![]() ![]() ![]() They shouldn’t have to ask a coder for help.” Changes under the hood I think it comes down to that: We want to put as much power as we can into the hands of the people who are making content. Modders should be able to make super-fancy UIs without editing any code in the game. Not only is it flashier, we’ve changed the way you can make new ones. “Our games are often compared to Excel, so we’ve completely reworked the GUI system. Wordsworth sees his role as empowering the designers and modders, whether they’re adding some mountains to the map or creating a custom UI for an overhaul mod. Artists can paint the map, essentially, and the see the impact of their tweaks instantly. With the new tools, all these changes can take place while the game is running live. It’s a bit of a slog for the tiniest of adjustments. In the World War II game Hearts of Iron IV, if artists want to make a small adjustment, they need to go into Photoshop, tweak some pixels on the map, fire up the game again and reload the map, see if the changes look good, go back into Photoshop. We’d have to ask them: ‘Can you script? Can you edit text files with curly brackets?’ Now we don’t need to.” “Let’s imagine Stephen King or the world’s best 3D artist came to our door, looking for a job on a new game. This doesn’t mean that Imperator and future games won’t permit modders and developers to make big changes by dipping into the text files, just that coding will no longer be a barrier. Half of our team is going to be building tools, going forward.”įor the designers, the new tools mean that they can focus on what they’re good at, specialities like art or writing, instead of editing text files. So we’ve got two tools engineers in our team, and we’re recruiting two more. “Modders always ask us why we don’t give them the tools we use to make the games, but we don’t have any. The most significant difference between the engine we’ve seen in the likes of Crusader Kings II or Stellaris and the new Clausewitz-Jomini alliance is the inclusion of proper tools, which will affect everyone, from those that design the games to those that mod them. ![]()
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