Would it be possible to mod FE beta

from Elemental Forums

I have heard that Fallen Enchantress beta will be available soon. I was wondering if some modding features will be accessible, for example scripting. The idea is not to mod anything solid, but rather start training ourselves with the engine before FE gets released to that we can get some basic experience and know the modding possibilities.

I imagine the XML structure will be available, so it could be analyzed, but if I remember correctly, with betas, the binary blob is downloaded directly from the web. So making modification to the XML will have no impact on the game. Right?

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

With E:wom, it is possible to force a beta client to use local data only and ignore the downloaded blob. But this only applies to core files anyway - you could always do normal mods (in your user/my games/elemental/mods/ folder) during betas.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Before you get your hopes up about modding Fallen Enchantress, you may want to read this thread...

https://forums.elementalgame.com/408576

 

Here are a few highlights from the developers:

Unfortunately, there won’t be a moddable DLL for War of Magic or Fallen Enchantress. It’s something we’ve wanted to do, but there aren’t the resources for it right now. The engineers have been busy working on implementing Derek’s new vision for FE and helping to improve WoM in recent patches. As Brad has talked about elsewhere, we’re currently hiring new developers to help out, but the priority for who we have available right now is making the gameplay for FE great.

 

Quoting Lord Xia,
reply 10
I think Jon Shafer was hired in part to add more modding into FE, right?  JON!!!  JON!!!!  JON!!!!

 

I’m lending my experience and helping guide what we do with modding in the future, but I’m not personally implementing new modding features.

 

Sorry guys, it's disappointing on this end as well. :(

Our first priority has to be deliver a solid, fun core experience. When we've accomplished that, it will give us the opportunity to flesh out the other parts of the game. As you all know, the launch of Elemental was rough, and being a small company means its impossible to address everything we want to at the same time.

Jon

 

Towards the end of the thread it gets a bit more promising though. Ultimately, it looks like FE is going to have the same modding capabilities as WOM with more of the values and such exposed to the XML. It will still be less flexible than Civ4, but more flexible than Age of Wonders.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Hm. I really hope we can expand a bit on what we have seen with WoM. I've been playing with the XML since last year, and there is quite a bit you can do and I have managed to make some of my ideas work, but it would be nice to have a bit more available.

 

My skills are so limited that I doubt I will ever be able to do much beyond the basic XML anyways, but for the more talented out there, it would be nice.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Thank you for the information. About this quote

 

Derek is making sure they're implementation can be used a dozen other ways, simply by tweaking that data.

 

One of the things that annoyed me in War of magic is that many XML modification either had no impact on the game or simply crashed the game which gave absolutely no flexibility even if the data could be modified. So if they can at least make the XML flexible, I think it will be enough for now.