to think data mods were gone for good but it's good to see its being worked on.

On the most part I think this is the best way to incorporate data mods and make them easy to be played in multiplayer.

I have have a few questions though, I believe allowing to add extra civilizations won't be possible in the near future right ? I get why, so people don't just directly port the DLC and distribute them as mods. Still, it's a big limitation compared to the original game, it would be huge to see something done about that.

I second Catbarf's request to give each civilization it's own building set data wise, so it becomes easy with just a graphic mod to change the set for only one civ, just like with the Indian set. Given that buildings are the most successful mods in the workshop, I believe people would really appreciate that.

Anyways it's great to see data mods being possible again on HD.
#7
gagman 6 22 Sep, 2016 @ 1:50pm 
own buildingset for dark, feudal, castle and imperial age :D
#8
morness 22 Sep, 2016 @ 2:45pm 
I forgot to mention that we may also take a look at doing a similar thing to UserPatch for exposing the key data driven aspects of civs to a parsable file -- civs, names, techs, unique unit ids, etc.
#9
Jorritkarwehr 68 22 Sep, 2016 @ 3:40pm 
Excellent news!

Is there any chance the files that can be part of mods can be expanded? Currently at least some bina files (palettes, for instance) aren't recognized in mod directories.
#10
dracoix 🐉 34 22 Sep, 2016 @ 8:41pm 
Thank you morness. :D Now I can throw away the footage and audio I was working on for my youtube rant about broken promises.

AoE1 glitches and bugged mechanics will remain untouched correct?

edit: (also rejoice if this patch gets pushed, because I can go back to programming my modding api. gag gets first dibs)

2nd edit: morness can me and tapsa finally get some of those tags? :3
Last edited by dracoix 🐉; 22 Sep, 2016 @ 8:44pm
#11
Tapsa 4 23 Sep, 2016 @ 6:39am 
1. I don't understand this.
2. Since the game is now married with Steam I think this is okay, but why do you claim that p2p file transfers are too slow? I have 10 Mbps upload speed.
3. ok
4. seems ok
5. I don't understand this.
6. Both full dat mod support and "dlc mod" prevention cannot be done simultaneously. You have to either monitor the Steam workshop / make dat mods available only for African Kingdom owners, or give up on proper dat mod support.
7. ok

"Is there any possibility in the longer term that graphics sets could be unlinked from their current meta groupings in the data to allow modders to introduce more individual sets by civ?"

- yes, with a dat mod. I think only one guy needs to make one and everybody who wants to have civ specific graphics can just use that one dat mod.

"AoE1 glitches and bugged mechanics will remain untouched correct?"

- what do you mean by this?
#12
ModPositive 19 23 Sep, 2016 @ 10:35pm 
Excellent news, thanks! I too would especially appreciate a decoupling of civ architectures from their architecture grouping in the dat file to enable custom graphic sets for each civ. Even better would be decoupling units but that would involve more work.

One question morness- do you think we can have support for files that are added into the location of the .exe (similar to what Jorritkarwehr mentioned)? My ENB mods all require external downloading since subscribing doesn't work for the .dlls, .txt, and .ini files that need to be in the .exe folder, for example:

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=702876146&searchtext=
Last edited by ModPositive; 25 Sep, 2016 @ 12:03am
#13
ordure bizarre 24 Sep, 2016 @ 4:46am 
That's such good news, I can't even tell.
And that hint for "future expansions" is even better! :)
#14
ModPositive 19 24 Sep, 2016 @ 11:58pm 
Oh, and one more question morness. In the future when the dat file is possibly broken up (as per step 7), would it be feasible to have random, dynamic variants? It's an old dream of mine:

"1. For graphic mods that are in conflict (i.e. modify the same SLP), will there be support to randomly, dynamically select variants during runtime?

For example, if I subscribe to 3 knight SLP mods (i.e. knight1, knight2, and knight3), and place/create 100 knights in-game, ~33 should appear as type "knight1", ~33 as type "knight2", and ~33 as type "knight3".

In my opinion, this would be an absolutely revolutionary feature for the modding scene and allow us to play in a much more diversified AoE universe! Subscribers would never again [only] have to pick and choose one mod over another.

My inspiration for this idea came from a very popular Skyrim utility, featured in PC Gamer: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/21377/?"
Last edited by ModPositive; 25 Sep, 2016 @ 12:00am
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Date Posted: 20 Sep, 2016 @ 11:56am
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