Les Podcast Officiels de Civilization V

[Bot]

Episode 15 : Le SDK de Civilization V.

Elizabeth Tobey reçoit Shaun Seckman (Modding Programmer) et, Eric Jordan (Tools Programmer) qui nous parle des outils de modifications du jeu : Le SDK.

 

Elizabeth Tobey: Welcome to the Civilization V podcast series. I’m Elizabeth Tobey, and today I’m talking with part of the Firaxis team: Shaun Seckman, Modding Programmer, and Eric Jordan, Tools Programmer. As you’ll soon discover by listening to this episode, Civilization V is more moddable than ever – and while you may have heard “better than ever!” claims before in game marketing materials, this time, it’s really, really, mindblowingly the truth. And these guys are super psyched about it.

Shaun Seckman: My name is Shaun Seckman, by the way, and I’m the modding programmer on Civ V. The way that Civ V is a lot more moddable than Civ IV would be in Civ IV you could only have one mod running at a time and that really limited the way that modders were able to deliver content. What usually happened is you would have this subset of modders that would be called mod modders and they would just combine multiple mods together. In Civ V you don’t need to do this. You can enable and disable as many mods as you want and mix and match them however you want. So if I have a zombie mod and I have a pirates mod I can enable both of them and play a game with zombies and pirates.

ET: Eric and Jordan wanted to give modders – and those who installed mods – the most freedom possible in the game. As Shaun put it, he wanted to “give gamers the power to do pretty much whatever they wanted.” To do this, the modding tools had to not only be robust and expansive, but they also had to be very accessible and easy for someone who wasn’t an advanced coder to use.

Eric Jordan: Hi I’m Eric Jordan. I’m a tools programmer on Civ V. I think another important goal with the modding is to bring it more to the forefront. Before, you would have to go online, go to a forum, and sort of patch in a mod. Now with Shaun’s in-game mod browser it will be easy and accessible for everyone to explore the mod community. Another important goal is the ease of content creation – the barrier to entry. That’s one thing that I focused on a lot with the Civ V world builder. The idea of making it easy and intuitive for someone to step in and start making changes.

ET: The devil is always in the details – and in this case, those details are the exact tools that Eric and Shaun are placing in modders hands. So what exactly are these amazing modding tools that will be included in Civilization V?

SS: Well everybody already knows about the world builder being a separate application this time. Some of the other tools we’re giving them is art conversion tools. They’re basically given the exact same art pipeline that we are using in-house. So everything that we use to create our leader heads, our units, our improvements, and even the terrain, they’re gonna have at their fingertips to do pretty much the same thing. It’s professional-level tools. The other thing we’re giving them is a tool called Mod Buddy. It’s gonna be the central program where they can add all of the files for their mod, edit LUA files, game rules, and pretty much all the arbitrary files, and then package that up into one single Civ V mod file – and that single file is what’s gonna get uploaded to the community hub or passed around in whatever means they want.

EJ: Another exciting tool we’re gonna be providing to modders is the Civ V live tuner. The tuner is a separate application that, when enabled in the config file, can attach to Civ V and modify the game or observe the game as it’s running. So, for example, you could type in a script command and have that execute in the game. You could also observe values to see what’s going on behind the scenes or to see where performance problems might be coming from. It also gives you little cheats so you can help debug your game or mod. So you could plop down a unit or a new city and it really kinda opens the doors to trying out all different scenarios and seeing how they work in a mod. A lot of our tools are also packaged together. We have a meta tool called Nexus. The dictionary definition of ‘nexus’ is just this meeting point of a whole bunch of different things and that’s exactly what the tool does. What the tool does is it integrates the game – it uses the actual game engine – but it also provides a user-friendly interface for doing everything from modifying unit formations to looking at particle effects and seeing how they work in the engine or building your own terrain tile pieces. So it’s a really exciting tool that we’re happy to provide.

ET: Shaun mentioned the World Builder earlier – and it deserves a description unto itself. Some of you may know what it is, and for others, it’s a brand new concept – but no matter what your comfort level with the tool and the modding scene, chances are, you’ll want to at least try out what these guys have built in Civ V.

EJ: So the world builder – it’s a really big tool. There’s a lot of features in it. Well first of all, the world builder can activate and deactivate mods in the exact same way the game can. So if you have a mod that introduces a new unit type, for example, you can actually go into the world builder and tell the world builder, “this is the mod you're using now” and it will get that information. So you can actually build maps directly for your mod. Starting out, when you're starting a new map, you have multiple options for how you want to do that. You can run a map script just like the game uses. It has these random map scripts for generating maps. You can choose one of them. You can build your own map script for a starting point. You could start with a blank map. You could take an old Civ IV map and you could convert that into a Civ V map and start with that. Once you've started with the map you can change anything on it - terrain types, feature types, resource types. You can also run utilities that will do things randomly for you. You might want to randomly distribute the resources or maybe you set it so there are no resources on the map itself but every time it loads it gets a new random resource spread. There are also full scenario tools for building scenarios with multiple teams and players and city-states. You can set up diplomacy, you can plop down units and cities and things like unit health or something like that. You can change the victory types, the year the game starts in, just about everything.

SS: One of the cool things worth noting is if you're currently playing a game in Civ, at any point in time you can hit escape and go to the in-game menu and actually save that current mapout as a world builder map which is really useful for if you find yourself in just a really interesting situation and you think it would be a good tactical map that you want to send out to other people and let them try it out. I found it to be really fun in the past.

ET: I don’t think I’m alone when I say that Civilization is my favorite series, and I have enjoyed several mods in previous games, but before now, I would never have dreamed of actually creating one on my own. But these tools aren’t just for the most hardcore – they are built so that newcomers can easily crack open the mod tools, fiddle around, and make something awesome.

SS: I think probably one of the first things that the new modder is going to be doing is opening up world builder and creating their first map. The new world builder that we have is very user-friendly. I’ve played around with it and the learning curve is not really that high. It’s a lot lower than Civ IV’s world builder. The other thing that we’re gonna have available when we ship is a Civ V wiki that will contain all the documentation for modding as well as some beginner guides and some examples for when they want to go beyond just creating a map and actually modifying the LUA scripts to create new civilizations or maybe even do a total conversion DLL mod if they wanted to.

EJ: Also on the design front I have to borrow some advice from Sid. One important point that Sid makes is that you should make sure that the person having the most fun is the player and not the designer. I think it’s a very easy mistake for a lot of first time modders to make, is to make a mod that’s really conceptually interesting, is really interesting to build, but isn’t that interesting to play. So that’s an important pitfall to watch out for.

ET: Having spent so much time creating and testing these mod tools, Surely Sean and Eric had their own hopes and dreams for future mods.

EJ: I think that mods can be a really amazing thing for both the modders themselves and the game. For the modders it provides them an opportunity to be creative and explore that creativity and for me that’s what got me into game development in the first place. So I really hope that this helps other people in creating games and having that same experience that I get to have every day.